Department of Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch was in Superior on Monday to meet with local law enforcement to highlight some of the changes proposed as the state faces a $5.7 billion budget shortfall. Among the changes is a new evaluation system that could keep low-risk, nonviolent offenders out of state prisons and low-risk offenders who’ve committed misdemeanor crimes off the state’s probation system … “There always will be a need for prisons to house violent criminals who pose a threat to public safety, but … we need to invest in strategies beyond prison expansion to curtail corrections spending and reduce recidivism,” Raemisch said …

The goal of the new strategy is to protect public safety by keeping violent offenders in prison, but providing opportunities for nonviolent offenders to complete treatment so they can succeed and become productive citizens when they return to their communities, Raemisch said. Under the proposed changes, offenders would be evaluated to determine the level of risk they pose to the community and provide services to help low-risk offenders.  The state would expand services in the Earned Release Program to provide services needed for successful reintegration in the community. Currently, drug and alcohol treatment are provided, but an offender may need education and job skills, Raemisch said. He said the goal is to provide what the offender needs …

One of the things county officials hope to see come from this is an opportunity to reintegrate prison inmates in the community by using the county jails to house state prisoners and allow them a chance, under Huber work release, to get jobs to ensure a successful transition from incarceration to release in the community.  “I’d like to work with the sheriff’s on a re-entry program … and get them acclimated in the community,” Raemisch said.

The state Court of Appeals reversed decisions by lower courts and the Public Employment Relations Board. In those decisions, the jail division was told it had to bargain with the unions before changing the system that placed sentenced inmates at the Erie County Correctional Facility in Alden and unsentenced prisoners at the Holding Center in Buffalo. Those classifications conformed to the labor jurisdictions of the bargaining units involved.

The Civil Service Employees Association represents the corrections officers charged with guarding sentenced inmates at the Correctional Facility.  The Teamsters union represents the deputy sheriffs charged with guarding presentenced and pretrial detainees at the Holding Center and the “Annex,” the quarters in Alden handling the overflow of Holding Center inmates.

After the lockups were merged under the sheriff’s control in 2000, the state Commission of Correction looked at the county-run jails as one system and insisted on a unified classification standard in which prisoners were housed by their institutional histories, whether they were violent and other factors the commission considered more objective. That forced jail officials to ignore the “sentenced or unsentenced” standard in housing prisoners …

Citing past decisions, the Court of Appeals said a public employer’s decisions are not bargainable as terms and conditions of employment where “they are inherently and fundamentally policy decisions relating to the primary mission of the … employer.” The court said the sheriff has “a statutory requirement to implement and maintain a formal and objective classification system.”

The report, which takes a look at jail facilities each year, applauded efforts by the Sheriff’s Office and its partners in the criminal justice system for making adjustments in how inmates are screened, housed and supervised to reduce overcrowding at county incarceration centers. The average monthly population at County Jail on Water Street in Santa Cruz fell 15 percent between 2004 and 2007, according to the report. Current statistics indicate that number continues to decline …  The report lists figures from the first six months of 2007, when the average monthly population there was 358 inmates, a significant decline from 2004 when the average population was 408 and a far cry from the 450-plus inmates that were housed in the facility a decade ago. According to County Jail statistics Tuesday, the population was 299 inmates, below the state-rated capacity of 311.

To keep a handle on jail population, the Sheriff’s Office established a Jail Overcrowding Committee that meets quarterly to discuss concerns. The committee — comprised of representatives from law enforcement, the judiciary, the District Attorney’s Office, the Probation Department, the Public Defenders Office, the county Board of Supervisors and other agencies — developed a set of strategies to reduce overcrowding.  Among those was implementation of a new classification system that screens inmates to determine whom might be better-suited for a work release or GPS monitoring program.

Senate Bill 5288 is similar to one proposed by the governor. It would eliminate most supervision for people on probation who are classified as low or moderate risk to reoffend and is being considered by the state Senate as a cost-cutting measure … The bill states that the DOC must supervise any offender sentenced to community custody who is classified as high-risk violent or high-risk non-violent. Most low- and moderate-risk offenders will not be supervised, except for sex offenders who fail to register in their community. The DOC may terminate those sex offenders’ supervision after 12 months have passed without a violation of their sentence …

Eldon Vale, secretary of the DOC, said that because Washington is facing such a severe budget crisis, the DOC has to reduce its budget, too. “We have to either incarcerate less people or supervise less people, and by reducing the supervision of those offenders who score out at a low or moderate risk to reoffend, we’re cutting out caseload,” Vale said.  “Does it present zero risk to the public? That’s not a question anyone can answer,” said Vale.

This is an excerpt from a longer piece that discusses offender assessment in detail.

“An Empirical Modeling Approach To Recidivism Classification” by Ed Dow, Charles Jones and Jack Mott is an introduction to a classification approach that goes far deeper than a single inventory score. With the continuing popularity of early releases as a mechanism to solve other corrections’ issues, accurate assessment of offenders being let out onto the street becomes ever more vital. In the interests of full disclosure let me state that Syscon has an interest in the RMS application that uses the principles outlined in this paper.

“Health and Prisoner Re-Entry” is a detailed report by the Urban Institute Justice Project on the nexus between re-entry issues and physical and mental health. A lot of interesting material in there.