Those skeptical, or unfamiliar with the law, New York is one of the few states without one. A law that is very successful and saves millions of the tax dollars each year. it is time off the sentences “IF” select inmates exhibit good behavior throughout their sentences and complete all rehabilitative and educational programming. Safeguards are also in place through this law, the Prison and Parole Systems to keep the most violent offenders behind bars (1st degree murder, life without parole, terrorism, incest, violent sex offenders, etc).
For more details and to voice your support, contact the senator and assemblymen below.
This law only benefits those men and women who made a bad decision, and committed a crime during a lapse of sound judgment, or were wrongfully convicted. Statistics, as reported by the Parole Commission at Legislative Hearings, show of the almost 800 violent felons released during the past 5 years, only 2 returned for a new crime.
The Governor’s Commission on Sentencing Reform even recommended it. due to these statistics, and because it promotes rehabilitation, improves discipline and safety in the prisons, helps to better millions of tax dollars in housing, clothing, food, medical care, and other court and state costs.
Your voice and support are needed now, contact our Governor, your Senator(s), Assemblymen and Women, your local community leaders, family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. TOGETHER we can make this happen.

Governor Andrew Cuomo
State Capitol
Albany, N.Y. 12224
1-518-474-8390
andrewcuomo.gov

Senator Velmanette Montgomery
(drafter of the bill)
Legislative Office Bldg.
Albany N.Y. 12247
1-518-455-3451
montgomery.nysenate.gov

Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry
(drafter of the bill)
Legislative Office Bldg.
Albany N.Y. 12248
aubry.nyassembly.gov

For your district Senators and Assembly people, to go nysenate.gov or nysenate.state.ny.us AND nyassembly.gov or nyassembly.state.ny.us

The number of inmates held in solitary confinement in the United States has been notoriously difficult to determine. Most states do not publish the relevant data, and many do not even collect it. Attempts to come up with a figure have been denounced as imperfect, based on state-by-state variances and shortcomings in data-gathering and in conceptions of what constitutes solitary confinement.

A widely accepted 2005 study found that some 25,000 prisoners were being held in supermax prisons around the country. And in the last year, that figure seems to dominate in the mainstream press. The Washington Post, in a recent front-page article on solitary confinement in Virginia, noted that “44 states…use solitary confinement,” and cited an “estimated 25,000 people in solitary in the nation’s state and federal prisons.” The problem here is that the 25,000 figure (as well as the 44) applies to supermax prisons only. It does not claim to account for the tens of thousands of additional prisoners held in the Secure Housing Units, Restricted Housing Units, Special Management Units and other isolation cells in prisons and jails around the country. Yet it is being cited as a total for the nation’s overall use of solitary confinement.

An alternative figure does, however, exist–and while it may not be perfect, we believe it more accurately reflects the total number of prisoners held in isolated confinement on any given day. A census of state and federal prisoners is conducted every five years by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The most recent census for which data are available is 2005. It found 81,622 inmates were being held in “restricted housing.” This number was recently cited by the Vera Institute of Justice’s Segregation Reduction Project. The 80,000 figure has also been used by National Geographic and The New Yorker, among others.

An earlier version of this number, from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s 2000 census, was cited by the widely respected Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, convened by Vera. The Commission further broke the figure down to show types of “restricted housing.” In 2000, the BJS found 80,870 inmates in some form of segregation, including 36,499 in administrative segregation, 33,586 in disciplinary segregation, and 10,765 in protective custody. The Commission noted that the 2000 figures represented a 40 percent increase over 1995, when 57,591 inmates were in segregation. During the same period of time, the overall prison population grew by 28 percent. (See page 56 of the Commission’s 2006 report, Confronting Confinement).

The census uses the term “restricted housing,” which clearly includes segregation units outside of supermax prisons. Since it captures where prisoners are housed on a given day (June 30, 2005), it is meant to include both long-term or indefinite isolation (years or decades) as well as shorter stints in solitary (weeks or months). It may include a small number of prisoners who are held in 23-hour lockdown in double cells, a practice popular in some states. (For this reason, some advocates prefer the term “isolated confinement” to “solitary confinement”). The number is based on self-reporting by wardens and state corrections departments, so it may reflect some errors and inconsistencies. But prison officials are not, as a rule, known for their tendency to overrreport the number of inmates they hold in solitary.

It is also worth noting that the census figures do not include prisoners in solitary confinement in juvenile facilities, immigrant detention centers, or local jails; if they did they would certainly be higher. We know that New York’s jails alone contain 990 isolation cells, according to the New York City Department of Corrections.

A survey of available data from a handful of states also suggest that the 80,000 figure is likely low, rather than high. Just eight states and the federal government hold some 44,000 prisoners in isolated confinement.

In 2010, a spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons told CNN that there were about 11,150 federal inmates being held in “special housing.” ADX Florence holds approximately 400 of these inmates in ultra-isolation.
In California in 2011, Scott Kernan, Undersecretary of Operations of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, testified before the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee that approximately 3,000 inmates were held in California’s Security Housing Units, including over 1,100 at the Pelican Bay State Prison SHU alone. A 2009 report from California’s Inspector General found 8,878 inmates in Administrative Segregation Units. This means that, all told, there are close to 11,000 prisoners in solitary confinement in California.
As reported by the Houston Chronicle based on figures from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, in 2011 there were over 5,205 inmates in long-term isolation in administrative segregation, and approximately 4,000 more serving shorter terms in solitary for disciplinary violations–for a total of more than 9,000.
According to a 2003 report by the Correctional Association, New York state had approximately 5,000 inmates in disciplinary lockdown in 2003.
At the end of 2011, Pennyslvania Department of Corrections reported that 2,406 inmates were held in segregation in the state’s Restrictive Housing Units.
A 2011 study by independent researchers funded by the National Institute of Corrections found that nearly 1,500 inmates, or 7% of the prison population, were in administrative segregation and a further 670 in disciplinary segregation–for a total of more than 2,100.
In Virginia, according to a 2012 article in the Washington Post, there were 1,800 inmates in solitary confinement, 500 of whom are held at the supermax Red Onion State Prison.
A 2007 report by the American Friends Service Committee found 1,623 inmates held in isolation in Arizona’s SHUs.
In a 2008 report to the state legislature, the Michigan Department of Corrections said that that the daily average number of inmates held in administrative segregation in FY 2007-08 was 1,294.
In our opinion, the most accurate possible description of how many prisoners are solitary confinement in the United States would go something like this: “Based on available data, there are at least 80,000 prisoners in isolated confinement on any given day in America’s prisons and jails, including some 25,000 in long-term solitary in supermax prisons.”

Research for this article was provided by Sal Rodriguez.

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.

Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

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The complications in handling the swelling number of aging prisoners range from making allowances for those with Alzheimer’s or dementia and finding sufficient ground-floor cells for inmates in wheelchairs to ensuring that older prisoners are not exploited or robbed by younger inmates.

“Age should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card, but when prisoners are so old and infirm that they are not a threat to public safety, they should be released under supervision,” said Jamie Fellner, the author of the study. “Failing that, legislatures are going to have to pony up a lot more money to pay for proper care for them behind bars.”

The report found that the number of imprisoned men and women 65 years and older grew by more than 90 times the rate of the total prison population from 2007 to 2010. While the number of those older inmates increased by 63 percent, the number of all inmates rose by just 0.7 percent.

State or federal prisons now hold about 26,200 people 65 years and older, and about 124,000 inmates older than 55, the report said. The number of incarcerated people who are older than 55 has grown at a rate six times that of the rest of the prison population.

While most elderly inmates have been in prison for years, the number of older people just entering has also been increasing — along with the cost of their care.

In Michigan, the annual cost of health care for the average inmate was $5,800, according to the study, a figure that increased to $11,000 for prisoners aged 55 to 59. The cost spiraled to $40,000 a year for inmates 80 years and older.

“Prison officials look at the projected increase in aging prisoners in their systems and realize in the very near future they will need to operate specialized geriatric facilities,” the report said. “Some already do.”

California, which is under federal court order to reduce overcrowding in its prisons, has seen the percentage of its inmates older than 50 increase to 17 percent in 2010, from 4 percent in 1990, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

“We have an awful lot of people who are probably going to die in prison,” said Nancy J. Kincaid, spokeswoman for the state’s Correctional Health Care Services. “There are people with 40-year sentences, 30-year sentences. We have to figure out how to care for these people.”

The state’s prison health care system has been in federal receivership since 2006, when a court ruled that the state was failing to provide inmates with adequate access to health care services.

Ms. Kincaid said that as the prison population had aged, so had the incidence of chronic diseases among inmates, including hypertension and diabetes. And because the state has only three hospitals for prisoners — about 120 beds — it must contract with private operators for inpatient care. The cost of a hospitalized inmate in such a facility is about $850,000 a year.

“We have guys who are comatose shackled to beds with a guard in the room,” she said.

To reduce costs, the state is building a $750 million medical center for inmates in Stockton that will have 1,772 beds, and include a pharmacy and dialysis clinic. It will be single story to ease mobility problems among what is expected to be a large number of older patients.

FROM: Andrea W. Evans, Chairwoman^
DATE: October 5,2011
RE: Recent Amendment of Executive Law §259-c(4)

Through the enactment of Chapter 62 of the Laws of 2011, Part C, subpart A, §38-b, Executive Law §259-c(4) was amended to provide that the Board of Parole shall:
“establish written procedures for its use in making parole decisions as required by law, Such written procedures shall incorporate risk and needs principles to measure the rehabilitation of persons appearing before the board, the likelihood of success of such persons upon release and assist members of the state board of parole in determining which inmates may be released to parole supervision;”
As you know, members of the Board have been working with staff of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervsion in the development of a transition accountability plan (“TAP”). This instrument which incorporates risk and needs principles, will provide a meaningful measurement of an inmate’s rehabilitation. With respect to the practices of the Board, the TAP instrument will replace the inmate status report that you have utilized in the past when assessing the appropriateness of an inmate’s release to parole supervision. To this end, members of the Board were afforded training in July 2011 in the use of the TAP instrument where it exists. Accordingly, as we proceed, when staff have prepared a TAP instrument for a parole eligible inmate, you are to use that document when making your parole release decisions. In instances where a TAP instrument has not been prepared, you are to continue to utilize the inmate status report It is also important to note that the Board was afforded training in September 2011 in the usage of the Compas Risk and Needs Assessment tool to understand the interplay between that instrument and the TAP instrument, as well as understanding what each of the risk levels mean.
AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMPLOYER

Please know that the standard for assessing the appropriateness for release, as well as the statutory criteria you must consider has not changed through the aforementioned legislation. Consequently, in all cases you must consider:
(i) the institutional record including program goals and accomplishments,
academic achievements, vocational education, training or work assignments,
therapy and interactions with staff and inmates:
(ii) performance, if any, as a participant in a temporary release program;
(iii) release plans including community resources, employment, education and
training and support services available to the inmate;
(iv) any deportation order issued by the federal government against the inmate
while in the custody of the department and any recommendation regarding
deportation made by the commissioner of the department pursuant to section
one hundred forty-seven of the correction [aw;
(v) any statement made to the board by the crime victim or ihe victim’s
representative, where the crime victim is deceased or is mentally or physically
incapacitated;
(vi) the length of the determinate sentence to which the inmate would be subject
had he or she received a sentence pursuant to section 70.70 or section 70.71 of the
penal law for a felony defined in article two hundred twenty or article two
hundred twenty-one of the penal law;
(vii) the seriousness of the offense with due consideration to the type of sentence,
length of sentence and recommendations of the sentencing court, the district
attorney, the attorney for the inmate, the pre-sentence probation report as well as
consideration of any mitigating and aggravating factors, and activities following
arrest prior to confinement; and
(viii) prior criminal record, including the nature and pattern of offenses,
adjustment to any previous probation or parole supervision and institutional
confinement.
See Executive Law §259-i(2){c){A}. As noted by the New York State Court of Appeals in Siimon v. Travis. 95 N.Y,2d 470 (2000), the above-stated criteria reflect the strong rehabilitative component of section 259-i of the Executive Law.

Therefore, in your consideration of the statutory criteria set forth in Executive Law §259-i(2)(c)(A)(i) through (viii), you must ascertain what steps an inmate has taken toward their rehabilitation and the likelihood of their success once released to parole supervision. In this regard, any steps taken by an inmate toward effecting their rehabilitation, in addition to all aspects of their proposed release plan, are to be discussed with the inmate during the course of their interview and considered in your deliberations.
Thank you.
AWE
cc: Elizabeth Glazer, Deputy Secretary
Mary Kavaney, Assistant Deputy Secretary Brian Fischer. Commissioner Anthony J. Annucci. Executive Deputy Commissioner Angela Jimenez. Deputy Commissioner
AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMPLOYER

In this Oct. 6, 2011 photo, Michael Mack, of the Brooklyn borough of New York, speaks during a Liferís and Long-Termerís Organization meeting at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. Participants in the program are serving long-term or life sentences. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)
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Updated: October 23, 2011 12:06AM

DANNEMORA, N.Y. (AP) — Yohannes Johnson is serving 75 years to life in a remote upstate New York prison, behind 30-foot concrete walls and locked steel doors, 300 miles and 30 years and 10 months from home in New York City.
He measures time in long, slow, personal change. And he maintains hope he will, someday, walk outside the Clinton Correction Facility.
“One thing I don’t do is subject myself to the thought I’ll never leave prison,” said Johnson, now 55, slender and soft-spoken, his hair flecked with gray. He’s a convicted robber and killer and president of the prison’s Lifer’s and Long-Termer’s Organization, part of a growing club of inmates locked up for life nationwide. “I can’t afford to do that. I do that, I lose hope. I lose hope then I don’t care about anything. I don’t care about anything then I become a detriment to myself and those around me.”
Now, even corrections officials are considering different options for older inmates while some research suggests keeping them locked up until they die might be an expensive and unnecessary price for the public to pay.
Nationally, nearly 10 percent of more than 2.3 million inmates were serving life sentences in 2008, including 41,095 people doing life without parole, up 22 percent in five years, according to The Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to prison. The increase resulted from lawmakers “dramatically” expanding the types and repeat offenses that carry potential life terms, research analyst Ashley Nellis said.
“The theme is we’re protecting society, then the question is: From what?” said Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a watchdog group. She said with the cost of keeping a state inmate $55,000 a year — a cost that grows as they age and their medical needs increase — a financial analysis shows that parole and probation are far cheaper punishments that can also satisfy the public need for retribution.
Meanwhile, data show new crimes by convicted felons steadily declining from their teens through their dotage.
“Most criminal behavior is tied with impulse control. The section of the brain that controls impulse control is the last section of the brain that becomes fully developed,” Elijah said. There’s a large drop-off in criminal behavior and recidivism after 40 or 45, she said, a point seldom made in public discussion “because it’s not convenient. It doesn’t dovetail with the kind of tough-on-crime mentality that results in votes.”
Patricia Gioia, whose daughter was murdered 26 years ago in California and who runs the Albany chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, said killers should spend their lives locked up, contemplating what they did, the person whose life they took and the lifelong suffering of families and friends. “They should in effect be punished for this and should not enjoy the freedom that other people have to wander the world,” she said.
The lifers know well the patterns of youth.
“In the ‘80s I used to say, ‘No, I don’t regret nothing. I’d do it all again,’” Johnson said. “In the ‘90s I realized it was that attitude that got me in the position I’m in.”
Johnson went to prison at 17 for attempted robbery and again at 21 for grand larceny and attempted weapon possession. In 1982, at age 24, he was convicted of murder, attempted murder and robbery for shotgun holdups of cabdrivers in Manhattan and killing a driver.
Some of the lifers and long-termers meeting last week discussed Dannemora’s younger prisoners, whom they variously described as still having “a child-like mentality,” overriding selfishness, a tendency to respond to difficulties with violence and those “who just don’t know how to conduct themselves.”
“We got a lot of young brothers in here who are going to return back to society,” said Doran Evans, a thick-shouldered man doing life without parole for murder. “As lifers we’ve got an obligation.”
This autumn day, Johnson was surrounded by 18 others in one of their few respites. The Lifer’s and Long Termer’s Organization is a break from the numbing monotony of maximum prison: Walking in lines through locked doors and gray halls on fixed schedules to and from meals, and nine hours a night spent in 6-by-8-foot cells, where anyone’s policy infractions can mean punishment for all.
About two dozen prisoners among more than 2,000 men at the maximum-security main prison attend the weekly three-hour meetings. Far more could qualify: 458 are serving 15 years to life, 712 doing 25 to life and 40 sentenced to life without parole.
Through barred or mesh-screened windows, they can see the Adirondack Mountains, which were turning gold and burnt orange. A freestanding stone Catholic church, built inside the walls by inmates in the 1930s, is called the Church of the Good Thief. Its patron is St. Dismas, crucified next to Jesus.
The meeting is part therapy and brainstorming session for the men in forest-green pants and shirts or sweat shirts and sneakers, an opportunity to vent. Issues included changes in television reception, the number of prisoners allowed to use the electronic law library, keeping the prison peaceful and avoiding lockdowns, and collecting clothing and food for Hurricane Irene relief.
According to some older lifers at Clinton, they are no longer a threat and should be let go. Prisoner advocates say the same, pointing to New York and new California data showing they commit few crimes if paroled.
“After a 10-year stretch, our recidivism rate is nearly zero,” said Michael Mack, 48, an outgoing ex-Marine serving 30 years at Clinton for two separate robbery convictions, one he said he did. “So there’s no need to be resentencing us like they do” with tougher sentences, he said.
A Stanford University study in September showed the recidivism rate was less than 1 percent among 860 murderers paroled in California since 1995. Five returned to prison for new felonies, none for similar life-term crimes.
By contrast, nearly 49 percent of all released California inmates were recommitted for new crimes.
“Not only are most violent crimes committed by people under 30, but even the criminality that continues after that declines drastically after age 40 and even more so after age 50,” the study found. In New York, the number of lifers with few prospects for release has grown in the past decade, tracking a national trend and raising a new set of criminal justice policy questions.
“What kind of treatment programs should we be considering for the offenders who have a sentence of life without parole, or enter the system with sentences of 50 years to life?” Commissioner Brian Fischer asked recently on the 40th anniversary of the deadly riots at Attica, another maximum-security prison in New York. Since the state’s 1996 sentencing amendments for capital crimes, establishing life without parole for first-degree murder, inmates with that sentence rose from four to 223, with 15 more expected each year, he said.
New York now has more than 800 prisoners who are 65 or older, double the total a decade ago. It has no death penalty, though 34 states and the federal government do. Federal prisons held 3,254 inmates age 66 or older in August, up from 1,326 in 2000.
From 1985 to 2006 in New York, 72 prisoners released when they were over 65 were returned for new crimes, less than 5 percent.
The lifers say they have something more positive to give back home.
“Those communities we came from, we left them in shambles,” Johnson said. “There’s a generation behind us and a generation behind them that thinks prison is a rite of passage.”
In the lifers meeting, even foul language is barred. Johnson said they should speak to each other the way they do the parole board.
“You have to be thinking for the next man, the man ahead of you and the man behind you so that they don’t do something out of stupidity and out of ignorance that can lead to a lockdown,” he said. “We have to learn to live among people without creating havoc.”
It’s a timely lesson they say they can take outside the prison first built in 1845.
“We can’t have a bad day,” Mack said. “I have to be respectful. For me to have a bad day can cost me my life.”

December 5, 2011

An Albany judge has upheld a state law that counts inmates, for legislative reapportionment purposes, in their home community rather than the district in which they are incarcerated. If upheld on appeal, the ruling would apparently diminish the populations of several upstate, generally Republican districts and increase the populations in several urban and generally Democratic districts.

Supreme Court Justice Eugene P. Devine rejected challenges to the constitutionality of the 2010 statute enacted during a brief period when Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature. Proponents of the law argued that inmates, who are ineligible to vote, were unfairly boosting the populations, and thus legislative representation, of rural counties where most of the prisons are located. But several Republican senators and citizens challenged the statute.
In Little v. New York State Task Force on Demographic Research and Apportionment, 2310-2011, Justice Devine said that even if the law “is the product of a power play by Democratic lawmakers to usurp the strength of the Republican Party,” the law survives constitutional scrutiny. “Though inmates may be physically found in the locations of their respective correctional facilities at the time the census is conducted, there is nothing in the record to indicate that such inmates have any actual permanency in these locations or have intent to remain,” he said.
Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, whose office defended the law that he championed as a state senator, called the ruling a “victory for fundamental fairness and equal representation.” The decision “applies a fair standard to the drawing of state legislative districts and makes it easier for counties to do the same by providing them with an accurate data set,” he said in a statement. David L. Lewis of Lewis & Fioire, counsel for the Senate plaintiffs, said he is considering requesting a direct appeal to the Court of Appeals.

http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/PubArticleNY.jsp?id=1202534334444&Albany_Judge_Upholds_Law_on_Counting_Prisoners_

The decision, if upheld, could entitle scores of inmates to new parole interviews.

Orange County Supreme Court Justice Lawrence H. Ecker (See Profile), in what he says is a case of first impression, reviewed a recent revision of Executive Law §259(c), and held that a man who came up for parole before a change in the law is nonetheless entitled to benefit from that law.

The revision requires the parole board to look beyond the instant offense and consider whether the applicant for parole has been rehabilitated.

In Matter of Thwaites v. New York State Board of Parole, 2011 NY Slip Op 21453, Justice Ecker said the board, in denying the inmate’s release, relied on “past-focused rhetoric, not future-focused risk assessment analysis.” He directed the parole board to afford Douglas Thwaites a new interview.

“The court finds the Board’s decision denying parole in this case to be arbitrary and capricious, irrational, and improper based upon the Parole Board’s failure to articulate any rational, nonconclusory basis, other than its reliance on the seriousness of the crime,” Justice Ecker wrote.

Douglas Thwaites was convicted of murder and assault in Brooklyn in 1986 and sentenced to a 25-year-to-life term. Mr. Thwaites, now 67, stabbed his estranged wife nine times, killing her, and also stabbed but did not kill a family friend who attempted to intervene, records show.

The inmate, who was interviewed by the parole board on March 16, 2010, was denied release in a boilerplate decision concluding that “discretionary release is inappropriate at this time and incompatible with the welfare of the community. To hold otherwise would so deprecate the seriousness of your crime as to undermine respect for law.”

The exact language is routinely cited in parole decisions.

Several months after Mr. Thwaites denial, the revision of Executive Law §259(c) took effect. It requires the board to “incorporate risk and needs principles to measure the rehabilitation of persons appearing before the board [and] the likelihood of success of such persons upon release.”

Justice Ecker said there is no question the board did not apply in Mr. Thwaites’ case standards that had yet to take effect. Regardless, he said the “remedial” objective of the legislation requires reconsideration of the inmate’s parole bid.

Mr. Thwaites, a prisoner at the Mid Orange Correctional Facility in Warwick, argued pro se.

The state was defended by Assistant Attorney General Jeane L. Strickland Smith. Jennifer Givner, spokeswoman for the attorney general, said the decision is under review.

In another parole decision last week, the Appellate Division, Third Department, refused to reinstate an action on behalf of violent felons who contend the parole board has systematically violated state law in routinely denying release to Class A-1 convicts. The same issue was unsuccessfully litigated in federal court.

Graziano v. Evans, 512150, is the state court version of Graziano v. Pataki, 7:06-cv-00480, a Southern District case dismissed a year ago by Judge Cathy Seibel (See Profile).

Judge Seibel rejected the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims and the state courts have rejected their statutory claims.

The Third Department affirmed Albany Acting Supreme Court Justice Roger D. McDonough (See Profile) in dismissing the state court action.

Justice McDonough had found that the lead plaintiff, Peter Graziano, had and availed himself of an opportunity to challenge his denial of parole, and res judicata bars the subsequent action. The Third Department, in an opinion by Acting Presiding Justice Thomas E. Mercure (See Profile), agreed.

Robert N. Isseks of Middletown represents the plaintiffs.

Assistant Attorney General Steven C. Wu defended the state.

@|John Caher can be contacted at jcaher@alm.com.

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http://news.yahoo.com/one-third-young-u-adults-arrested-study-164839070.html

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Close to one in three American teens and young adults get arrested by age 23, according to a new study that finds more of them are being booked now than in the 1960s.
Those arrests are for everything from underage drinking and petty theft to violent crime, researchers said. They added that the increase might not necessarily reflect more criminal behavior in youth, but rather a police force that’s more apt to arrest young people than in the past.
“The vast majority of these kids will never be arrested again,” said John Paul Wright, who studies juvenile delinquency at the University of Cincinnati’s Institute of Crime Science, but wasn’t involved in the new study.
“The real serious ones are embedded in the bigger population of kids who are just picking up one arrest,” he told Reuters Health.
Though violent crimes might be on the rarer end of the spectrum of offenses, the study’s lead author pointed to the importance of catching early warning signs of criminal behavior in adolescents and young adults, saying that pediatricians and parents can both play a role in turning those youngsters around.
Robert Brame of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and his colleagues analyzed data from a nationally-representative youth survey conducted between 1997 and 2008.
A group of more than 7,000 adolescents age 12 to 16 in the study’s first year filled out the annual surveys with questions including if and when they had ever been arrested.
At age 12, less than one percent of participants who responded had been arrested. By the time they were 23, that climbed to 30 percent with a history of arrest. For the full study in Pediatrics, see http://bit.ly/jsoh2P
That compares to an estimated 22 percent of young adults who had been arrested in 1965, from a past study.
“It was certainly higher than we expected based on what we saw in the 1960s, but it wasn’t dramatically higher,” said Brame.
Arrests in adolescents are especially worrisome, he told Reuters Health, because many repeat offenders start their “criminal career” at a young age.
POLICE MORE LIKELY TO ARREST
The researchers said it seems that the criminal justice system has taken to arresting both the young and old more than it did in the past, when fines and citations might have been given to some people who are now arrested.
“If (police) find kids that are intoxicated or they have pulled over someone intoxicated… now, nine times out of 10 they’re going to make an arrest,” Wright told Reuters Health.
“We do have to question if arrest is an appropriate intervention in all circumstances, or if we need to rethink some of the policies we have enacted.”
He pointed out that young people who have an arrest on their record might have more trouble getting jobs in the future. It’s one thing if that’s because they were involved in a violent crime, he continued, but another if their offence was non-violent, like drinking underage or smoking marijuana.
“Arrest does have major social implications for people as they transition from adolescence to adulthood,” Wright said.
While the report didn’t ask youth why they had been arrested, Brame said that common offenses in that age group also include stealing, vandalizing and arson.
For most minor offenses, teens and young adults will get a term of probation or another minor penalty, he said. The most serious adolescent offenders and those with a prior record could be prosecuted as adults and end up getting a prison sentence.
Brame said that being poor, struggling in school and having a difficult home life have all been linked to a higher risk of arrest in that age group.
He and his colleagues wrote in Pediatrics on Monday that other warning signs of delinquent behavior include early instances of aggression and bullying, hyperactivity and delayed development.
Pediatricians might be able to recognize those warning signs more clearly than parents, and can point kids toward resources to help keep them out of trouble, such as counseling services, Brame said.
“We urge that parents who are concerned about their kids’ well-being, that they get those kids in to see a pediatrician on a regular basis so the pediatrician can do the things they’re trained to do.”
(Reporting by Genevra Pittman; editing by Anthony Boadle)