New report on racial disparities in sentencing

The Sentencing Project has issued a new report, “Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity.” The study found that African Americans were incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites and Latinos at nearly double the rate. The 23-page report is based on data from five states in the Northeast and Midwest. The report recommends “addressing disparities through changes in drug policy, mandatory sentencing laws, reconsideration of “race neutral” policies, and changes in resource allocation.”

Rand study: Mental health court cost-effective

People with mental illnesses are vastly overrepresented in prisons and jails.

In a promising attempt to rectify this problem, mental health courts have sprung up around the United States in the past decade. These courts are designed to divert nonviolent, mentally ill offenders out of their pattern of cyclical incarceration through individually tailored treatment programs.

In 1997, there were only four such courts nationwide. In 2004, the courts got a boost with passage of the federal Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act, which authorized $50 million for states and counties to establish more mental health courts and provide other mental health resources to prisoners. Now, there are dozens of courts. As I write, one is even getting off the ground in my own county (Contra Costa County, California).

Because the courts are relatively new, they have not been widely studied. Now, the imminently respectable Rand Corporation has weighed in with a new study on the fiscal side of one such court, the Allegheny County Mental Health Court in Pennsylvania.

The study’s bottom-line conclusion: Sending people to treatment instead of to jail has the potential to save the taxpayers money.

The full report, “Justice, Treatment, and Cost,” is available online.

For more information on the movement toward reducing prison expansion through model prisoner reentry programs, see the web site of the Re-Entry Policy Council, a public/private partnership involving the U.S. departments of Justice, Labor, and Health.

New Report: Anti-Gang Strategy Failing Badly

From today's Washington Post:

"Anti-gang legislation and police crackdowns are failing so badly that they
are strengthening the criminal organizations and making U.S. cities more
dangerous, according to a report being released Wednesday.

"Mass arrests, stiff prison sentences often served with other gang
members and other strategies that focus on law enforcement rather than
intervention actually strengthen gang ties and further marginalize angry young
men, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank
that advocates alternatives to incarceration.

" 'We're talking about 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds whose involvement in
gangs is likely to be ephemeral unless they are pulled off the street and put in
prison, where they will come out with much stronger gang allegiances,' said
Judith Greene, co-author of Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies."

Link to the full Post article.

ForenSnips

Model prisoner reentry program

New York has been selected as one of seven states to receive a grant from the National Institute of Corrections to implement a model prisoner reentry program. The goal is to reduce recidivism “by promoting an effective transition process through the coordination of criminal justice and human service programming.”

See the full article in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.

Book review

A review of Jonathan Simon’s new book, Governing Through Crime: How The War On Crime Transformed American Democracy And Created A Culture Of Fear (Oxford University Press), is online at the the Law and Politics Book Review, sponsored by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.

Did forensic profile go too far?

Psychological profile helped convict teen who maintains his innocence

Police detective Jim Broderick in Fort Collins had set his sights on 15-year-old Tim Masters. He was convinced that the boy had kidnapped, sexually mutilated, and murdered a woman.

No physical evidence tied the boy to the crime. But for years after the 1987 crime went cold, Detective Broderick continued to insist that Masters was the killer.

The detective was haunted by Masters’ oddness during questioning, his collection of survival knives, and the timing of the woman’s death - within a day of the fourth anniversary of the boy's mother's death. But most troubling of all, according to a Denver Post expose on the case, were Masters’ violent sketches. Especially one featuring a blade tearing into a diamond shape.

Finally, in 1995, Broderick telephoned forensic psychologist Reid Meloy and asked him to study Masters' artwork. “Meloy had developed a reputation as an expert witness on sexual homicides,” writes Post reporter Miles Moffeit. “He even disclosed a deeply personal fascination with the subject, according to court testimony, saying he himself had sexually sadistic fantasies.”

Without interviewing Masters, Meloy wrote a damning opinion: Masters fit the profile of a killer because he was a loner who came from an isolated or deprived background and harbored hidden hostility toward authorities as well as violent fantasies. This was a displaced sexual matricide, stemming from Masters' feelings of abandonment by his dead mother. "The killing of Ms. Hettrick translated Tim Masters' grandiose fantasy into reality," Meloy wrote.

Meloy’s profile helped garner a conviction, and in 1999 Masters was sentenced to life in prison.

Now, a legal team has launched what the Post characterizes as “one of the most ambitious and expensive bids ever in Colorado to prove a man's innocence.” The investigation focuses on a sexually deviant medical doctor who lived near the scene of the killing; the doctor committed suicide and police destroyed much of the physical evidence that could have tied him to the crime.

Watch the Denver Post's online video, “The Story of Tim Masters,” which shows details of Masters' interrogations at the hands of police.

My more recent posts on this topic are here, here, and here.

Thanks to Denver forensic psychologist Michael Karson for bringing this case to my attention.

Crusade for abused women in prison

California has a "unique law" intended to assist domestic violence victims in prison. Under the law, a woman who killed her abusive partner and who was convicted before 1992 is entitled to petition for a new trial if she did not have an expert witness on battering.

The law was enacted in 2002. The problem is, many women in prison did not hear about it. Then, a young lawyer named Olivia Wang began a crusade. Her Habeas Project has grown into a statewide coalition that is celebrating victory in the freeing of Joyce Walker, who spent 16 years in prison for killing her horrifically abusive husband.

The story is featured on page 1 of Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

The Habeas Project has helped win freedom for 19 domestic violence survivors serving life sentences in California.