ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 22, 1996 TAG: 9601220076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
They're against ``three-strikes-and-you're-out'' laws.
They think the nation is too focused on building prisons and think more money should be spent on alternative punishments in the community.
They oppose measures to make prison life harsher and call for more rehabilitation programs.
Who are these bleeding hearts?
The men and women who run America's prisons.
``We've seen sentencing policies that crowd our prisons with some offenders who could be handled in the community, bills that would take away tools we need to manage people, and declining resources devoted to rehabilitation programs to change behavior and reduce recidivism,'' said Bobbie Huskey, president of the 20,000-member American Correctional Association, at the association's convention here last week.
``It's frustrating for us in the field to see policies put in place that don't work or drain resources that could be used in better ways,'' Huskey said.
Commenting on the seeming irony of prison and jail administrators espousing some of the same views on criminal policy as, say, the American Civil Liberties Union, David Parrish, who runs the Hillsborough County Jail in Florida, said: ``It's a matter of practicality. It's not that I'm liberal; I'm practical.''
At the convention, attended by about 3,000 prison and jail wardens, correction officers, probation and parole officials, and halfway-house administrators, members approved a set of ``legislative initiatives'' to send to state and national legislators.
Association leaders said the group agreed to start lobbying Congress to oppose measures they view as counterproductive and designed primarily to assuage public anger over crime.
One such measure is a bill pending in Congress that calls for ``no-frills'' prisons. It would strip federal facilities of televisions and weight equipment, as well as require inmates to perform hard labor.
State legislatures already have passed laws requiring longer mandatory sentences for certain crimes. Virginia has abolished parole. At least 13 states have adopted ``three-strikes'' laws - measures that mandate terms of up to life in prison for criminals convicted of three felonies. (Pennsylvania's ``three-strikes'' law, passed last year, stopped short of mandating a life sentence.) Alabama, Florida and Georgia reinstituted the use of chain gangs.
``We're at the back end. We're where the impact of these policies hits,'' said Arthur Leonardo, superintendent of a prison in New York state.
The primary effect of tough-on-crime measures has been a huge increase in the number of prisoners nationwide - from 315,974 in 1980 to 1.1 million in 1995, according to Justice Department statistics. In one year alone - from mid-1994 to mid-1995 when the crime rate was falling - the prison population nationwide increased 8.8 percent. Virtually every state in the nation is building prisons, and correction budgets in many states are the only ones for which appropriations are rising.
So why don't people in the business want more business?
They say building prisons doesn't keep up with the growing numbers - and probably can't because the public doesn't want higher taxes - and crowded prisons have less of everything except violence.
``What happens is, say you've got a block with 240 prisoners and three officers on duty,'' said Mel Grieshaber, president of the International Association of Correctional Officers. ``It gets double-celled, and now there are 480 inmates. They might give us one more officer, but when there's a budget crunch, we probably go back to three, which is unsafe for us and the inmates.''
Others emphasized that public education, social programs, crime-prevention efforts, treatment programs in prison and community-based alternatives to incarceration end up getting less when so much of a state's budget goes to prison building and basic security.
``We're finding we have so much more territory to cover with our people,'' said Daniel Lombardo, president of the Delaware Valley Volunteers of America, a group that runs prerelease programs for former inmates in Philadelphia and Camden, N.J. He said the ex-inmates he works with often are functionally illiterate, lack job skills and have been drug users. Many need to be taught impulse control, anger management and thinking about consequences.
``With the prisons as crowded as they are now, they can't do much with training or treatment,'' Lombardo said. ``What they have is crowd management.''
Huskey emphasized that the organization is not opposed to building prisons. ``What we're saying is, `Let's have a balanced approach,''' she said. ``Let's use prisons for the violent offenders and make them good prisons. For nonviolent offenders, let's create more drug-treatment centers, more work-release centers, more-intensive parole supervision, more day-reporting centers where counselors work with offenders on their problems.''
Huskey, a consultant who previously was Virginia's administrator of community corrections, argued that community alternatives involving work and restitution hold offenders more accountable than prisons do - and cost a lot less.
Keeping someone in prison costs an average of $50 a day; day reporting and other forms of intensive supervision cost about $13, she said.
In addition, community programs often do a better job than prisons of changing behavior and reducing recidivism, because offenders are being taught and supervised as they operate in the real world, she said.
Huskey said correction officials oppose long mandatory sentences because they drive up the prison population and don't allow judges, parole officers or other professionals to distinguish between who needs such punishment and who doesn't.
Laws that imprison felons for life after a third serious offense are a mistake, in the association's view, because they eventually create a large geriatric population in prison, a population more prone to health problems than crime, Huskey said.
State prison wardens at the conference also heaped scorn on the notion that their prisons are ``country clubs'' with too many frills.
``That's ludicrous,'' said New York's Leonardo. He said that television - which inmates pay for themselves - and weight lifting and other activities are ``a management we use for control, since we can take them away from the ones who don't obey the rules.''
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