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A starting place for citizen advocacy |
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The following material was given to participants in the Criminal Justice Lobby Day for use in conferences with legislators on April 11, 2000: *************************** PREVENTING PAROLEE CRIMESB 1987 (Vasconcellos) SupportSenate Bill 1987 appropriates $13,500,000 from the General Fund to the Department of Corrections for a 3-year demonstration project, the purpose of which is to provide substance abuse treatment services and parallel employment preparation training, to felons who are to be paroled. BACKGROUND: During the rapid expansion of our prison population, deficiencies developed in the education, job skills, and drug programs that help prisoners reintegrate into society after they are released. As a result, last year two out of three paroled felons in California were returned to prison either due to conviction for another crime, or because of a parole violation. This is twice the failure rate of most other states. Promising programs have been developed to provide prisoners with needed education, job skills, and treatment for drug dependency. However, these programs operate in isolation from one another, and serve less than 3% of all prisoners. Because the Department of Corrections is being re-organized to cope with budget excesses, attention tends to be focused away from the importance of program improvements that would improve the parole success rate. One proposal by the department is to invest $10.4 million in increasing the number of parole officers assigned to supervise parolees with two strikes. The department's stated intention is that these officers should make it more possible for these parolees to succeed, not to cause them to fail at an even higher rate. The non-partisan Legislative Analyst suggests that this investment should be augmented to assure that these parolees develop needed cognitive skills, and get work that increases their chance of success. SB 1987 should be enacted, because there is probably a connection between the ability of most parolees to remain drug free, and the likelihood of maintaining a good work record. It appears that the recidivism rate is greatly reduced when parolees are employed on a full-time basis. One job development program found that fewer than 25% of its employed clients fail parole, compared with a statewide parole failure rate of 65%. A 25% recidivism rate over a 12-month period would save approximately $5.8 million in costs of incarceration for every $1 million invested in the proposed program. If the failure rate rose to 40% over a 12-month period, the savings would still be $3.2 million for every $1 million invested. Even if the recidivism rate for employed clients were to increase to an unlikely 50% at the end of 12 months, the state will still save over a million dollars for every $1 million invested in the program. Friends Committee on Legislation |
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