Rick Scott Vetoes Bill Sending Non-Violent Drug Offenders To Rehab After Serving

[KenFSU]

This was a real opportunity to save the state some much desperately needed money.

Unbelievable.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/gov-rick-scott-vetoes-bil_n_1414758.html

Rick Scott Vetoes Bill Sending Non-Violent Drug Offenders To Rehab After Serving Half Sentence In Jail

Florida Governor Rick Scott on Friday vetoed a widely popular bill that would send certain non-violent drug addicts to treatment after serving half their sentences.

“He said it was a 'public safety’ issue. No it’s not,” said bill sponsor Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff (R-Fort Lauderdale) according to the Miami Herald. “These are non-violent drug offenders.”

The bill, a rare common sense favorite during a legislative season that saw Scott approve dying animals and Jay-Z lyrics debated on the House floor, was opposed by only four state lawmakers.

Sold on Bogdanoff's argument that the state would save money by getting potential re-offenders the help they need for addiction, lawmakers including typically tough-on-crime conservatives overwhelmingly sped the bill through the House 40-0 and the Senate 112-4.

But though offenders would remain in custody during the rehabilitation portion of their sentences, Scott said in his veto statement that the bill would violate laws against early release -- and be an injustice to "victims."

“Justice to victims of crime is not served when a criminal is permitted to be released early from a sentence imposed by the courts...This bill would permit criminals to be released after serving 50 percent of their sentences, thus creating an unwarranted exception to the rule that inmates serve 85 percent of their imposed sentences.”
Tampa Bay Times/HeraldColumnist Steve Bousquet wrote that Scott's veto missed the point:

The prison system would have chosen inmates based on their good behavior, the severity of their addictions and the likelihood that rehabilitation would save taxpayer dollars, a House analysis said.

In other words, the bill, properly implemented, could have reduced the cost of government, the very thing that Scott talks about so much.

"This was a very small step toward prison reform," [House sponsor Rep. Ari] Porth (D-Coral Springs) told Bousquet. "This was a real chance to have a positive impact on the lives of people."

[ben says]

Terrible veto. Good for tax payers, good for people in need of some real medical assistance, good for social utility. Vindictive at best.

[Tacachale]

Terrible, terrible move.

[urbaknight]

Non violent drug offenders shouldn't see one day in jail. simply doing drugs is a victimless crime, it's on the addict if they don't seek help. Fine them and get them help, but jail isn't the place for them. Now if they steal in order to buy their drugs, then they should go to jail for a little while.

[NotNow]

"Non violent" drug offenders who are in prison are largely drug dealers and smugglers.  Those "possession" charges of multiple pounds of MJ or kilos of cocaine are not for personal use.   Is it possible that rehab might not be helpful to this particular segment of criminal? 

[Tacachale]

^It's considerably less possible that locking them up forever, at taxpayer expense, will do anyone any good. This was a Republican crafted bill, btw.

[ben says]

Non violent drug offenders shouldn't see one day in jail. simply doing drugs is a victimless crime, it's on the addict if they don't seek help. Fine them and get them help, but jail isn't the place for them. Now if they steal in order to buy their drugs, then they should go to jail for a little while.

+1.

"Non violent" drug offenders who are in prison are largely drug dealers and smugglers.  Those "possession" charges of multiple pounds of MJ or kilos of cocaine are not for personal use.   Is it possible that rehab might not be helpful to this particular segment of criminal? 

Without getting into one huge socioeconomics argument, or explaining seasons 1-5 of the Wire, drug dealers are dealers because they don't have many other options. It's not like they wake up one day and say the ol' "I wanna be a drug dealer when I grow up." For some people, this is their only option.

Not to mention this bill targets non-violent drug addicts...people who get popped for possession charges. A high majority of those people only have enough on them for personal use. So, I don't really think this bill would have targeted high level drug dealers and "smugglers." After all, by the time the drugs get to distribution level, they've already been smuggled.

[ben says]

I know I'm "that guy," i.e. the one who recommends books ACTUALLY expecting them to be read (unrealistic, I know), but for a fascinating look at the American criminal justice system, and why it doesn't "work," check out "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" by Stuntz. Quick read, too.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Collapse-American-Criminal-Justice/dp/0674051750

[KenFSU]

I know I'm "that guy," i.e. the one who recommends books ACTUALLY expecting them to be read (unrealistic, I know), but for a fascinating look at the American criminal justice system, and why it doesn't "work," check out "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" by Stuntz. Quick read, too.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Collapse-American-Criminal-Justice/dp/0674051750

Ordered!

I tend to trust the opinions of fellow fans of The Wire

[JeffreyS]

If we try to save tax dollars getting a better outcome for our citizens we only hurt our for profit prison system.

[ben says]

I know I'm "that guy," i.e. the one who recommends books ACTUALLY expecting them to be read (unrealistic, I know), but for a fascinating look at the American criminal justice system, and why it doesn't "work," check out "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" by Stuntz. Quick read, too.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Collapse-American-Criminal-Justice/dp/0674051750

Ordered!

I tend to trust the opinions of fellow fans of The Wire

Wow! This has got to be a first!

I think you'll enjoy it. It's a short book, and the author (now deceased) was the preeminent criminal law scholar of his time (our time...he died a few years ago). It's a little on the academic side (i.e., there's the occasional graph/chart), BUT, it's highly readable. Takes you step from step, from the founding of the nation, to the civil war, to present, on how the criminal justice system works (or in this case, doesn't work). Let me know what you think. If you liked The Wire, then this will be highly pertinent.

And yeah...The Wire: best nonfiction (yes, nonfiction) TV show of all time.

[NotNow]

A TV show?  Really?  Drug dealers, like everybody else, have choices.  Just being born poor does NOT make a criminal.  To think otherwise (especially because it was on a fictional TV show) is just....ignorant. 

Most of the possession charges for personal use you refer to are serving in county jails, not state prisons.  Most, not all, but most of the possession cases in prison are large quantities that a traffiking charge could not be made. 

I'll read your book, but I have read many, many books on the criminal justice system and I don't think another by any college professor will change what I know to be true.

It may not match your imagination or your TV show, but that is reality.

Also, I don't care if Republicans or Democrats sponsor a bill, if it is inappropriate, then I will oppose it.  If it is a good bill, I will support it.  To do otherwise would make one a slave.

[JeffreyS]

So NN do you think it would be good bill in terms of money or results.

[ben says]

NN,

Maybe I was being hyperbolic, maybe you read too much into what I was saying, but, I do believe people have choices. That being said, I also believe people are a product of their environment, socioeconomic class, family, et cetera. To just say: people have choices, end of story, is naive to the nth degree. It's undeniable that the poor make up a large majority of prison/jail/juvenile detention centers. Include people without a good family. Include those who don't have the means, funds, and support to enter "the real world."

To your other point, regarding jails vs. prisons. Both are terrible places. I don't really differentiate between the two. Not to mention ridiculous three strikes laws, and statutory repeat offender laws, put most of these drug crimes into the prison system.

I did not offer that book to "change your mind." I offered it for insight. Nothing more, nothing less.

As for The Wire. Watch it. That's the "real world"--played by actors, yes. But scenes/themes/life that repeats itself day after day, city after city. I've yet to meet a cop, a lawyer, a local politician, a segment of the poor, who, after watching that show, said anything but "this is my life." Give it a shot before you trash it.

[KenFSU]

Great article from the New York Times a few years ago...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes â€" from writing bad checks to using drugs â€" that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges â€" many of whom are elected, another American anomaly â€" yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."

No more.

"Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons."

Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment."

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach."

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

"The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different," said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. "But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it's much higher."

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. "The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism," said Stern of King's College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them "are among the most serious and violent offenders."

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation's prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

"Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are," Tonry wrote last year in "Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective."

"It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries," Tonry wrote. "Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential."

The American character â€" self-reliant, independent, judgmental â€" also plays a role.

"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility," Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years."

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have "comparatively mild penal policies," Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

"Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas," said Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America's exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

"As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized" thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

"These figures," Cassell wrote, "should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate."

Other commentators were more definitive. "The simple truth is that imprisonment works," wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. "Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs."

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. "Rises and falls in Canada's crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years," Tonry wrote last year. "But its imprisonment rate has remained stable."

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville's work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America's booming prison population.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy â€" just what Tocqueville was talking about," he said. "We have a highly politicized criminal justice system."