It is shocking that in order to save the state money, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other elected officials are contemplating a massive early release of prison inmates, the elimination of parole supervision for released prisoners, and a refusal to return inmates who violate parole to prison.
We can prove, both anecdotally and by extensive studies, that this plan will increase crime and make victims out of many innocent Californians.
For a single anecdotal case epitomizing the danger of the governor's plan, look no further than the tragic murder last month of 17-year-old Lily Burk. The accused murderer, Charlie Samuel, is a poster child for the failings of the governor's plan.
Samuel was most recently in prison for a petty theft conviction. When he violated parole terms only weeks after his prison release, he was not kept in custody or returned to prison, but instead referred to drug treatment. Once there, he left the program on a short-term pass! All this occurred because Samuel left prison classified as what Schwarzenegger calls a "low level, nonviolent" inmate.
Unfortunately, the tragedy that is Charlie Samuel is not an aberration. Extensive studies dating to the 1970s document that inmates usually have lengthy criminal records, and continue to commit crimes when released from prison.
An exhaustive 2002 United States Department of Justice study tracked the arrest records of 272,111 inmates, from 15 different states, for a three-year period after their 1994 releases from prison. These inmates had been imprisoned for a wide variety of offenses, ranging from drug offenses to murder. Collectively, they totaled over 4.1 million arrests before incarceration, although more than half were serving their first prison sentence.
In the three-year period following release, 67.5 percent of the inmates had been rearrested for a new offense, almost exclusively either a felony or serious misdemeanor. A third were rearrested in the first six months after release, and nearly half within two years.
Property offenders - Schwarzenegger's low-level inmates - had the highest rearrest rates at 73.3 percent. The first published study to answer the question of whether the release of inmates contributes to an increase in the crime rate was published in 2004 by UC Berkeley Professor Steven Raphael and UCLA Professor Michael Stoll.
They found that releasing prison inmates is associated with increase in crime, and there were "significant effects of prison releases on the overall violent and property crime rates and for most of the individual felony offenses." Raphael and Stoll also issued a stark warning about reducing prisoner population through prison releases: "Such a reduction should be carried out in a cautious and deliberate manner. We find that in all time periods, released offenders have a significant effect on very serious felony offenses, such as homicide and robbery, and thus state corrections departments should carefully think through changes in sentencing, parole policy and other actions intended to reduce incarceration rates."
Who pays the price for a massive release of unsupervised inmates?
Our local communities, with police departments investigating new crimes, prosecutors filing new cases, and jails housing inmates pending trial. The governor and Legislature are hitting local governments with a double whammy - Los Angeles will lose $200 million under the new state budget, which directly translates into cuts in public safety while at the same time transferring the cost of crime back to the community by the early release of prisoners.
Tragically, as in the case of Lily Burk, many individual Californians will become new crime victims.
The simple fact is that many people who are in prison are there because they can not conform their behavior to society's rules. We often refer to these inmates as doing life in prison on the installment plan. The ultimate cost of their unchecked release is an enormous amount of money and heartache to Californians.
Paul M. Weber is president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
