Runaway Criminal Justice Costs.How Can Criminal Information Technology Reduce the Costs of Criminal Justice?-Issue to face is how to ration criminal justice services?
There is a terrible secret about the criminal justice industry in 2008. It costs too much. We as a society can't afford it. I recently had breakfast with a New Orleans policing official and told him I(following a two murder 4 wounded person weekend) that "the city had a 6 million dollar weekend" including 1 million dollars each for the murders and 2 million dollars each for the victims suffering life-long wounds.
Information technology has been used in many jurisdictions to increase agency capacity to help arrest, clear and convict. Each arrest and conviction (often for minor crimes)help drive up the costs of criminal justice. We have more than 2 million people in correctional institutional care and another 6 million in community correctional programs at a total cost of 49 billion dollars per year. Critical services(including education and medical care) have (According to the PEW Foundation 1 in 100 Report) suffered or been eliminated because of these criminal justice costs.
Can criminal justice agencies use information technologies to systematically reduce costs through managing crime prevention efforts, risk management, e monitoring of offenders, e delivery of prevention and early intervention services?
While a major paradigm shift, this may be the next frontier for criminal justice information technologies, consistent with new research, Congressional initiatives and changes in public sentiment.
What is your view? Can the Elephant-Criminal Justice-(to paraphrase an IBM President)learn to Dance?-to control rather than increase criminal justice expenses? Here are two background articles that can get us started discussing this topic:
1. City Business Piece on Criminal Justice Costs; and
2. an AP article describing the Pew Foundation One in One Hundred report.
Questions for discussion:
1. Are correctional and criminal justice costs bloated beyond any reasonable level or need?
2. How might re-purposing criminal justice information systems help reverse this trend?
Policy Shackles
by Richard A. Webster
Posted: Monday, March 10, 2008
Editor's note:The finale of the two-part Murder Inc. series today focuses on the costs of murder and violent crime to the community's judicial system.
Two men and one woman were shot March 2 in Central City, according to the New Orleans Police Department. One man died while two survivors were listed in critical condition.
When the NOPD announced the crime, it did not name the victims or speculate as to a motive. The unknown shooter remains at large. It is just another faceless tragedy that has become commonplace in New Orleans.
But that one act of violence triggered a chain reaction that will play out over the course of years and potentially decades if the murderer is ever captured, convicted and incarcerated. The public resources poured into caring for the injured and prosecuting the guilty would cost Louisiana taxpayers millions of dollars.
"It's something people may not think about because we're busy with recovery," said Bobby Freeman, chief of the NOPD's Violent Offender Unit. "It ranks in the top 10 in my mind but people have their own personal issues. Do they have schools for children or homes not filled with formaldehyde?
"But it affects all of us. It's easy to say, 'OK, geographically it's away from me.' But financially, it's at your back door."
Some may turn a blind eye when reading about another fatal shooting. Law-abiding citizens can find it hard to care whether drug dealers choose to tear each other apart with semi-automatic gunfire.
But criminal justice officials say the public pays for each of these senseless killings. They support preventative measures - educational, vocational and substance abuse programs - as the most effective ways to put an end to the bloodshed.
"Every one of these killings diminishes us collectively and undermines our sense of what kind of community we're living in," said Pamela Metzger, an associate professor of law at Tulane University Law School.
Murder rate
In 2007, there were 209 murders in New Orleans, a 30 percent increase over the 161 killings in 2006.
Non-lethal shootings, or aggravated assaults, are even more numerous. There were 341 in the third quarter of 2006 alone, the most recent statistics available from the NOPD.
The cost of a homicide is estimated at $1 million while a shooting that leaves a person disabled averages $2 million, according to a study co-authored by Peter Scharf, director of the Center for Society Law and Criminal Justice at Texas State University.
The financial costs are split between the victim and the shooter.
Medical care for severe gunshot victims can reach $500,000 and is typically paid for by the state since most of the wounded are uninsured.
The investigation, trial and incarceration of the accused can cost millions more.
On July 16, 2006, New Orleans police arrested 20-year-old Michael Anderson for the slaying of five teenagers in Central City one month earlier. The NOPD took him to Orleans Parish Prison where he has sat awaiting trial ever since.
It has been 583 days since Anderson first entered OPP at a price of $23.39 a day. The people of New Orleans have so far paid $13,636.37 for the alleged murderer's imprisonment.
Given the severity of the quintuple homicide, Anderson's trial could last up to three years adding $25,612 to his jail bill for a potential total of $39,248.
If Anderson is found guilty of first-degree murder, he likely will be sentenced to life in prison. Given his age, Anderson can expect to spend at least 40 years behind bars. At a cost of $14,815 a year, state taxpayers will shell out $592,614 for Anderson's incarceration.
And the longer Anderson stays in prison, the more his medical care and special needs costs increase. The average annual cost associated with prisoners older than 50 is $70,000, three times that of a younger prisoner, according to a 2008 report by Pew Charitable Trusts.
When Anderson's trial costs are included, which could potentially be hundreds of thousands of dollars, his decision that early morning in June 2006 to exact revenge on his enemies through the barrel of a gun could cost the people of Louisiana millions.
Costly murder trials
Freeman oversees the Violent Offender Unit, which handles all violent crime cases. The typical murder trial in New Orleans takes at least two years and costs tens of thousands of dollars, he said.
Prosecution costs could include thousands of dollars spent on witness protection, hiring toxicology or ballistics experts, and providing food, lodging and transportation for witnesses and experts.
The Violent Offender Unit recently prosecuted a case involving Thai-speaking people so it hired a translator at $200 per hour for three hours. Including travel time. One interview cost $1,000, Freeman said.
Sometimes the money is wasted by trial delays. VOU flew in 15 witnesses for one homicide case only to have the judge grant the defense a continuance. The 15 witnesses who flew into New Orleans on the city's dime turned right around and flew back home.
"It's so daunting to even think about what a murder costs," Freeman said. "I don't even think it's possible to get that cost but it has to be in the millions."
Murder trial costs also depend on the severity of the charge. Death penalty cases are more expensive to defend and prosecute because there are two phases to the trial - the first to determine guilt or innocence and the second to decide the sentence.
The two phases are conducted as separate trials with each requiring its own investigators, paid experts and witnesses.
In Georgia, the death penalty trial of Brian Nichols, accused of a triple homicide, cost $1.2 million and bankrupted the state agency responsible for indigent defense.
Death penalty rare
Part of the problem in New Orleans is former DA Eddie Jordan constantly pursued the death penalty although New Orleans juries rarely impose capital punishment, Metzger said.
The last person sentenced to death in Orleans Parish was Phillip Anthony in 1997. A jury Found Anthony guilty of the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen triple homicide.
When Jordan was in office, it wasn't unusual for the indigent defense board to face up to 40 death penalty cases at one time, said Andrew Greenlee, interim state public defender.
Jordan's insistence on pursuing the death penalty against all odds sucked up millions in public funds and manpower, Metzger said.
"When they charge a person with something they know they won't get, they're taking big wads of money that belong to the people of Louisiana and flushing it down the toilet. When the strong likelihood is life in prison without parole, it's hard to understand someone forcing everybody to devote those resources to the death penalty. But to be fair, prosecutors face tremendous pressure to impose the death penalty."
Capital cases also affect those accused of lesser offenses, Metzger said.
"You have one or two cases that involve very serious crimes and they end up absorbing tremendous resources in lawyer time. This places in jeopardy the constitutional rights of everyone who lives in Louisiana. A person who gets arrested for something they didn't do can be left hanging in limbo because there's no one to represent them. They can spend months in jail long past any possible maximum sentence."
Community costs
Beyond the obvious costs associated with a shooting - hospitalization, court and incarceration - there are steeper prices to pay that are harder to quantify, Scharf said.
Inmates can't support their families or pay child support payments, so many children are placed on welfare. One child in the system for 15 years costs the state $180,000 at an average of $12,000 a year.
There is also the impact on lost business and investment.
"We know whores and dope dealers on the street deter investment and murder has the same impact," Scharf said. "There are buildings in the CBD that are empty because people are afraid of crime in New Orleans and don't want to do business here. There are tangible psychological fear costs that can be disastrous for a city."
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Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison
By DAVID CRARY – Feb 28, 2008
NEW YORK (AP) - For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America's rank as the world's No. 1 incarcerator. It urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.
Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008 - one out of every 99.1 adults. Whether per capita or in raw numbers, it's more than any other nation.
The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.
The steadily growing inmate population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," the report said.
Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are pressuring many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft on crime.
"We're seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets," she said in an interview. "They want to be tough on crime. They want to be a law-and-order state. But they also want to save money, and they want to be effective."
The report cited Kansas and Texas as states that have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. They are making greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.
"The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens," the report said.
While many state governments have shown bipartisan interest in curbing prison growth, there also are persistent calls to proceed cautiously.
"We need to be smarter," said David Muhlhausen, a criminal justice expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We're not incarcerating all the people who commit serious crimes. But we're also probably incarcerating people who don't need to be."
According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.
The largest percentage increase - 12 percent - was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.
The report was compiled by the Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project, which is working with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.
"Getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers," said the project's director, Adam Gelb.
According to the report, the average annual cost per prisoner was $23,876, with Rhode Island spending the most ($44,860) and Louisiana the least ($13,009). It said California - which faces a $16 billion budget shortfall - spent $8.8 billion on corrections last year, while Texas, which has slightly more inmates, was a distant second with spending of $3.3 billion.
On average, states spend 6.8 percent of their general fund dollars on corrections, the report said. Oregon had the highest spending rate, at 10.9 percent; Alabama the lowest at 2.6 percent.
Four states - Vermont, Michigan, Oregon and Connecticut - now spend more on corrections than they do on higher education, the report said.
"These sad facts reflect a very distorted set of national priorities," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, referring to the full report. "Perhaps, if we adequately invested in our children and in education, kids who now grow up to be criminals could become productive workers and taxpayers."
The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect an increase in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.
"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."
The racial disparity for women also is stark. One of every 355 white women aged 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one of every 100 black women in that age group.
The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails. That's out of almost 230 million American adults.
The report said the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10.
The U.S. also is among the world leaders in capital punishment. According to Amnesty International, its 53 executions in 2006 were exceeded only by China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan.
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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Upcoming Blog featuring Dr. Peter Scharf
Stay posted for our upcoming Blog featuring Dr. Peter Scharf with additional commentary from his Guest Bloggers. Dr. Scharf has been the subject of major media coverage related to New Orleans including PBS, NPR, BBC, NBC, ABC Nightline, NY TIMES, WA POST, CBS, TIME, as well as being the author of eight published books, including Badge and the Bullet, Towards a Just Correctional System, etc.
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Friday, March 14, 2008
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