The Sentencing Project Provides Data and Other Resources for Reform Advocates,
by Sherry Reames
I have become a big fan of the Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit that describes its mission as “advocat[ing] for effective and humane responses to crime that minimize imprisonment and criminalization of youth and adults by promoting racial, ethnic, economic, and gender justice.” Although it is best known for recommending an end to extremely long sentences, the Sentencing Project (hereafter SP) also advocates for a universal “second look” review process after the first decade of incarceration, for the restoration of voting rights to citizens with felony convictions, and for laws and programs to keep youth out of the adult criminal-legal system.
As their website explains, the SP works toward these goals in partnership with dozens of national and state-level organizations. What the SP provides to all of them, and to us in MOSES and WISDOM, is a wealth of free resources that can easily be downloaded from that website: detailed research reports on various aspects of the U.S. criminal-legal system, data and fact sheets, press releases on recent developments, informational videos, and current calls to action. Among the latter, to my surprise, is a campaign to “End the Ban of Food Stamps for People with Drug Convictions” (an issue I thought had been resolved long ago), as well as one to “Support the Safer Detention Act,” seeking compassionate relief for elderly and sick people in federal prisons.
Besides exploring the wonderful SP website – www.sentencingproject.org – MOSES members might want to sign up to receive their emails, which include links to new reports and press releases as they are published. It is not necessary to donate, but after doing so I also started receiving invitations to some inspiring webinars about the work being done by some of SP’s partner organizations in other states.
I have become a subscriber to the Marshall Project, a free news service that collects important stories about all aspects of the criminal-legal system across the country – police activity, correctional facilities, individual cases, court decisions, etc., etc. I receive several emails from them every week, with brief summaries and links to fuller accounts with thorough documentation. You can request emails in specific areas of interest only, in lieu of everything they produce.
The Marshall Project was founded by Bill Keller, who wrote the excellent book What Is Prison For?, reviewed in this newsletter in 2023. Keller’s basic premise was that correctional facilities need to be just that: facilities for correcting, not punishing, the behaviors that got people into them. He described approaches to this issue in Norway and Germany, where prisoners are treated with respect and all personnel are expected to be part of their rehabilitation team.
I have to pick and choose among my Marshall Project emails, because I can’t possibly read them all. But I think this is an excellent resource to try, at least temporarily, for anyone who wants to get a bigger picture of what’s going on all over the U.S. in the specific areas that concern those of us in MOSES. The project’s email address is: info@themarshallproject.org.
JSRI spent 2023 working on the Jail (no surprise) and behavioral health.
Much of the Justice System Reform Initiative (JSRI) work in 2022 was focused on the jail. This year we had a long stretch where the jail was not an issue – but spoiler alert – it roared back in December. JSRI used the time with fewer jail decisions to continue our focus on diverting people experiencing mental/behavioral health crises from the criminal legal system.
Dane County Jail
At the end of the 2022 County Exec Parisi had vetoed the board of supervisors legislation to reduce the jail to 5 floors, a plan MOSES endorsed. This left the County with a plan to build a 6 story jail but without enough funding to build it. In late 2022 the Board of Supervisors voted down 3 methods for paying for the new jail.
Consequently 2023 started with the pressure to find more money for the jail, this legislative effort was blocked by a coalition of different groups on the Board. The coalition included a number of supervisors that are jail abolitionists that do not want any money spent on the jail, a group of supervisors that are primarily concerned about legal reform and the Black Caucus that is concerned about how jail spending limits other efforts for legal reform. This coalition was large enough to block spending proposals that required either ¾ or ⅔ majorities.
A breakthrough came April 19, 2023 when the Sheriff and the Black Caucus announced an agreement in which the Black Caucus voted for funds for the jail and the Sheriff agreed to a series of reforms. The most concrete reforms included:
Sheriff Barrett will support removal of federal in-transit prisoners from the current jail facility. He will work with the US Marshals to place the persons currently in the facility into other facilities in the surrounding areas by November 1, 2023. This has largely happened. On Dec 9th there were two federal prisoners in the jail.
Sheriff Barrett will support the transfer of Huber services to the Dane County Department of Human Services. This is a softer goal and there has been little or no action on this idea.
Sheriff Barrett will submit reports per Sub 1 2021 RES-320 as amended and continue current jail population reporting. This has happened indirectly. The CJC instituted an interactive dashboard that includes race, ethnicity, and sex – characteristics that were missing from other jail reports.
As mentioned, above this instituted a period of relative calm on the Jail issue. The Mead and Hunt team finished construction documents and put the project out to bid in Sept 2023.
But the bidding process concluded in Nov 2023 yielding only a single bid and that bid was $27.6 million dollars over budget.
As this article is written it seems that the County will send the exact same bid package out to bid for a second time. This is a bit of a gamble since there is no guarantee that more bids or lower bids will respond to this new bid process. We will know by midyear.
Behavioral Health and the legal system.
For the last decade, JSRI has been advocating for a crisis triage center as an alternative to incarceration for people experiencing a behavioral health crisis. More recently we have advocated for 911 to dispatch medical and crisis workers instead of police to appropriate behavioral health crisis calls. In Madison that program is called CARES and establishing CARES was a big success in 2022. This year’s budget expands on that success.
CARES
The CARES program receives about $900,000 a year. This support comes from both City of Madison and Dane County budgets.
JSRI recently met with Che Stedman, the Assistant Fire Chief who supervises the CARES program. He told us that one reason CARES does not operate 24 hours/day is that after a certain time of evening there is nowhere the CARES team can take a person except to an emergency room, one of the outcomes CARES is trying to avoid. The CARES program is not a treatment program, rather it is a crisis response team. They do not house people, so for many of their cases they need to have a place they can transport people to a stable environment. This would be the purpose of a Crisis Triage Center (see below).
Assistant Chief Stedman also mentioned that a substantial number of the calls to 911 for CARES ask that no one physically come to their residence. CARES staff do talk with the people calling, but the 911 center is itself stepping up to handle these calls.
Starting with a pilot last year and now expanded with this year’s budget, the 911 center will have five crisis workers on staff. This program is definitely part of an effort to divert behavioral health calls from police responses and entanglement with the legal system. It also has the benefit of serving all of Dane County on a 24/7 basis.
There is strong support, both from the JSRI, politicians, and the wider public to make the traditional CARES teams (one paramedic and one crisis worker) available throughout Dane County. This budget provided $200,000 in matching funds earmarked for cities and towns outside of Madison to work with the Madison Fire Department to expand CARES beyond Madison. This funding follows a year of study by Dane County Human Services Dept. examining how CARES can be expanded county wide. Hopefully, we will see initiatives in 2024.
Crisis Triage Center
The CARES unit can meet with people, but, as mentioned above, they are not a long term solution. Consequently, an important part of their service is to transport their clients to a safer location. Despite a decade of advocacy, Dane County does not have a 24/7 facility for behavioral health crises.
The way this works in other places is that there is a crisis-triage center available 24/7 that
provides a short term stay (often 23 hours) to allow someone in a behavioral health crisis to
calm down, for the helpers to discover and engage any family support, for any prescriptions to be identified, and identification of a longer term housing.
Dane County has been trying to build such a center for several years. The blockage has been that Wisconsin law does not include licensing for this type of facility, at least for involuntary stays. That means that not only is such a facility unavailable to CARES as an alternative to incarceration, it is also available neither to the police nor to the general public when they are looking for help without the threat of incarceration. The JSRI has advocated that Dane County start a crisis/triage center with voluntary admissions, as other locations facing the same problems have done.
2023 has been a good year for MOSES and the JSRI. The Dane County Budget has increased support for CARES, some, but not all, pandemic policies that decrease the jail population persist, diverting behavioral health cases from the legal system continues to be a topic of public discourse. But the wheels of justice turn slowly, and in some cases, move backwards. We hope that some of these issues will resolve in 2024 and allow us to begin advocacy for new areas of the criminal legal system.
Judge Geske has been an long time advocate for restorative justice and an advocate for creating a human oriented justice system. She joined us for our first virtual Lunch and Learn on October 21, 2020. (Note that this recording begins with the introduction to Justice Geske.) The video is 1:11 long. Justice Geske begins at 14:21. The first 14 minutes include other members of MOSES making announcements. Note that this was an early Zoom meeting during COVID and unfortunately was not recorded to highlight Judge Geske. She talks about how she got involved with restorative justice and why it is so important.
Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly doesn’t help make the world a better place or further the goals of MOSES. Some great resources are listed below. If you know of additional resources, please list them in the comments section.
Videos:
PBS: Race: The Power of an Illusion. This is an excellent 3 part documentary from 2003 which can be purchased from California Newsreel, and is in some county libraries. Of great value is the online companion to the series, “Background Readings” which provides access to about 15 articles each on Society, History, and Science, all related to the topic and which can be read online.
See especially:
Interview with Beverly Daniel Tatum under the Society section
“Racial Preferences for Whites: The Houses that Racism Built,” a short Op/Ed piece by Larry Adelman.
Slavery by Another Name 2012. Traces the 80 years of involuntary labor in the North and the South that followed the end of slavery through the ever-inventive creation of new “crimes” like vagrancy and long prison sentences which led to decades of forced labor. Available for $19.95 from PBS documentaries
Frontline: Two Nations of Black America. 1998 documentary by Henry Gates Jr, tracing the rise of some blacks and the social fall of others. $19.99 from PBS.
The House I Live In. Video version of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, with some new twists. Was aired on PBS.
Beyond Hate (1991): Bill Moyers. (87 minutes) Excellent examination of why and who we hate, and discussion of what hate does to us and for us. Should be available in most libraries or can be purchased on amazon.
Harvest of Empire: 2012. Based on the book by Juan González. Examines the political events, social conditions, and U.S. government actions that led millions of Latino families to leave their homelands in an unprecedented wave of migration over the past six decades. Available at local libraries, on amazon and itunes.
Unnatural Causes (2008): acclaimed documentary series broadcast by PBS and now used to tackle the root causes of our alarming socio-economic and racial inequities in health. The four-hour series crisscrosses the nation uncovering startling new findings that suggest there is much more to our health than bad habits, health care, or unlucky genes. The social circumstances in which we are born, live, and work can actually get under our skin and disrupt our physiology as much as germs and viruses. Total of 4 hours, consisting of 7 segments:
In Sickness and In Wealth (56 min.) How does the distribution of power, wealth and resources shape opportunities for health
When the Bough Breaks (29 min.) Can racism become embedded in the body and affect birth outcomes?
Becoming American (29 min.) Latino immigrants arrive healthy, so why don’t they stay that way?
Bad Sugar (29 min.) What are the connections between diabetes, oppression, and empowerment in two Native American communities?
Place Matters (29 min.) Why is your street address such a strong predictor of your health? (This episode is available as a stand-alone DVD with English, Lao, Hmong, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Cantonese audio, as well as English and Mandarin subtitles.)
Not Just a Paycheck (30 min.) Why do layoffs take such a huge toll in Michigan but cause hardly a ripple in Sweden? A Forgotten Injustice: a documentary about deportation of two million Mexican -Americans during the great depression of 1930’s. Available on Youtube
BOOKS:
Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity by Tim Wise. Available in paper or in a lecture form. Wise, a well-respected white author writing on racism, argues against color blindness and for a deeper color consciousness in both public and private practice. See also White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son and Dear White America: Letter to New Minority addressing the sources of white anxiety, the rise of the Tea Party, and racialized nostalgia.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, 2010, now available in paperback. This highly praised but demanding book is the “bible” of the prison transformation movement. It includes essential history of the last century and especially the last 30 years, explaining the origins of the drug war and its horrendous impact on black communities and our thinking. At least read the 19 page intro.
Lies my Teacher Told Me: James Loewen. “Everything your American History Teacher Got Wrong!”
Illegal: Peter Geniesse Documents the struggles of people from Mexico trying to enter the U.S.
More than Just Race:Being Black and Poor in the Inner Cities. Available on amazon.
INTERNET:
To test your unconscious bias, go to http://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ which offers on-line tests offered by Harvard University to test unconsciousness bias. We all have some type of racism in us; let’s recognize it and deal with it.
whatsrace.orgTake the racial literacy quiz. See Toolbox with low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk “engagement games” to use with groups.
Race Matters and More Race Matters Toolkits: Annie E. Casey Foundation
This toolkit is designed to help decision-makers, advocates, and elected officials get better results in their work by providing equitable opportunities for all. The toolkit presents a specific point of view on addressing unequal opportunities by race and offers simple, results-oriented steps to help you achieve your goals. Also see the companion series, MORE Race Matters. These publications serve to complement the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Race Matters Toolkit by providing users with additional guidelines, tips and additional tools.
Project NIA Launched in 2009 in Chicago, Project NIA is an advocacy, organizing, popular education, research, and capacity-building center with the long-term goal of ending youth incarceration. Project is based on the belief that several simultaneous approaches are necessary in order to develop and sustain community-based alternatives to the system of policing and incarceration. A 350 page downloadable curriculum is available on the site. Can be used with kids or adults and includes sessions on racism and privilege.
We Need to Talk About an Injustice. A moving and powerful 23 minute TED talk by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, about why black incarceration in the U.S. should be the key burning issue in our entire country (and why it is the core of our 11×15 Campaign).
“In Defense of a Loaded Word”, article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Sunday Review Section of New York Times, 11/25/13. Very nuanced analysis of the different perspectives on use of the forbidden word, and an argument why black people should be able to use it.
How Racist Are We? Ask Google. Interesting article tracing what percentage of votes Obama lost in 2008 due purely to racial antagonism.
Improving Mental Health Treatment in Dane County
and Keeping People Out of the Criminal Justice System
The criminal justice system is not designed to meet the needs of people needing mental health care. Yet, today, a large portion of people in the Dane County Jail have mental health issues (nearly 40% are receiving psychotropic medications) and there is a high racial disparity in this population. Many stakeholders in the county are now working to reduce the number of people with mental health issues who are incarcerated in the jail and are searching for effective approaches to achieve this objective. As a contribution to this effort, MOSES (Madison Organizing in Strength, Equality, and Solidarity) offers the following Desired Future Conditions to describe an improved criminal justice system, an improved mental health care delivery system, and the kind of community in which we desire to live.
Desired Future Conditions
Dane County Mental Health System
There is timely access to effective mental health care for everyone in Dane County through a coordinated system of providers, regardless of payer status. Trauma-informed care practices are an essential part of the system.
There is a coordinated approach among service providers, referring organizations, first responders, etc. to help people navigate the system and find the services that they need, including housing, transportation, employment, and other supportive services.
Case management (identification of needs and coordination of services) is available to all individuals who need it, bridging provider and agency boundaries. Peer support specialists are involved throughout the system.
Dane County Crisis/Restoration Center and Crisis Management
A Crisis/Restoration Center (providing mental health urgent care services 24 hours a day) is available to anyone in the community needing such services. The Crisis/Restoration Center provides immediate triage and stabilization followed by seamless/uninterrupted access to community services for longer-term treatment as needed. These services include treatment for co-occurring substance abuse disorders as needed.
First Responders (law enforcement officers, fire, EMS, 911 dispatchers), when responding to a call, have access to professional mental health consultation (in person on the scene, or through phone consultation) regarding background information and in making a decision on the appropriate next steps and/or facility placement for the individuals involved or needing assistance.
The Crisis/Restoration Center provides a viable treatment option in lieu of charging people with a crime and booking them into the Dane County Jail.
Dane County embraces and has established policies and procedures to direct people with mental illness who have a police contact to a treatment facility or program rather than into the criminal justice system. All First Responders are trained to identify and respond appropriately to people having a mental health crisis.
The Department of Corrections, Division of Community Corrections proactively determines needs for services for those on probation and supervision and assures that appropriate clients receive treatment from the mental health care delivery system as a way of improving compliance with rules, in lieu of probation holds and seeking revocation to state prison.
Dane County Jail Policy and Procedures
Jail intake personnel are trained and empowered to identify people with mental health issues who need to be diverted to the Crisis/Restoration Center.
The psychiatric services contractor is empowered to identify people in the jail who need to be moved to a mental health treatment center to prevent decompensation, and to recommend such action to jail supervision.
There are measurable definitions for identifying people in the jail who have mental health issues and these definitions are utilized by trained personnel to implement and regularly and transparently evaluate best practices. People with mental health challenges are not subjected to solitary confinement and/or sensory deprivation.
The jail emphasizes continuity of care for people with mental health issues. This care includes connecting with providers in the community, maintaining current medications, and doing reentry planning that connects individuals to mental health and other supportive services when they are released.
Administration and Management
Key stakeholders from the mental health system, the criminal justice system, and the community meet at least quarterly as partners in overseeing the management of these two systems.
Data is developed and used to manage and evaluate the systems and is also shared with the public in meaningful and transparent ways to enable citizens to understand the operations of our criminal justice systems. Programs and policies are evidence-based and routinely assessed to provide accountability.
While respecting HIPPA and other confidentiality requirements, information is shared among agencies and providers to better serve individuals with mental health issues. Family involvement is sought in order to develop and provide support for effective, holistic treatment plans.
Prepared by MOSES Justice System Reform Initiative, Crisis-Restoration Center Workgroup, April 2018
