[Senate Hearing 113-873]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 113-873
OVERSIGHT OF THE BUREAU OF PRISONS
AND COST-EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES
FOR REDUCING RECIDIVISM
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 6, 2013
__________
Serial No. J-113-34
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
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COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont, Chairman
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California CHUCK GRASSLEY, Iowa, Ranking
CHUCK SCHUMER, New York Member
DICK DURBIN, Illinois ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
AL FRANKEN, Minnesota JOHN CORNYN, Texas
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware MICHAEL S. LEE, Utah
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut TED CRUZ, Texas
MAZIE HIRONO, Hawaii JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
Kristine Lucius, Chief Counsel and Staff Director
Kolan Davis, Republican Chief Counsel and Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
----------
November 6, 2013, 10:03 A.M.
STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE Members
Page
Blumenthal, Hon. Richard, a U.S. Senator from the State of
Connecticut.................................................... 6
Grassley, Hon. Chuck, a U.S. Senator from the State of Iowa...... 4
Hirono, Hon. Mazie, a U.S. Senator from the State of Hawaii...... 7
Leahy, Hon. Patrick J., a U.S. Senator from the State of Vermont. 3
prepared statement........................................... 102
Sessions, Hon. Jeff, a U.S. Senator from the State of Alabama.... 5
Whitehouse, Hon. Sheldon, a U.S. Senator from the State of Rhode
Island......................................................... 1
prepared statement........................................... 104
WITNESSES
Witness List..................................................... 39
DeLisi, Matt, Ph.D., Professor and Coordinator, Criminal Justice
Studies, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa..................... 21
prepared statement........................................... 84
La Vigne, Nancy G., Ph.D., Director, Justice Policy Center, The
Urban
Institute, Washington, DC...................................... 28
prepared statement........................................... 69
Samuels, Charles E., Jr., Director, Federal Bureau of Prisons,
Washington, DC................................................. 7
prepared statement........................................... 40
Sedgwick, Jeffrey, Ph.D., Managing Partner and Co-Founder,
Keswick
Advisors, Richmond, Virginia................................... 30
prepared statement........................................... 95
Tilley, Hon. John, Chair, House Judiciary Committee, Kentucky
House of Representatives, Hopkinsville, Kentucky............... 26
prepared statement........................................... 53
Wetzel, John E., Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of
Corrections,
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania....................................... 24
prepared statement........................................... 49
QUESTIONS
Questions submitted to Matt DeLisi, Ph.D., by Senator Grassley... 111
Questions submitted to Nancy G. La Vigne, Ph.D., by:
Senator Blumenthal........................................... 108
Senator Grassley............................................. 112
Senator Whitehouse........................................... 123
Questions submitted to Charles E. Samuels, Jr., by:
Joint questions submitted by Senators Blumenthal and Leahy... 116
Senator Franken.............................................. 109
Senator Grassley............................................. 113
Follow-up questions submitted by Senator Leahy............... 119
Senator Sessions............................................. 122
Questions submitted to Jeffrey Sedgwick, Ph.D., by Senator
Grassley....................................................... 114
Questions submitted to Hon. John Tilley by Senator Whitehouse.... 124
Questions submitted to John E. Wetzel by:
Senator Grassley............................................. 115
Senator Whitehouse........................................... 125
ANSWERS
Responses of Matt DeLisi, Ph.D., to questions submitted by
Senator Grassley............................................... 126
Responses of Nancy G. La Vigne, Ph.D., to questions submitted by:
Senator Blumenthal........................................... 132
Senator Grassley............................................. 134
Senator Whitehouse........................................... 128
[Note: At the time of printing, after several attempts to obtain
responses to the written questions, the Committee had not
received any communication from Charles E. Samuels, Jr.]
Responses of Jeffrey Sedgwick, Ph.D., to questions submitted by
Senator Grassley............................................... 136
Responses of Hon. John Tilley to questions submitted by Senator
Whitehouse..................................................... 142
Responses of John E. Wetzel to questions submitted by:
Senator Grassley............................................. 141
Senator Whitehouse........................................... 140
MISCELLANEOUS SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Washington, DC, statement. 158
Arthur Liman Public Interest Program, Yale Law School, New Haven,
Connecticut, statement......................................... 145
Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), Washington, DC,
statement...................................................... 178
National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), Washington, DC,
statement...................................................... 155
Tierney, John, The New York Times, ``For Lesser Crimes,
Rethinking Life Behind Bars,'' December 11, 2012, article...... 182
Wall, A.T., ``Rhode Island Halts Growth in the Inmate Population
While Increasing Public Safety,'' article...................... 173
OVERSIGHT OF THE BUREAU OF PRISONS
AND COST-EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES
FOR REDUCING RECIDIVISM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2013
United States Senate
Committee on the Judiciary
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:03 a.m., in
Room SD-226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Sheldon
Whitehouse, presiding.
Present: Senators Whitehouse, Leahy, Durbin, Klobuchar,
Blumenthal, Hirono, Grassley, Sessions, and Lee.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND
Senator Whitehouse. The hearing will come to order. I am
very grateful that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee has
joined us, Chairman Leahy, as well as Senator Durbin of
Illinois and Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut. I am sure
others will join us. Senator Grassley will be joining us very
shortly, but he has important business in the Finance Committee
right down the hall, so he will be along as soon as he has
cleared that.
Welcome, everybody. Today's hearing is ``Oversight of the
Bureau of Prisons and Cost-Effective Strategies for Reducing
Recidivism.'' We will be exercising our legislative
responsibility to conduct oversight of the Bureau of Prisons,
but perhaps more importantly, we will be exploring with
Director Charles Samuels and with the second panel of witnesses
what can be done to improve our Federal corrections system so
that we better protect the public while reducing costs. This is
an area that has attracted broad and bipartisan interest within
our Committee, and I think there is real reason for optimism
about being able to legislate effectively in this area.
Continued growth in Federal spending on prisons and
detention poses a significant threat to all other Federal law
enforcement activities. During the last fiscal year, the costs
of detaining Federal inmates ate up more than 30 percent of the
Justice Department's budget. Since 2000, costs associated with
Federal prisons and detention have doubled. If nothing is done,
these costs will continue to consume an ever larger share of
the Department's budget, squeezing out other activities.
While spending on Federal prisons has continued to grow,
the system nevertheless remains dangerously over capacity. The
inmate-to-staff ratio in our Federal prisons has increased
significantly over the past decade, and each year we ask the
men and women who guard our prisons--who walk the toughest beat
in the State, as we say in Rhode Island--to do more with less.
If we let these trends continue, we will be putting these brave
men and women at serious and unnecessary risk.
Fortunately, States across the country have shown that it
is possible to rein in corrections costs while improving public
safety and reducing recidivism.
My home State of Rhode Island enjoys the leadership of A.T.
Wall, the Director of our Department of Corrections and the
dean of corrections directors around the country. With his
leadership, we enacted a package of reforms that increased
recidivism reduction programming, focused greater attention on
high-risk offenders, and expanded investments in successful
community reentry. As a result of these reforms, our State's
prison population declined for the first time in years.
Other States have had similar successes. Today we will hear
from witnesses from Pennsylvania and Kentucky who helped lead
their States in enacting and implementing significant reforms
of their corrections systems that cut costs while better
protecting the public.
These examples--and others from around the country--show
that it is time for the Federal Government to learn from these
States.
As a former State and Federal prosecutor, I recognize that
there are no easy solutions to this problem. Inmates in our
Federal prisons are there because they have committed serious
offenses and because the law enforcement officers across their
country did their jobs in seeing that they were arrested and
prosecuted. And we must never try to save money at the expense
of public safety.
But what the States have shown us is that it is possible to
cut prison costs while making the public safer--if we are
willing to be guided by what works.
To achieve this goal, we must be willing to look at all
aspects of our sentencing and corrections system:
We should be willing to reevaluate mandatory minimum
sentences, an area in which Chairman Leahy and Senator Paul and
Senator Durbin and Senator Lee have begun important work
together.
We should be willing to explore whether the Federal
Sentencing Guidelines are still working effectively nearly 30
years after they were first enacted.
We should ask whether we are doing enough to provide drug
and alcohol treatment for those inmates who need it and whether
we are collecting accurate information about substance abuse
and addiction from the pre-sentence report right through the
criminal justice process.
We should ask whether there is more to be done to prepare
inmates for reentering their communities and more to help the
communities with their reentry. In Rhode Island, under the
leadership of Director Wall, we passed reforms that allowed
inmates to earn credit toward their sentences if they were
willing to participate in programs that meaningfully reduced
their criminal risk factors.
And finally, we should ask if we can do a better job of
supervising ex-offenders after they are released. Many States,
led by Senator Hirono's home State of Hawaii's example, the
HOPE program, have implemented parole systems that impose
``swift and certain'' sanctions for violations of the terms of
supervision, with very promising results so far. So from the
pre-sentence report through post-release supervision, there is
room for improvement.
Let me conclude with one point that I think is not
debatable, and that is that doing nothing about this problem is
no longer an option. If we do nothing, we are choosing to let
the corrections budget take away from the FBI's ability to
disrupt terrorist groups. If we do nothing, we are allowing the
cost of corrections to prevent us from stopping the next
generation of cyber threats. We would be choosing to spend less
enforcing the Violence Against Women Act. We would be choosing
to give less to our partners in State and local law enforcement
agencies.
Those are not choices my colleagues wish to make. Those are
not smart choices. So I look forward to hearing from Director
Samuels and today's other witnesses and to working with the
Members of this Committee to address this critical issue.
I now recognize our Chairman, Patrick Leahy. Thank you,
sir.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. PATRICK J. LEAHY,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF VERMONT
Chairman Leahy. Thank you, and thank you, Chairman
Whitehouse. I will be brief. I will put my full statement in
the record because I agree so much with what Senator Whitehouse
has just said.
This is the second hearing this fall in which we have
turned our attention to the unsustainable growth in the Federal
prison population, with a 700-percent increase, I believe, in
the last 30 years. And that means the Bureau of Prisons' budget
takes more and more of the resources from the Department of
Justice. We are losing prosecutors. We are losing agents
necessary to investigate and charge crimes. We are cutting
support for critical work with our local and State law
enforcement.
I think the main drivers of this prison growth are front-
end sentencing laws that were enacted by us in Congress, like
the proliferation of mandatory minimum sentences. I am hoping
that many, including the people who voted for those, are
looking at it now in retrospect and realize it was a bad
mistake. And I am committed to addressing sentencing reform
this year, and I am pleased by the fact that both Republicans
and Democrats are joining in that effort. It is a problem that
Congress created, but it is also a problem that Congress can
fix, and it is high time we do so. And I think public safety
demands that we do so.
We can also do such things as change the calculation on
good time credit to the 54 days a year which Congress intended
instead of the 47 days that BOP actually credits. That is a
change that I included in the Second Chance Reauthorization
Act, and I believe, Senator Whitehouse, you are going to be
doing that in some of your legislation.
I want to find out what is being done on programs to reduce
recidivism. I know it is an interest shared by Members of this
Committee--Senators Whitehouse, Senator Cornyn, and others.
More than 90 percent of Federal inmates are going to be
released at some time back to our communities. What chance do
they have to make it in the community when they are released?
Last, and one of the main reasons I also wanted to be here,
is, Director Samuels, just to say publicly to you, I want to
thank you for the prompt attention to concerns that I have
raised and Senator Blumenthal and others have raised regarding
the proposed closing of the only secure facility for female
inmates in the Northeast. I understand you have taken those
concerns to heart, and I want to thank you for that. I know
that people in my State of Vermont thank you, and Senator
Blumenthal, who has raised this question, certainly will.
So I will put my full statement in the record. As I told
Senator Whitehouse, I am supposed to be at another hearing, but
thank you for doing this. It is a subject we have to talk
about--and, Director Samuels, thank you for your service.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Leahy appears as a
submission for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Chairman Leahy.
I now turn to our distinguished Ranking Member, Senator
Grassley.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHUCK GRASSLEY,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF IOWA
Senator Grassley. I always welcome the opportunity to have
oversight of the Justice Department. It is a very important
function of this Committee, and the Bureau of Prisons, of
course, is a large component of the Department's budget. And,
of course, the Bureau's work is very, very important.
We all know with the budget deficits we have that the
Federal Government spends too much money, so it is nice to have
this administration find some places to save money. But the
Bureau of Prisons is one of the few places where they are
trying to do that.
We should be very careful about any action we take in
changing sentencing laws, whether based on cost or other
concerns. It is hard to think of another example of a more
successful domestic policy accomplishment over the past 30
years than the reduction of crime rates that we have had. This
policy was achieved through multiple policy changes: policing
techniques, prison construction, longer sentences, and many
others that I will not name.
Crime rates are now at their lowest level in 50 years. Many
people have earned the right to be proud of these results. At
the same time, we must remember that these were hard-won gains,
and I am concerned that we are hearing many of the same kind of
voices that headed us toward greater crime starting back in the
1960s.
For instance, we hear that prisoners should have their
sentences retroactively reduced. We heard that mandatory
minimum sentences should be eliminated, that we should no
longer have truth in sentencing, that fewer drug prosecutions
should be pursued, that all of these proposals would save money
and not raise crime. Obviously I am skeptical. Reducing prison
sentences will bring prisoners out in the streets sooner. The
deterrent effect of imprisonment would be reduced. Many so-
called nonviolent drug offenders happen to have violent
records. Some of these released offenders will commit
additional crimes. Somehow cost analyses of the Bureau of
Prisons do not include costs to victims, including injuries,
economic losses, psychological and emotional harms.
One organization represented here today notes that most
prison costs are fixed, and the real costs of adding or
subtracting an inmate is closer to $10,000 than the $25,000
figure that is often used. That changes the calculus as well.
The cries for increased judicial discretion are actually_cover
language for leniency, and too many judges are already too
lenient. They can do serious damage.
I note here the Second Circuit's unanimous ruling last week
that a district judge had violated judicial ethics in her zeal
to issue rulings against successful crime reduction practices
that led to increased imprisonment. Rather than contemplate her
rebuke for multiple actions and changing course away from the
apparent bias, I regret that this district judge quickly issued
a press release statement contending that she had done nothing
wrong.
Of course, we welcome State officials who will testify
today. We can always consider what States are doing, but State
and Federal offenders often have committed different kinds of
crimes. What works in one context may not work in the other. We
also need to proceed with caution because as States are letting
more prisoners out earlier, crime rates are rising.
It is too early to fully establish the causes of this
increase in crime, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics just
announced that property and violent crime rates rose
significantly in 2012. The violent crime rate rose from 22.6
victimizations per 1,000 in 2011 to 26.1 in 2012. The rate of
property crimes rose 10 percent in 1 year.
Funds are not unlimited. I would be willing to examine some
balanced mix of sentencing reforms. It is well worth
considering releasing very sick prisoners or prisoners of such
advanced age or other situations as to be assessed as a very
low risk to commit new crimes. But leniency for the sake of
leniency is ill advised. It is an especially bad idea as crime
rates are rising, as we see in the last couple years.
I look forward to today's hearing. Thank you.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you, Senator Grassley.
Senator Durbin, would you like to make an opening
statement? Senator Sessions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JEFF SESSIONS,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ALABAMA
Senator Sessions. Mr. Chairman, thank you, and this is an
important subject. Mr. Samuels and I have talked before. I
believe in terms of cost we spend too much per prisoner in the
Federal system. It is more than 2 times what the average States
are probably spending on their prisons, number one.
Number two, we have had an increase in violent crime rates,
and my sense is with the budget difficulties the last 3 or 4
years, States where maybe 90 percent of the prisoners are
confronted by the criminal justice system are softening their
punishments, and the Federal Government sort of sets the
standard and leads sometimes in those issues.
Senator Durbin and I did work together on legislation to
ease some of the sentences for crack and other penalties,
really, so I think we took a step in the right direction. But
Senator Grassley is correct. We have seen a substantial
increase in crime, 15 percent violent crime last year, and the
fact is that long-term sustained reduction in crime in America
from the consistent violent times of the 1970s when I was a
young prosecutor to half that today. The murder rate is half
what it was. A lot of that is driven by the fact that there are
not that many people who commit murders. Not that many people
commit rapes. And the more of those who are in jail, the fewer
murders and rapes you are going to have. That is just fact. And
people do not need to go back to the time when we do not think
realistically about the value of prison in terms of reducing
crime.
And with regard to recidivism, Mr. Chairman, I think some
programs work better than others, but anybody that knows
anything about the criminal justice system over a long period
of time knows there is no cure, no plan yet ever devised, but
someone always has something they say will change the course of
criminal history, but it has not happened yet, and we have
tried thousands of different programs.
So we have got to be modest achievement in reducing
recidivism; 10, 15 percent is worthy of us giving great
consideration to. But these ideas and promotions that we are
going to have 50 percent or 60 percent reduction in crime, you
are going to have to prove it to me, because I have been
watching this for over 30 years, and it is not happening in any
program I have seen. If it would, I am for it.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Whitehouse. I appreciate it, Senator Sessions.
Senator Klobuchar, do you care to make an opening
statement?
Senator Klobuchar. No. I am actually looking very forward
to hearing our witness, so thank you.
Senator Whitehouse. Senator Lee. Senator Blumenthal.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
Senator Blumenthal. Just to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for
having this hearing, and to respond briefly to the remarks made
by the Senator from Alabama. Between the two of us, I think
perhaps we have close to 70 years in the justice system, and I
want to agree with him that in an ideal world we would, first
of all, have no crime; but, second, treat criminals without
regard to the dollar cost. But there are very severe dollar
costs to incarceration. In fact, the cost of incarcerating an
individual is now in excess of what it costs to send a young
person to college in many universities across the country, and
I would just point out that many States are taking very
innovative and important steps toward reducing their prison
populations in part because of wiser incarceration policies.
And I hope we can explore some of those policies with the
Bureau of Prisons here so that we keep dangerous people in
prison, the ones who are likely to recommit serious and harmful
crimes, physically dangerous people, and at the same time work
to rehabilitate them. And I am going to be focused on the
recent decision of the Federal correctional institution at
Danbury, which unfortunately a number of us had to stop, which
would have resulted in transfers of women prisoners away from
their families, which in my view is bad prison policy. No
matter how long people are kept in prison, they should be
nearer to their children, especially if they are mothers of
those children, and nearer to their families. And I am glad
that we were able to prevail with the help of the Attorney
General in changing that decision. I want to thank the Director
of the Bureau of Prisons for his wisdom in doing so, and I look
forward to asking him questions about other prisons and other
prisoners and what can be done to keep them nearer to their
persons, whether they are women or men.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you.
Senator Hirono, do you care to make an opening statement?
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MAZIE HIRONO,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF HAWAII
Senator Hirono. Very briefly, Mr. Chairman. Prison
overcrowding is a huge issue at both the Federal and State
level, so thank you for this hearing. And I will be very
interested in hearing from our witnesses what we can do
regarding the front end that has to do with sentencing and at
the back end, because the recidivism is another major issue, so
front-end and back-end issues relating to prison overcrowding.
Thank you.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you.
Mr. Samuels, would you stand to be sworn? Do you affirm
that the testimony you are about to give before this Committee
will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
Mr. Samuels. I do.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you and welcome.
Charles E. Samuels, Jr., is our Director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons, a position he has held since December 2011.
As Director, he is responsible for the oversight and management
of all Federal Bureau of Prisons institutions and for the
safety and security of thousands of inmates under the agency's
jurisdiction. Prior to his appointment, he served as the
Assistant Director of the Correctional Programs Division, where
he oversaw all inmate management and program functions,
including intelligence and counterterrorism initiatives, case
management, community corrections, mental health, and religious
services. Director Samuels began his career at the Bureau of
Prisons as a corrections officer in 1988. We are pleased to
have him.
Please proceed, Director Samuels.
STATEMENT OF CHARLES E. SAMUELS, JR., DIRECTOR,
FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. Samuels. Good morning, Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking
Member Grassley, and Members of the Committee. I am pleased to
appear before you today to discuss the Federal Bureau of
Prisons.
I cannot begin without acknowledging that this past
February, the Bureau suffered tragic losses with the murders of
two of our staff. Officer Eric Williams, from the United States
Penitentiary in Canaan, Pennsylvania, was stabbed to death by
an inmate while working in a housing unit. Lieutenant Osvaldo
Albarati was shot and killed while driving home from the
Metropolitan Detention Center in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. We will
always honor the memories of these two law enforcement
officers, and their loss underscores the dangers the Bureau
staff face on a daily basis.
I know we all share a commitment to our Nation's criminal
justice system. We are proud of the role we play in supporting
the Department of Justice public safety efforts. But we
understand that incarceration is only one aspect of the overall
mission. I am sure you share my concerns about the increasing
costs associated with operating the Nation's largest
correctional system. Those costs make up one-quarter of the DOJ
budget. We are optimistic the Attorney General's ``Smart on
Crime'' initiative will reduce the Federal population in the
years ahead.
I know that several of you have bills that have the
potential to possibly impact the Bureau's population and
crowding through sentencing reform and sentence credit
incentives. I appreciate your work and your interest in this
important topic, and I look forward to working with you going
forward.
The Bureau of Prisons is responsible for the incarceration
of over 219,000 inmates. Our prisons are crowded, averaging 36
percent more inmates than they were designed to house. We are
most concerned about the 52 percent crowding at higher security
facilities and 45 percent crowding at medium security
facilities. I am grateful for the support Congress recently
provided to activate new facilities in Berlin, New Hampshire;
Hazelton, West Virginia; Yazoo City, Mississippi; and
Aliceville, Alabama. When fully activated, these facilities
will assist with reducing overall crowding rates by about 4
percent.
I know you have expressed a great deal of interest in the
mission change at FCI Danbury. This change will decrease
crowding from 48 percent to 23 percent in low-security female
facilities and from 38 percent to 36 percent in low-security
male facilities, while also bringing many women and men closer
to their homes.
Reentry is a critical part of public safety. Our approach
in the Bureau of Prisons is that reentry begins on the first
day of incarceration. Preparation for release includes
treatment, education, job skills training, and more that takes
place throughout an inmate's term.
Over the past 20 years, there has been a significant
evolution and expansion of our inmate reentry program. Several
of our most significant programs are proven to reduce
recidivism. Federal Prison Industries, or FPI, is one of our
most important programs. FPI participants are 24 percent less
likely to recidivate than non-participating inmates. We were
recently given new authorities to seek repatriated work and to
pursue potential projects under the Prison Industries
Enhancement Certification Program for FPI, and we are working
diligently to maximize these opportunities.
We currently have more than 450 inmates working on
repatriation projects. We agree with many experts that inmates
must be triaged to assess risk and to determine appropriate
programming to reduce such risk.
High-risk offenders are our first priority for treatment as
they pose the greatest public safety risk when released from
our custody. The safety of staff, inmates, and the public are
our highest priorities. I have made several recent changes to
Bureau operations that will help us enhance safety and
security. Let me highlight some recent advantages.
We expanded the availability of pepper spray for our staff
to use in emergency situations at all high-security prisons,
detention centers, and jails. We have developed plans to add an
additional correctional officer to each high-security housing
unit during evening and weekend shifts using our existing
resources. We have made significant advances in reviewing and
reducing our use of restrictive housing, and we are expanding
residential drug abuse programming.
The mission of the Bureau of Prisons is challenging, but
maintaining high levels of security and ensuring inmates are
actively participating in evidence-based reentry programs, we
serve and protect society.
Chairman Whitehouse, this concludes my formal statement. I
thank the Members of the Committee for your continued support,
and I would be happy to answer any questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Samuels appears as a
submission for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you, Director Samuels. You said
in your testimony that reentry should begin the first day,
reentry planning should begin the first day. What further
steps, in addition to what you are already undertaking, do you
think would be most helpful for this Committee to consider?
Mr. Samuels. Mr. Chairman, I think the next steps for the
Committee to consider, as I have stated in written testimony
and in my oral statement, we are doing everything possible when
inmates enter our system to begin the reentry process, and it
is not just something that should start from the initial onset
and stop. It needs to continue throughout their entire term of
incarceration.
Since 1980, our population has exploded. In 1980, we had
approximately 26,400 inmates in our care, 10,000 staff to
manage that population, and only 41 institutions at that time.
As of to date, as I have indicated, our population is at
219,000. We have approximately 38,000 staff. That is an
increase of 830 percent just with the inmate population alone.
Safety and security is very, very important to manage a
correctional facility. We are utilizing staff who have been
hired to provide programming, in some cases, to provide
security, because security is paramount to ensure that you have
an environment where you can provide the appropriate
programming. And we are on a path of unsustainability, and it
is a significant issue that I think everyone needs to be
concerned about, because the men and women who work for the
Bureau of Prisons, who are dedicated law enforcement officers,
are putting their lives on the line every single day.
We believe that reentry is very, very important because it
is a significant part of our mission. Our mission is not just
to warehouse individuals, but to ensure that we are providing
them everything necessary when ultimately they are released.
Ninety-five percent of the inmates in our care will at some
point in time be released back to communities.
Reentry is also important because for us to manage these
individuals, we have to ensure that we are actively ensuring
that they are engaged in programs within the institution, and
this is accomplished by our reentry efforts.
I can report that, despite all the challenges we have faced
over the last 30 years, we are at a point where 80 percent of
the inmates who are released from the Bureau of Prisons do not
recidivate within 3 years. And I give credit to the staff who
are working under these difficult situations and at the same
time ensuring that we are maintaining safe, secure facilities
for the American public.
So if any consideration could be given, I think it is
looking at the growth that we have no control over. As you all
are aware, the Bureau of Prisons, we do not control the number
of inmates who enter the system. We have no control over their
sentence limit. But what we do have a duty and an obligation to
do is to ensure that for those individuals who are ultimately
released do not return to prison, because on average about
45,000 inmates are released back into the communities. And with
the recidivism issues and concerns, I tell our staff day in and
day out that it is up to us to do what we can control and it is
making sure we provide effective programs so they do not
return.
Senator Whitehouse. Is one of them the Residential Drug
Abuse Program? The Residential Drug Abuse Program, do you--tell
me a little bit about that and how effective you believe that
is and how it fits into the improvement of non-recidivism upon
reentry?
Mr. Samuels. Yes. The Residential Drug Abuse Program is
modeled after our cognitive behavioral therapy model that
research has shown, with experts looking at this, that it does
reduce recidivism as well as relapse. And so within the Bureau
we have been very, very successful with RDAP.
We have taken it a step further. We have used the cognitive
behavioral therapy model to place programs throughout the
Bureau for other segments of our population. I will give you an
example. We have a challenge program that also uses CBT for
high-security inmates. We have a BRAVE program that we use for
young male inmates. We have a Resolve program that is very
beneficial for female offenders who have experienced traumatic
incidents within their life. We have the sex offender treatment
program, which is also very successful. And for chronically
mentally ill inmates, we have a Step-Down program, we have a
Stages program that we utilize for individuals who are
suffering from paranoid issues, and overall we believe that
this is very important. We have to continue to do it. But the
challenge is with the resources and focusing on high-risk need
offenders, and we have to ensure that that is where we are
putting the focus for the efforts that we have put in place.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you, Director.
Senator Grassley.
Senator Grassley. Thank you, Mr. Samuels, for being here,
and thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have testimony before us that
25 percent of the Federal prisoners are foreign citizens.
Anyone who is concerned about reducing prison costs should make
lowering that number a priority. What can your agency do, the
Bureau do more effectively to use the International Prisoner
Transfer Program to make more of the foreign citizens serve
their sentences in their home countries rather than at U.S.
taxpayer expense?
Mr. Samuels. Thank you, Senator Grassley, for this
question. As you stated, 25 percent of our population comprises
non-U.S. citizens. That number equates to 55,000 criminal
aliens in our population. And we have a Treaty Transfer Program
that we are actively using, and there is room to ensure that we
are increasing the numbers as far as the participants for the
program. We are reaching out throughout the Bureau to ensure
that our staff are explaining this program in its entirety to
the inmates who would benefit from being removed from within
the Bureau of Prisons and given an opportunity to serve their
time through the agreements that we have with the international
community where the agreements are in place. And that would, in
effect, as you have stated, give us some cost reductions within
our population.
Senator Grassley. One way to reduce prison crowding is to
build more prisons. Congress has authorized building four
additional Federal prisons. At the same time the Federal
Government bought a State prison in Thompson, Illinois, and is
spending additional money to renovate it. I would like to know
the current status of Thompson Prison and what is the amount of
the money being spent on it. And then, last, so it is really a
three-part question: Is the spending on Thompson slowing down
the opening of the four additional prisons that have been
authorized and their status?
Mr. Samuels. Okay. The current four facilities that we have
that are in the activation process, the purchase of the
Thompson facility has not in any way impeded our progress in
moving forward to activate the facilities that you make
reference to. We have the New Hampshire facility as well as the
facility at Aliceville, Alabama. We have hired the staff, which
we are continuing to hire, and we are also gradually moving
forward to build the population for the institutions.
The facilities that are still pending for full activation,
which we have the facility at Hazelton, West Virginia, and the
penitentiary in Yazoo City, and at this point we are trying to
hire, and hopefully, depending on funding that will potentially
hopefully be provided in Fiscal Year 2014, we would be put in a
situation to determine how soon we can move inmates into the
facility for activation.
For the Thompson facility, I can assure you there has
always been great need within the Bureau of Prisons for this
type of facility. We have not in the Bureau of Prisons brought
on any type of high-security ADX beds similar to what we have
in ADX Colorado since 1994. If you looked at our population in
1994 compared to where we are today, these beds are premium. We
have had to do our best with limited resources to prioritize
the inmates that we place at the ADX. So I am looking forward
to being able to fully activate the Thompson facility because,
as I mentioned, at the high-security level, with crowding
within the Bureau of Prisons, we are facing significant
challenges that are ultimately putting our staff at risk,
putting the inmates at risk, and the community at risk. So we
desperately need those beds.
Senator Grassley. Can you submit a figure that is being
spent on Thompson Prison in writing?
Mr. Samuels. Yes, sir.
Senator Grassley. Thank you.
[The information referred to appears as a submission for
the record.]
Senator Grassley. My last question. Twenty-five percent of
the Federal prisoners are gang Members. Prisoners can more
easily maintain their ties to crime if they are gang Members.
That can make prisons more dangerous and make it harder for
inmates to avoid committing new crimes when they are released.
What specifically does your agency do to reduce gang
Membership in prisons? And is Membership so high because
prisoners who did not previously belong to gangs join them
after they are in prison?
Mr. Samuels. Thank you. Within the Bureau of Prisons,
which, as you have acknowledged, we do have a significant
number of gang Members, many of these individuals long before
entering the prison system have gang affiliation, and this is
one of the reasons why the unsustainability for safety and
security within our facilities with the large numbers that we
are dealing with, we have had to put innovative strategies in
place to target these individuals.
We are able to manage and maintain control by using the
number of prisons that we have to spread out influence. The
Bureau of Prisons for well over 30 years has used a risk
assessment tool, and with this assessment tool, we look at
criminogenic factors, which being a gang member would fall
within static, which is a factor where you cannot change it.
And we have dynamic factors that we also weigh in because gang
Membership, misconduct, criminal history, these are good
predictors of institution misconduct as well as recidivism.
So by targeting and looking at these individuals' history,
and particularly those who have gang affiliation, we are doing
everything that we can to get these individuals involved in
evidence-based programs to ensure that we are trying to at
least explore with them alternatives with their criminal
thinking to put them on the right path to move away from any
belief that they need to belong to a gang, especially within
the correctional environment, because it is our responsibility
to protect these individuals, and they should not believe for a
moment that they should join a gang for any type of safety. And
that is why command and control within the prison system is
very important to defuse those types of issues.
Senator Whitehouse. Senator Durbin.
Senator Grassley. Mr. Chairman, I have to go down to
Finance, and I will come back for the second round.
Senator Whitehouse. Very well.
Senator Grassley. Thank you.
Senator Durbin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Before he leaves,
I want to thank Senator Grassley for his shared interest in the
Thompson Federal Prison. We both realize that this is going to
create good-paying jobs for people living in his home State of
Iowa and my home State of Illinois, and, as you said, is going
to lessen the overcrowding and provide critical beds that are
necessary for the protection of the men and women of your
Bureau who work so hard. And I thank Senator Grassley for those
questions. I thought that he took away some of my thunder here
on that Thompson Prison.
Director Samuels, it has been a little over a year, maybe a
year and a few months, since we had a hearing that you attended
in this room relative to solitary confinement segregation and
the impact it has on people serving time in prison. We had many
witnesses before us, including a man who had spent more than 10
years on death row in isolation in Texas. He came to testify
before us. I will never forget his testimony as long as I live.
It was heart-breaking, and it reflected the fact that many of
the people in segregation in an isolation situation 23 hours a
day in a cell, 1 hour by themselves outside, ultimately many of
them will come out of that prison, and the question is: What is
left of them after they have gone through that life experience?
We had testimony at that hearing from the Director of
Corrections from the State of Mississippi, and he talked about
an assessment Mississippi had done after suicides in these
circumstances in which they concluded they were wasting money
with more and more isolation and segregation. And Mississippi,
the Director of Corrections there, really was a leader in
saying we are going to change this. We can save money, we can
keep everyone safe in a prison, and we can avoid these terrible
outcomes, the mental degradation of people who are faced with
isolation and segregation.
I asked you at the time whether you believe that putting
people in segregation or separate facilities had any ultimate
impact on their mental health, and you demurred, as we say in
law school, from answering. I would have said yes, clearly yes,
but you demurred. But to your credit, you said, ``I will look
at this situation for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.''
So now I would like to ask you two things. What have you
done in over a year? And, number two, what can we look forward
to? Is there a way for us to save money, not degrade the mental
condition of those who are put in isolation, and still protect
the men and women who serve in the Bureau of Prisons?
Mr. Samuels. Thank you, Senator Durbin, and I do want to
commend you on taking the lead on this very, very important
issue. When I attended the hearing in June 2012, it was a very
significant issue for the Bureau, and I would also say for this
Nation, because I have had many conversations with my peers in
the field of corrections, directors and secretaries, relative
to this issue.
Since the hearing at the time, there were well over 13,500
individuals in some form of restrictive housing within the
Bureau of Prisons, and I can report today that the number is
now approximately 9,300-plus. So we have had a significant
reduction in that area. And what we have done throughout this
agency is put a focus on the issues relative to restrictive
housing. I have had many conversations with the senior leaders
within this agency, specifically the wardens who are
responsible for the day-to-day operations of our prisons, and
stressed the fact that we have to be just as aggressive getting
individuals out when we put them in restrictive housing, and
realizing that we only use it when absolutely necessary, which
for the men and women, to include the inmates in our
institutions, we always must keep the focus on safety and
security.
We have some very dangerous inmates in our system, as I
know you are aware, and we have to ensure that we are
protecting everyone in the correctional environment. But at the
same time, we have a duty and an obligation, as you have
mentioned, to ensure that when we are placing individuals in
restrictive housing, that we are maintaining the highest level
of quality care relative to their physical as well as mental
health.
Senator Durbin. I am sorry to interrupt you, but I only
have a few seconds left, and I would like to ask a question, a
pointed question on a different topic. We spend somewhere
between $1.5 million a year to $2 million for each and every
inmate being held at Guantanamo, $1.5 million plus a year. What
is the maximum amount per inmate cost at, say, Florence,
Colorado, our highest-security Federal prison?
Mr. Samuels. Per inmate?
Senator Durbin. Per inmate, annual cost.
Mr. Samuels. For the complex, it would be equal to
approximately $75 per day, and it varies from facility, but if
we look at it specifically for the----
Senator Durbin. And that is the highest-level maximum
security prison in the Bureau of Prisons system?
Mr. Samuels. Yes, sir.
Senator Durbin. Has anyone ever escaped from there?
Mr. Samuels. No, sir.
Senator Durbin. Thank you very much, Director.
Senator Whitehouse. Senator Sessions.
Senator Sessions. What is the average cost per inmate in
the Federal penitentiary?
Mr. Samuels. The average annual cost, $29,000 a year.
Senator Sessions. Alabama would be less than half of that,
which is a low-cost State, but a lot of other States are much
less. And I think we invest a lot of money because the Federal
Government wants to have the highest and best prison system and
benefit the prisoners the most we can. But I do think we have
to look at that cost figure. Other States are just not costing
that much.
With regard to the 25 percent that are foreign born that
are in prison, those do not include the people being detained
in immigration institutions for deportation. These are
individuals who have been tried by a Federal judge for some
sort of crime like drugs or assaults of that kind. Is that
correct?
Mr. Samuels. Yes, sir. We have more than 100,000
individuals in our custody who have been sentenced for drugs,
which 77,000 are U.S. citizens and 23,000 criminal aliens.
Senator Sessions. I noticed in your numbers I have here
that the prison population went up about 2,000 between 2012 and
2013. At least that was the projected increase. That would be
about a 1-percent increase, which is below the population
increase. So at this point, we are not seeing a surge of
prisoners above the normal population increase in the country,
are we?
Mr. Samuels. Senator Sessions, I am glad that you raised
this point. For Fiscal Year 2013, we had a net gain of 611
inmates, and although the number appears to be small compared
to recent years where we have been averaging 6,000-plus
inmates, you have to realize that at the same time we processed
within the Bureau of Prisons well over 70,000 inmates, which
these are individuals who have to go through screening for
physical and mental health and everything else that it takes to
manage that large-scale number of inmates going into our
system. And when you look at the overall trend, even for a 10-
year period, we have had a 40-percent increase. So the 611
continues to demonstrate that we are having more and more
inmates, and we are not planning at this point to build any new
prisons. So 600----
Senator Sessions. When you say more and more, it is a net
600 increase, though, right?
Mr. Samuels. The net is 611, and even with that number, you
are still looking at a third of a prison. So we have to take
those 611, and we are put in a situation right now throughout
this country where we are triple-bunking.
Senator Sessions. I just would say to my colleagues I think
there is a decline in Federal and State incarceration rates
from the time 1981 when I was made United States Attorney. In
the early 1980s, this Congress, Senator Kennedy and Senators
Thurmond, Leahy, Biden, Grassley, Hatch did the mandatory
sentencing, eliminated parole, had the mandatory sentencing
provisions, and it was a revolution in prison and in
prosecution. I saw it before and after. States began to follow
mandatory sentences. We have seen a decline in murder rates by
one-half. People in the 1970s were constantly fearful of their
homes being burglarized, being assaulted, their cars broken
into, all kinds. And you just have seen this rather substantial
improvement.
So all I would say to our colleagues is there is no doubt
in my mind that moving from a revolving door where people would
come in and they would be given probation and then they would
be released on bail for the second, third, and fourth offense
and tried another year later, and given probation again, too
often this was driving the crime rate.
So we achieved a lot, and that is why I was willing to
support and work with Senator Durbin to maybe reduce some of
the mandatory sentences, because I think we can be smarter
about it. I do not have any doubt we can be smarter about it.
But it would be naive and a big error if we were to think we
can just walk away from incarcerating dangerous people. You are
worried for your guards. You are talking about gangs and your
guards. A lot of the people are just dangerous, and we have
just got to be real careful about that.
And I think we need to watch the cost. The Federal prison
system cannot be the greatest system, most expensive in the
whole world--which it is. We just cannot--we have got to look
for ways to reduce cost, and we have got to be cautious about
adopting the belief that there has been some new recidivism
program that is going to solve the recidivism rate. If we can
reduce it even a little bit, I am willing to support a good
program. But a lot of the programs just have never produced the
results we would want them to have. The recidivism rate today
is not a lot different than it was in 1980, I do not think. And
so we are spending a lot more on it, trying to make it better,
and we had a very successful achievement there.
Finally, you and I have talked at Prison Industries. There
is no doubt in my mind that people who work in prison prefer
it. Prisoners who have work programs are safer, are they not,
Mr. Samuels?
Mr. Samuels. Yes, sir.
Senator Sessions. I think the data shows that clearly. And
they probably have a little better recidivist rate. I do not
know.
Mr. Samuels. They do.
Senator Sessions. But we have got to have a breakthrough.
More people in prison need to be working. The American people
understand this. There have been a lot of attempts, some of
them not very smart, to help prisoners work. But I really
believe all of us need to look for a way to have more
productive work in prisons.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you, Senator Sessions.
Senator Klobuchar.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thanks for holding this hearing. I appreciated Senator
Sessions' comments about the smart sentencing, and as a former
prosecutor, I know how we need to keep dangerous offenders
behind bars. My State has one of the lowest incarceration rates
in the country, but we also have one of the lowest crime rates.
And part of that is triaging these cases and making sure there
is some response to low-level offenses, escalating responses.
But the length of it can be the matter of dispute, and I think
that is part of what we are talking about here.
I came through this, looking at our State, which sometimes
people joke we are not just the Land of 10,000 Lakes. We are
the Land of 10,000 Treatment Centers. But our focus on going
after addiction and some of these things I think has made a
difference in the handling of these cases, and in particular
drug courts. Drug cases made up about a third of our caseload
in the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, which had a
population in Hennepin County of over 1 million people,
Minneapolis, 45 suburbs, 400 employees. And we really focused a
lot on drug courts.
Now, I made some changes when I got in there. I think
Senator Sessions would have liked some of them. I took some of
the cases out that had guns with them, some of the more violent
cases, because I did not think they belonged there. And I think
it actually strengthened the drug court and the use of the drug
courts.
You know the stats, Director. Three out of every four
people who graduate from these programs are not arrested again.
Seventy-five percent success rate compared to 30 percent in the
traditional system. Saving taxpayers dollars, an average of
$6,000 per person. And I asked Attorney General Holder at our
last DOJ oversight hearing about expanding the use of drug
courts at the Federal level, and so that is what I wanted to
start with, with you, how you see this could work and how we
could more effectively lower costs, better rehabilitate
offenders, and then also reduce our crime rates like we have
seen in our State.
Mr. Samuels. Thank you, Senator. I do agree with the drug
treatment programs. They do work. We see a lot of benefit just
from the behavior that we are quick to witness with the inmates
who participate in the programs. Internally within the Bureau,
we have the Residential Drug Abuse Program as well as the non-
residential, and we also offer drug education in all of our
institutions.
As far as a policy issue relative to drug courts, I am not
the expert for those types of discussions, and I definitely
know that within the Department there are many individuals who
are more appropriate to have those discussions on policy issues
for the Department that could eventually benefit any
reductions, you know, with our population on the front end as
well as the back end.
Senator Klobuchar. But you do see it as a way, with now the
advent of some Federal drugs courts, of reducing some of the
numbers in the prison?
Mr. Samuels. I believe the evidence shows that that is very
possible.
Senator Klobuchar. Now, you mentioned the Residential Drug
Abuse Program and how that has proven effective in reducing
recidivism and decreasing institutional misconduct. How many
inmates are enrolled in the program? What kind of return on
investment do we get?
Mr. Samuels. For inmates who participate in the Residential
Drug Abuse Program, for every dollar we invest, there is a
$2.60 savings. And the total number of individuals we have
participating in residential drug abuse program treatment right
now is 16,000 inmates. And we would like to see that number
increase, which we, again, as I have stated, know that it is
very productive. So our overall plan is to increase the number
of programs we have so we can have the maximum number of
inmates participating.
Senator Klobuchar. What is your view on awarding inmates
good time credits for participating in the intensive recidivism
reduction programs or increasing the number of opportunities
for inmates to earn these credits through education or
vocational programs?
Mr. Samuels. The Department as well as the administration
have continued to support these legislative proposals. I
definitely concur and believe that they are important. When you
look at the additional 7 days of good conduct time that can be
added to an inmate's credit for time off their sentence--
because right now they are receiving 47 days--it is very
beneficial to the safety and security of the facility, and it
is not where an inmate would be rewarded something for not
having good behavior, and it helps us.
For the inmates, we believe we can ultimately get a large
number of inmates to participate in evidence-based programs to
receive up to 60 days off of their term by participating in
more than 180 days within a calendar year, the programs that
you mentioned. We believe it is beneficial, and it definitely
ultimately helps with public safety, because the majority of
these inmates are going to be released, and being exposed to
these cognitive behavioral therapy programs only enhances
safety.
Senator Klobuchar. Just one last question. In your
testimony you acknowledge the tragic deaths of two Federal
Bureau of Prisons employees, Officer Eric Williams and
Lieutenant Osvaldo Albarati, and I know all of us extend our
sympathy to their families. What do you think can be done to
improve safety for prison staff while on or off duty?
Mr. Samuels. What we need to do to improve safety of our
staff, it comes down to a resource issue. We are doing more
with less, and the staff are very proud to take on the mission
because this is why they have elected to serve this country by
working in corrections. But when you are dealing with large
numbers on any given day throughout this country, we have one
officer working in our housing units providing oversight for
150-plus inmates. We have recreation specialists who are doing
their best to ensure that inmates are actively involved with
recreational activities, and you can have in excess of 500
inmates being supervised by one person.
So we are doing everything that we can to put the resources
where they need to be, but you can only imagine if there is any
type of disturbance within the institutions and you only have a
small number of staff to respond, the staff are putting their
lives on the line every single day. And this is why the
programs are very important, and we believe it is, you know, up
to us to do what we can with the limited resources in the
capacity that we have to maximize the situation, to put us in
the best possible situation to effectively manage our prisons.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much.
Senator Whitehouse. Senator Lee.
Senator Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr.
Samuels, for joining us today.
As I have expressed many times on previous occasions, in my
view the Federal Government has been for decades enacting and
subsequently enforcing far too much substantive criminal law.
As a result of that, our Federal prison system is overcrowded,
and it is extremely costly.
As we have heard today, the Bureau of Prisons consumes a
very significant share of the overall budget of the U.S.
Department of Justice, using resources that might otherwise be
used more effectively in other areas to enhance public safety
in the United States.
Although long mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses
do not tell the whole story of the increasing overcrowded
Federal prison population, I think they do share a very
significant part of the problem of overcrowding, and I think we
have to look very closely at our current scheme of mandatory
minimum sentences as a result. And I think we have to do that
to see whether incremental changes can safely and effectively
be made to these sentences to reduce the Federal prison
population and to reduce costs while at the same time
preserving, if not enhancing, public safety in America.
The legislation that I have cosponsored with Senator
Durbin, the Smarter Sentencing Act, S. 1410, would decrease
mandatory minimum sentences for certain categories of drug
offenders. So my first question for you, Mr. Samuels, is
whether this type of legislation, should it succeed, as it is
widely expected to do if it were passed, in helping to decrease
the Federal prison population over the next few years, over the
decade or so following its enactment, what would that do for
you? What would that do for the Bureau of Prisons as far as
making it easier for you to do your job if we succeeded in
reducing the overcrowding problem?
Mr. Samuels. Thank you, Senator Lee, and I would start by
saying that I agree that reform needs to take place. The
specifics of the various bills that are being considered is
something that, again, needs to be considered by the
appropriate individuals within the Department relative to
policy issues.
To your question, what would it do to help the Bureau of
Prisons, any reduction within our population that ensures that
there is no threat to public safety obviously helps us
effectively run our institutions. And we are not dealing with
the competitive issues within the people when you are trying to
do as much as you can to stretch resources within the
environment, because the increase within the population, which
research shows that when you continue to add more and more
inmates, the propensity for violence increases, and this puts
our staff and the inmates, to include the surrounding
communities where our institutions are located, at risk.
Senator Lee. Two of your biggest concerns I would have to
imagine would be, one, prison safety, safety within the prison,
safety of the prisoners themselves and of your personnel; and
also the effectiveness of your programs to minimize recidivism.
I would imagine that reducing the overcrowding problem would
then have a positive effect on your ability to manage both of
those concerns.
Mr. Samuels. Yes, sir.
Senator Lee. Good. What programs do you have in place
currently to ensure that those released from prison, including
those who might be released earlier than they would otherwise
be as a result of changes like these, what programs do you have
in place to make sure that they do not present a threat to
public safety once they are released?
Mr. Samuels. As I mentioned earlier, we have numerous
cognitive behavioral therapy programs that we have modeled
after RDAP because of the research showing that these types of
programs are very effective. And we are constantly encouraging
inmates to participate in these programs, and we are very
successful on many occasions in doing so. But I would share
with the Subcommittee here to date that we really need to have
some type of incentive to get more of these inmates involved in
the programs, and this is why I continue to support, and I
believe that the sentencing credits that could be provided,
similar to what we have with RDAP--I mean, many of the
individuals know that when they participate in RDAP they can
get up to a year off their sentence. But at the same time, they
are being exposed to the program and they receive the benefit,
which ultimately helps them with their transition from prison
back into the community. And if we can have an incentive to
entice the other inmates within the population who do not have
a substance use disorder, then it increases the number of
inmates who can be exposed, which over a period of time, when
the majority of these individuals are going to be released,
this will help public safety.
Senator Lee. Okay. So----
Senator Whitehouse. Senator Hirono.
Senator Lee. Thank you.
Senator Hirono. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You mentioned that the average cost to incarcerate a person
in our system is about $29,000 or almost $30,000. Is there a
difference in average cost in a women's prison facility?
Mr. Samuels. For the female facilities, it depends on the
number, the mission, but typically the average is going to be
the same.
Senator Hirono. Typically?
Mr. Samuels. Yes.
Senator Hirono. Do the women in these facilities have the
same access to the kinds of programs that are available to men
in the male facilities?
Mr. Samuels. Yes.
Senator Hirono. There is a growing number of women in our
prison population, so you cited some data in your testimony.
Does your data reflect differences in recidivism for men and
women? And, also, do you have evidence-based programs that work
better for men versus women in terms of success and
reintegrating into society? I think you talked about one
program that is specifically for women, Resolve, but----
Mr. Samuels. The Resolve program.
Senator Hirono. But can you share with me if you do that
kind of data collection that distinguishes men and women and
how they are treated and what is successful?
Mr. Samuels. For the programs that we operate, I mean, we
are following typically one model throughout the Bureau. Now,
we have not collected any specific data to distinguish between
female inmates versus male inmates to identify whether one
particular program does not work better based on male or
female.
Senator Hirono. Why is that?
Mr. Samuels. Why is that?
Senator Hirono. Yes. Why do you not have that kind of data?
Do you think that there are no differences? Or you just have
not done it?
Mr. Samuels. I would say for this discussion that there are
no differences. But we do not have specific programs
specifically targeted for the female inmate population, which
this would be consistent with all of corrections, not just
within the Federal system. But I would definitely take your
question back to have discussions internally with the Bureau to
include with my colleagues if there is something that is being
done or if you are aware of something specifically for the
female inmate population relative to the CBT programs that we
provide.
Senator Hirono. Well, my understanding is that as a general
proposition, women are in prison for drug crimes and not
violent crimes. So that is a very different profile than
dangerous felons in our prison system. So I would ask that you
take into consideration those kinds of factors as well as--I
think that there may be some programs that will better enable
women to reintegrate when they are released than would work for
men. And I believe that there are some States who recognize
those kinds of factors and plan their programs in a way that
reflects that kind of understanding. I think it is very
important because, as more and more women, who tend to still be
the caregivers for their families, are incarcerated, that has a
lot of ramifications to their families, their children,
reentry, all of that.
Mr. Samuels. And, Senator, I have recently put together a
warden's advisory group specifically for the female inmate
population to look at what we have done historically and to
focus on the types of concerns that you are raising to make
sure that if there are any best practices or things that we
should consider, that we are moving in a direction to ensure
that there is a balance on both sides so the female inmates
within our care are receiving appropriate attention and care
relative to the issues that you have raised.
Senator Hirono. Because my impression is generally that
there have been fewer programs for women in our prison system,
both in the State level and Federal level, and I understand
that your responsibility is on the Federal side.
Thank you very much.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you, Senator Hirono.
Thank you very much, Director Samuels. We appreciate you
being here today, and we appreciate the support for our joint
legislative-executive efforts going forward that the Bureau of
Prisons is going to continue to show. We will obviously
continue to call on you for information and on your staff for
expertise, and we look forward to that relationship as we
proceed.
You are excused from the Committee. We thank you for your
testimony, and I will call up the second panel.
Senator Whitehouse. I welcome our panel.
Professor DeLisi is from Iowa. The Ranking Member
represents Iowa, and the Ranking Member has asked that
Professor DeLisi testify first so that he has a chance to hear
his constituent's testimony before he has to return to his work
within the Finance Committee. So, without objection, we will go
out of the usual order and begin with Professor DeLisi. But let
me first ask all the witnesses to please stand and be sworn. Do
you affirm that the testimony you are about to give before the
Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, so help you God?
Professor DeLisi. I do.
Mr. Wetzel. I do.
Mr. Tilley. I do.
Ms. La Vigne. I do.
Mr. Sedgwick. I do.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you, and please be seated.
Professor DeLisi is a professor and coordinator of criminal
justice studies with the Center for the Study of Violence at
Iowa State University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal
of Criminal Justice and the author of nearly 250 scholarly
articles. He has received the Fellow Award from the Academy of
Criminal Justice Sciences and is a member of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association
for Psychological Science. And would you like to make any
further recognition of Professor DeLisi or welcome?
Senator Grassley. I guess you have said it all, but I do
say welcome to you. Thank you very much.
Senator Whitehouse. Very well. Professor DeLisi, please
proceed, and then we will go to Director Wetzel and down the
line.
STATEMENT OF MATT DeLISI, PH.D., PROFESSOR AND
COORDINATOR, CRIMINAL JUSTICE STUDIES, IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY,
AMES, IOWA
Professor DeLisi. Thank you very much for this opportunity.
Although reducing the costs of BOP is important, the policy
recommendations significantly neglect the antisociality of
criminal offenders and the likely recidivism that would result
from a large-scale release of BOP inmates. The majority of this
testimony attests to the antisociality and behavioral risks
denoted by the modal Federal prisoner, with quantitative
estimates of additional crimes that could result from the
policy recommendations.
The report promulgates the notion that drug offenders are
somewhat innocuous and that their antisocial behavior is
limited to drug sales and drug use. In fact, criminal
offenders, all criminal offenders, tend to be very versatile in
their offending behaviors. Thus, a person sentenced for drug
crimes is also likely to have property crimes, violent crimes,
public order crimes, nuisance crimes, traffic violations, and
assorted violations of the criminal justice system. Thus, any
discussion of drug offenders should also be understood that
they are next week very likely to be property offenders and
potentially violent offenders.
Moreover, recent research using a variety of samples has
indicated that drug use is one of the prime drivers of overall
criminal activity. Meta-analytic research indicates that drug
offenders offend at rates approximately 3 to 4 times that of
offenders who do not have drug problems. And overall their
behavioral repertoires extend far beyond drug offending.
Regarding the safety valves for judicial discretion,
current law permits judges to waive mandatory minimum
sentencing for a person sentenced for drug offenses with little
to no criminal history. Thus, the extant policy is adequate to
avoid unnecessary confinement of low-risk offenders. The
suggestion to apply the safety valve to all offenders--
including those with extensive criminal histories--is not
advised. The entire criminal career paradigm demonstrates
tremendous continuity in antisocial behavior from childhood to
adolescence to adulthood.
As the Director indicated in panel one, 25 percent of BOP
inmates are gang Members, and gang Membership is one of the
most robust predictors of offending, misconduct while in
confinement, and recidivism.
In this way, prison is an important interruption of their
criminal careers, but, unfortunately, the preponderance of
offenders will continue to commit offenses upon release.
Releasing these types of offenders could likely produce
more crime. Research has shown that a one-prisoner reduction in
the prison population is associated with a 15 Part I Index
crime increase per year. To put this into perspective,
releasing 1 percent of the current BOP population would result
in approximately 32,850 additional crimes. An independent study
by other researchers arrived at the estimate that a one-
prisoner reduction increases crime by 17 offenses per year.
Thus, to use the same example, releasing 1 percent of the
current BOP population would result in 37,230 additional
offenses.
The Safety Valve 1 recommendation in the Urban Institute
proposal to release 2,000 offenders based on these prior
estimate would produce a range of 30,000 to 34,000 new index
crimes per year.
In terms of Safety Valve Recommendation 2, the proposal
recommends the creation to apply, quoting the report, ``beyond
drug offenders with minimal criminal histories to drug
offenders with more extensive criminal histories, some weapons
offenders, armed career criminals, sex abuse offenders, child
pornography offenders, and identity theft offenders.'' The
release of these offenders with extensive criminal histories
could be potentially disastrous to public safety.
Regarding the expanded Incentivize Programming estimates,
using, again, the same data, the proposal to potentially
release 36,000 inmates over the next 10 years would produce an
estimated 540,000 to 612,000 new Index crimes.
The Recommendation 2, to release 12,000 offenders in 1
year, would produce 180,000 to 204,000 new Index crimes.
And proposal number 3 to transfer 34,000 inmates to home
confinement could potentially over the next 10 years increase
crime by 510,000 to 578,000 offenses.
To wrap things up, the report contains no mention of the
various antisocial conditions relating to criminal propensity
of Federal offenders. For instance, the prevalence of
psychopathy in correctional populations is about 25 fold higher
than its prevalence in the general population. Psychopathy is
one of the most pernicious and stable antisocial conditions and
one of the most robust predictors of recidivism. Thus, any
proposed BOP releases would include (depending on the size of
the recommendation) the release of hundreds to thousands of
clinically psychopathic offenders.
Another important criminological construct is sexual
sadism, the prevalence of which is much higher in correctional
populations than in the general public. Even after decades of
confinement, offenders who are sexually sadistic pose
significant risks to the community as exemplified by current
Federal death row inmate Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., who was
sentenced to death in 2003 after serving approximately a
quarter century for prior predatory criminal convictions.
It is also important to note that these antisocial
conditions are not limited to homicide offenders and sex
offenders, but are found in offenders convicted of other
crimes, including drug-based offenses.
Senator Whitehouse. Professor DeLisi, we are trying to keep
our testimony to 5 minutes per witness. If you could sum up.
Professor DeLisi. A final point, and I have some questions
that are in the testimony if they are asked later----
Senator Whitehouse. The testimony will be in the record.
Professor DeLisi. Chairman Leahy indicated that the BOP
problem is one that Congress created, but I would also add that
the corollary benefit of that legislation was the reduction of
crime by the increased use of confinement.
[The prepared statement of Professor DeLisi appears as a
submission for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Professor.
Let me now introduce John Wetzel. He is, I would call him,
the Director of Corrections for the State of Pennsylvania, but
the nomenclature is different in Pennsylvania. He is the
Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. He
oversees all administrative functions relating to the
Pennsylvania Department of Corrections operations, budgeting,
personnel, and training. He began his corrections career in
1989 as an officer at Pennsylvania's Lebanon County
Correctional Facility. He has served as a correctional officer,
treatment counselor, supervisor of treatment services, trainee
academy director, and as warden of the Franklin County Jail. He
is a member of the American Correctional Association and the
American Jail Association and a past president of the
Pennsylvania County Corrections Association, and for the
record, had very nice things to say about A.T. Wall when we
said hello at the beginning.
Secretary Wetzel, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF JOHN E. WETZEL, SECRETARY, PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT
OF CORRECTIONS, HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Mr. Wetzel. Thank you very much, and thanks for this
opportunity to talk about Pennsylvania and the experience we
have had in addressing many of the same problems you all face
in the Federal system.
Specifically, when Governor Tom Corbett was elected,
Governor Corbett was the Attorney General, and before that he
was a Federal prosecutor. So he has a very unique perspective,
and he has had really a firsthand view of the corrections
system. And what he saw over the 24 years before we took over
was an average growth in the Pennsylvania Department of
Corrections of 1,500 inmates a month. So when we took over
nearly 3 years ago, we had 51,000 inmates, and that was a
consistent growth over both Republican and Democratic
administrations. And the one charge that he gave me when we
took over the Department of Corrections was not to willy nilly
reduce population, not to willy nilly reduce spending, although
both of those things were a priority. The main priority was to
improve outcomes and really improve our corrections system and
take the perspective that we need to get a better return on our
investment for what we are spending in corrections.
How did we do that? The first thing we did is we applied
for and received a grant to go through the justice reinvestment
process, and we partnered with the Council of State Governments
and went through a process that quite specifically was data
driven. And Governor Corbett is a hard sell and takes a
perspective of many of the folks on the panel in that we are
very concerned, the bottom line for us is always going to be
crime rate and public safety. And so the process had to be data
driven.
So we gathered data through this process, and the most
important part of this process is that it was a process that
was participatory and had all Members and all stakeholders as
part of the group that looked at the policy options.
So we gathered the data. We looked at what the population
drivers were, and then we identified policy options looking
nationally and internationally at policy options that seemed to
work for other jurisdictions. Then we built consensus, and this
is the key part of this process where we had, you know, the
ACLU and the conservative think tank sitting there having a
discussion and coming to agreements on how we can get better
outcomes. And some of the focus really needs to be on what the
root cause of the crime is.
So it is very easy in this field to paint with broad
brushes and say, well, we do not want to open the back door and
let a bunch of people run out because that is going to have a
negative effect on public safety. We all agree with that.
But what we also all agree with is what we want out of our
criminal justice system is that when someone becomes criminally
involved, when they come out the back end of our system, what
we want them to be is less likely to become criminally involved
again. We can all agree with that. And the reality is there is
enough research out there that tells us that when we make good
decisions from the front end of the system as far as who needs
to be incarcerated, who we can deal with in other manners, and
more specifically what the root causes of the crime is. So
violent offenders, murderers, rapists are different, and we
cannot paint with the same brush as someone who the root cause
of their crime is addiction.
So it does not matter how long we lock an addict up. If we
do not address the addiction, they are going to come out and
they are not going to be less likely to commit another crime.
So we took that approach. We got consensus on policy options
that were legislative, and in 6 months from the first meeting
until the legislation was passed, that passed unanimously in
both the House and the Senate, which was pretty miraculous
itself in Pennsylvania, we came up with policy options. And
what those policy options resulted in is that under our 2\1/2\
years we have averaged a decline of 70 inmates a year out of
51,000. Not a huge decline, but when you look at consistent
1,500 inmate growth a year, we have eliminated that. We have
been able to close a couple prisons, and we have been able to,
more importantly, get more people into programming. And that
has really been the key.
So our policy options start at the front end, identify
groups who--a small group of offenders who were not appropriate
to ever come to a State prison. Then we looked at funding risk-
based sentencing, so the Sentencing Commission in Pennsylvania
is building a sentencing tool so the judge has risk
information, not just a pre-sentence investigation but risk.
What is the risk of future offense for this offender? And that
factored into the sentencing.
Then we looked with the Department of Corrections at areas
we just were not doing good. So waiting lists for programs, how
can we better deliver programs? And part of that was making
sure we are only putting people in programs who need the
programs, so making sure we are assessing.
Then the back end of our system we put a lot of focus on.
Our community corrections system, we spent $110 million. When
we measured it by recidivism, we saw that 95 percent of those
programs were not effective. So we restructured those programs.
We looked at who we put in it. And, more importantly, we
decided to put a performance measure on the contracts. So the
contractors are paid based on their ability to impact
recidivism. This process was a good process, and at the same
time, our crime rate went down. We have less people coming in,
more people getting out, and the crime rate in Pennsylvania
continues to go down.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wetzel appears as a
submission for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. That is a terrific story, Secretary.
Thank you very much.
Our next witness is Representative John Tilley, who
represents the 8th District of Kentucky in the Kentucky General
Assembly. He has served in the Kentucky General Assembly since
January 2007, and he is the Chair of the House Judiciary
Committee, where he has been the Chair since 2009. In that
role, he worked with other State leaders to form a bipartisan,
multi-branch task force with the goal of enhancing public
safety, controlling corrections costs, and decreasing
recidivism. Representative Tilley is currently the vice chair
of the National Conference of State Legislatures' Committee on
Justice and the Judiciary. Representative Tilley was a
prosecutor prior to joining the legislature, serving for nearly
6 years as Christian County's assistant county attorney, and we
are delighted that he is here today.
Thank you, Chairman. Please proceed.
STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN TILLEY, CHAIR, HOUSE JUDICIARY
COMMITTEE, KENTUCKY HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, HOPKINSVILLE,
KENTUCKY
Mr. Tilley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Members, as
well. We do have a similar story to Pennsylvania's with a
couple of curves on that. I can say with great confidence as
well as a former prosecutor, Members, that we can have it all
in one sense. We can have better public safety at less cost
with less crime and less recidivism, as you heard from the
secretary as well. And we can be smart on crime or remaining
tough on criminals, which is a concern of this Committee. And
we have done that in Kentucky, and that has been an honor to
tell you about it, but I will tell you it was no honor when the
Pew Charitable Trust in their Public Safety Performance Project
made us the poster child for prison growth in about 2008. They
released a report called ``One in 100,'' which stood for the
proposition that 1 in 100 adults in this country were behind
bars. In Kentucky, that rate was 1 in 92.
Just as an aside, there were 1 in 31 adults under some form
of correctional control. That is astoundingly high. I think it
should be to all of us.
In Kentucky, for the decade ending in 2010, our prison
growth rate was almost quadruple the national average. We were
at 45 percent, and the rest of the country was hovering around
13 percent, which is also to me an unsustainable figure.
And so to put that even in greater context, let me tell you
that we comprise about 4.5 percent to 5 percent of the world's
population, but we house about 25 percent of the world's
prisoners. So Kentucky was truly the epicenter for prison
growth in this country.
So all that begs the question. Did all that translate, all
that record spending and record incarceration translate into
better public safety? Did it translate to less crime, less
recidivism, things that we measure our performance on? And we
can tell you in Kentucky that it did not, as many States found
as well. All that spending, well over a 200-percent increase in
the previous 20 years amounted to very little. Recidivism
remained well above the national average. Our crime rate had
always been relatively flat. As you have heard, the crime rate
has been dropping for some time, but we only enjoyed about a
third of that national crime rate drop. We were about 6 percent
over the previous decade of our study. The rest of the country
was about 19 percent.
And so we have remained flat as well, and I will tell you
that our sister State to the south of us, Tennessee, we share
the most border, their crime rate, again, we were one of the
safer States in the country in the top ten, and they now remain
one of the more high crime States, maybe number one, and their
prison growth is exploding, is my understanding.
In response, we formed a multi-branch, bipartisan task
force, a very small task force with seven Members. I was proud
to co-chair that. We received support from the business
community, from the retail federations. The Kentucky Chamber of
Commerce has taken a national leadership role in this. We
received support from all manner of stakeholders in this
effort. And what we found was this on that task force: that our
prison growth rate was being driven not by crime; it was being
driven by the number of arrests and court cases, by drug
offenses, by rising incarceration rates for technical parole
violators, and low-level offenders were again driving this
population. In Kentucky, they were far more likely to go to
prison than any other State. We found that to be a 57 percent
to 41 percent number there. They were far more likely to go to
prison at that rate.
The results, some recommendations, some very comprehensive
reform called House Bill 463. I remind you again, in a very
bipartisan way, Mr. Chairman. It passed 96-1 in the House and
38-0 in the Senate. The goals, again, better public safety,
less cost, less recidivism, getting smarter on crime. How did
we do that? I do not have a lot of time to tell you about,
about a minute and 42 seconds I see before me. Generally, let
me tell you--and I know I want to stick to my time. Focus our
most expensive prison beds on the most serious offenders. Fine
alternatives for our low-risk, non-violent drug offenders,
which we have done. And use those things, use those savings to
expand treatment opportunities and supervision opportunities
for a number of our low-level offenders who were, again,
driving that population.
More specifically, we have strengthened probation and
parole and pre-trial. We have seen astounding results from pre-
trial alone with not having to arrest and detain as many low-
level misdemeanants. We are actually seeing less offenses
committed while on release so that has increased our public
safety rate. We are seeing them show up to court at a greater
rate, even though they are not being housed in county jails.
Counties are saving millions and are happy with us on that
note.
And I will tell you we have modernized our drug code, which
has been a focus today, obviously, from a number of voices. We
have had presumptive probation for simple possession. We have
deferred prosecution which is a possibility, which must be
prosecutor approved for low-level drug offenses. We distinguish
between trafficking and peddling, an important distinction I
think to make. We had not previously in Kentucky done that.
Again, these are prosecutor-driven things, and I will tell
you that not one felony has been reclassified to a misdemeanor
in our negotiations in trying to come up with a commonsense way
to approach this.
Again, we reinvest these savings, which have been in the
millions, to increase drug treatment. I will get to how much
more we have to that in just a minute. And I tell you, in my
last few seconds, let me tell you we have achieved, I think,
remarkable results, and I will fast forward to those. We now
have fewer prisoners at lower cost. At one benchmark, just a
few months ago, we were at 3,500 less out of a total of roughly
now we are around 20,000 hovering. We had been at 22. We were
supposed to be at 24. And just as the secretary said, we are
now well below that average and about 3,500 fewer. We have less
recidivism. For the first time in a decade, we are well below
the national average. We have dropped 5 percentage points. And
we have a 500-percent increase in drug abuse capacity, drug
treatment capacity available to DOC.
Chairman, Members of the Committee, I look forward to your
questions, and we know we have a lot of hard work in front of
us, but we have had tremendous results in Kentucky, and we
invite you to learn more.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Tilley appears as a
submission for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Chairman Tilley. I
appreciate your being here, and it is a remarkable success
story.
Our next witness is Nancy G. La Vigne. She is the director
of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute where she
oversees a portfolio of research projects relating to crime,
justice, and public safety. Prior to joining the Urban
Institute, Dr. La Vigne was the founding director of the Crime
Mapping Research Center at the National Institute of Justice in
the U.S. Department of Justice. She has written on a variety of
subjects, including criminal justice evaluation, prisoner
reentry, crime prevention, and the spatial analysis of crime
and criminal behavior.
Doctor, welcome.
STATEMENT OF NANCY G. La VIGNE, PH.D., DIRECTOR,
JUSTICE POLICY CENTER, THE URBAN INSTITUTE,
WASHINGTON, DC
Ms. La Vigne. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure to
be here. I represent the Urban Institute. We are a nonprofit,
nonpartisan research organization. We do not engage in
advocacy. Rather, our mission is to bring facts and data and
evaluative research to bear on pressing topics like the one we
are here to discuss today. It is in that spirit that about a
year ago we set out to chronicle the drivers of the Federal
prison population and its growth over time and to project the
impact of various policies that were on the table to reverse
that growth--much in the way that we heard in the models of the
States in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, a similar just
reinvestment model of identifying drivers of growth.
We also looked at the degree of overcrowding. Members of
this Committee have already documented that. The overcrowding
is tremendous. It is at great risk to the safety of both staff
and inmates. But, importantly, from where we sit in the
research we have done looking at the impact of programs
designed to prevent recidivism, the crowding in the Federal
system creates tremendous challenges for delivering programs
and treatment that is so necessary to support the successful
reintegration of Federal offenders when they exit prison.
And what we know from our own research and research that we
have conducted through the development of the What Works in
Reentry Clearinghouse, which is a systematic review of only the
most rigorous research out there on various types of prisoner
reentry programs, and what we have learned is that there are
programs that work. There are many programs that work across a
whole host of types of reentry interventions, from substance
abuse treatment to employment, education programs, vocational
programs, mental health treatment, programs to support family
visitation. In each one of those categories, we have identified
one if not several of impactful programs that rigorous research
says works.
Indeed, even within the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the RDAP
program has been rigorously researched and found to be
effective as has Prison Industries. So there is a lot of
opportunities to provide programming and help support public
safety, but those are limited by the crowded prison environment
in the Federal system as well as limited resources with which
to dedicate to offer such programs.
There are many solutions on the table. Those solutions were
not developed by the Urban Institute. They were developed by
various congressional staffers in partnership with the Members,
and include legislative proposals that are sponsored by Members
of this Committee. What we set out to do was to analyze how
these different proposals would yield impact on both the prison
population and on cost.
When we looked at those projections, we were very
conservative in our estimates. We were conservative in two
ways:
One, we were fiscally conservative. We chose to use the
marginal cost of prison rather than the average cost. I can
explain more about the importance of that later. But we thought
it was best to be conservative, so some of our estimates are
actually lower than others who were trying to project the
impact of these various policies.
Similarly, and importantly, our estimates were conservative
with regard to how we perceived them being enacted on the
ground, and we firmly believe that judges and the BOP will
exercise extreme caution in discerning who should benefit from
these programs. And as you know, most of these policies look at
risk levels, something that was critical in the work that
States have done. Risk assessments are very important in
determining who really needs to be in prison and who could be
subject to early release policies. But for that reason, also
our estimates may be lower in terms of potential cost savings
than you might hear from other people.
At any rate, you know from our report that we assess a
whole host of different types of policy changes. We know that
reducing mandatory minimums and giving judges discretion to
deviate from mandatory minimums could save literally billions
of dollars. We know that earned time credits for program
participation can not only relieve crowding in the short run,
but it also provides incentives for inmates to take part in
programs that are in the interest of public safety.
We have heard examples from the States and not just those
represented here, but we know of others--Texas, North Carolina,
New York--that have engaged in sweeping reforms and have
averted growth or even reduced their populations without any
detrimental impact to their crime rates.
So I think this is a moment of tremendous opportunity, and
I thank you for your leadership on it.
[The prepared statement of Ms. La Vigne appears as a
submission for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. Well, we certainly hope it is the
moment of tremendous opportunity, and I want to thank you and
the Urban Institute for the effort and the professionalism that
they brought into that report.
And we will conclude now with Dr. Jeffrey Sedgwick,
managing partner and co-founder of Keswick Advisors in
Richmond, Virginia. He previously served as Assistant Attorney
General for the Office of Justice Programs in the U.S.
Department of Justice, where he oversaw activities relating to
initiatives such as Project Safe Neighborhoods, Project Safe
Childhood, and the Prisoner Reentry Initiative. Prior to his
Justice Department service, Dr. Sedgwick taught for 30 years at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he is welcome
here today.
Please proceed, Professor.
STATEMENT OF JEFFREY SEDGWICK, PH.D., MANAGING PARTNER AND CO-
FOUNDER, KESWICK ADVISORS, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
Mr. Sedgwick. Thank you, Chairman Whitehouse.
In its draft report, ``Stemming the Tide: Strategies to
Reduce the Growth and Cut the Cost of the Federal Prison
System,'' the Urban Institute observes that, ``The Federal
prison population has escalated from under 25,000 inmates in
1980 to over 219,000 today.'' And it observes that, ``This
growth has come at great expense to taxpayers and other
important fiscal priorities.'' I could not agree more with this
report on the problems of fiscal austerity confronting public
safety budgets; however, I believe we need to be very careful
not to oversimplify the tradeoffs in public safety that we need
to consider in order to make good decisions and, as a result,
may offer cost shifting instead of true cost savings.
A more comprehensive view of the problem we face would cast
the issue somewhat differently: we need to reduce not the costs
of incarceration (or, indeed, the criminal justice system) but,
rather, the total social costs of crime including not only
expenditures on public safety, but also the costs of
victimization, tangible and intangible, to the public. As we
seek to do this, the allocation of funds among components of
the criminal justice system should be guided by their
demonstrated effectiveness in reducing crime not their absolute
or relative size compared to other components of the criminal
justice system.
It is all too tempting in the current environment to look
to the correctional system, both State and Federal, as sort of
a piggy bank or a source of savings in a period of austerity.
For example, early last year, CBS aired a segment on its weekly
news program ``Sunday Morning,'' entitled, ``The Cost of a
Nation of Incarceration.'' The unmistakable implication of the
program was that the United States incarcerates too many at too
high a cost. But just how large and costly is the prison
population? According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics,
1,598,780 adults were incarcerated in U.S. Federal and State
prisons and county jails at year-end 2011--a 0.9-percent
decrease over 2010 and the second consecutive annual decrease.
Indeed, the imprisonment rate has declined consistently since
2007 when there were 506 persons imprisoned per 100,000 U.S.
residents. The rate in 2011 was comparable to the rate last
observed in 2005, which was 492 persons per 100,000 population.
Given that population, in a recent Vera Institute
calculated average per inmate cost of incarceration at $31,286,
we could estimate the total cost of incarceration nationwide in
2011 as $50.2 billion--surely a large sum. But is it either
disproportionate in relative terms or too large in absolute
terms?
In order to understand that, we would have to bring into
the calculation: What did we get in return for that $50.2
billion? Well, as some have testified previously and noted, and
some of the Members of the Committee have noted, according to
the FBI Uniform Crime Report, between 1960 and 1992, the number
of violent crimes in the United States increased nearly
sevenfold, from approximately 288,000 to more than 1.9 million,
and the violent crime rate increased nearly fivefold from 160.9
to 757.7 per 100,000 population. But then rather abruptly the
crime rate began to decrease, and it decreased for nearly a
decade and then plateaued until 2 years ago, when it started to
tick up.
Scholars who have looked at this decline and tried to give
a reason for it or determine a reason for it--and I would cite
Franklin Zimring as the best source on this--has noted that
incarceration and the increase in incarceration in the United
States played a very large role in this particular decline. In
other words, what we got for our $50.2 billion investment was a
decrease in crime, but value is underestimated because it does
not include psychic costs of about $180 billion per year. So I
leave it to you to judge whether a $50 billion investment that
gets you a $180 billion return is a good idea or not.
Now, this is not meant to suggest that nothing can be done
to deal with the current fiscal problems afflicting the
criminal justice system broadly and the Federal prison system
in particular but, rather, to counsel caution in dealing with
sweeping claims of cheap, readily available, and highly
effective alternatives to Federal incarceration. Rather, we
need to do four things.
First, we need to understand characteristics of the Federal
prison system, and they are quite different from the State
prison systems.
Second, we need to critically evaluate the effectiveness of
interventions meant to reduce recidivism.
Third, we need to make use of the voluminous literature on
predicting criminality and also identifying markers of its
onset and persistence.
And finally, we need to hold tenaciously to the commitment
by our actions to reduce the total social costs of crime and
eschew the practice of merely getting those costs off our books
by shifting them to others.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Sedgwick appears as a
submission for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you very much, Dr. Sedgwick. I
appreciate you all being here.
Let me start with Secretary Wetzel. You are an observer
from the outside of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Corrections
is your lifelong profession. You have been very successful in
Pennsylvania, and you are showing not only bipartisanship but
unanimity and then success in the reform effort.
What would you take out of Pennsylvania's experience and
apply as lessons that would be helpful for the Federal Bureau
of Prisons? Are there critical differences that we need to
acknowledge? What are they? Are there similarities? Where are
they? What have been your successes that you think will apply
most readily to your Federal colleagues?
Mr. Wetzel. I think from a process standpoint we were able
to have people check their ``R'' or ``D'' at the door and
become part of the process, and we set a goal and acknowledged
a goal and put all the partisan stuff aside. So I think that is
first and foremost.
Understand that we all wanted the same thing. We all want
good outcomes.
And then I think really understanding the dynamics of the
population. Certainly the Federal population is, arguably,
different than a State population, but I think it is very
important to really accurately identify and then build
consensus at what group we are comfortable dealing with in
another manner.
And then specifically, as we start splitting these
different groups out, then look at how we are likely to get the
best outcome. And, you know, you are not going to bat a
thousand on this, but where are we likely to get the best
outcome? The one thing that across the board we had consensus
on is that we were not pleased with the outcomes we were
getting from our current approach. So business as usual was not
going to work, and it was not acceptable. And we came to that
consensus early on, that nobody could make the argument that we
were happy with the return on the investment we were getting
for corrections.
By the same token, we certainly did not want to open up the
back door and have an increase in crime because we are trying
to do what is expedient. That was not the approach at all. But,
you know, I think if your focus is on how we are likely to
reduce crime and not necessarily focus on the dollars--we did
not necessarily focus on the dollars. We focused on how we were
going to get better outcomes, and a by-product of that is a
reduction in population. And it was more of a natural by-
product than the goal is to--and I think if you take that
approach and not say our goal is to reduce spending by X amount
but our goal is to get better outcomes and identify folks who
we can deal with in another manner that will be more effective
and less costly, that is really--and if you keep that as the
focus, I think that is the best way to move forward.
Senator Whitehouse. When you are talking about identifying
folks, what are the sorts of categories you are looking at? Is
it age, gender, drug history, level of incarceration, length of
term? What are some of the groups that you picked out of the
general population to try to improve the focus? And how did you
define those?
Mr. Wetzel. Yes, and we did talk about violent versus non-
violent because, as many people pointed out, you know, by the
time someone came to the Pennsylvania Department of
Corrections, they had an average of eight arrests. And nobody
gets locked up for jaywalking in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Okay? So that is not why they are there. So we did not put the
focus on that, but we put the focus on actuarial risk, and let
us look at, again, actuarial risk tools that allow us to
predict future crime and future recidivism, and to try to make
to the extent possible good individual decisions and give
judges the tools that they have all the information to make
those individual decisions.
Senator Whitehouse. So you were dialing it all the way back
into the pre-sentence report for judges?
Mr. Wetzel. Yes, well, you know, in Pennsylvania we have an
inconsistent level of pre-sentence reports, and under the
Rendell administration in 2008, they passed this risk-based
sentencing tool that was supposed to be developed by the
Sentencing Commission. However, it was not funded. And through
our initiative, we were able to fund that so we can give judges
actuarial information at sentencing and allow them to make
better decisions on real information.
Senator Whitehouse. Where did you get the actuarial
information?
Mr. Wetzel. Well, we had the information, and the
Sentencing Commission is the group who is charged to take that
information and develop a tool specifically for Pennsylvania--
--
Senator Whitehouse. You were pulling information out of the
tracking information on your own inmates, essentially.
Mr. Wetzel. Yes, we have a bunch of different sources of
information: the Sentencing Commission, the courts, the
different criminal justice agencies. Pull all those together,
get the information, develop a tool, test it, pilot it, and
norm it for our population, then roll it out across the State.
Senator Whitehouse. Got it. Okay, thanks.
Mr. Wetzel. Thank you.
Senator Whitehouse. Chairman Tilley, same question to you.
Can you pick out of what Kentucky has done any particularly
successful elements that you would commend to us as areas of
focus?
Mr. Tilley. I think there are a number of measures on the
front and back end that work and are translatable to the
Federal system. And, again, mind you, I am not expert on the
Federal Bureau of Prisons----
Senator Whitehouse. Understood.
Mr. Tilley. But to me we are talking about folks who are--
--
Senator Whitehouse. You are expert on what you did in
Kentucky.
Mr. Tilley. Well, I appreciate that. Some would say maybe.
I would tell you that it seems to me, though, that being a
former prosecutor, I saw a number of Federal cases proceeding
and moving along to conviction, and it seems that we actually
are doing more of the same kind of work that one might imagine.
So I would say focusing on reentry and recidivism, first, let
us go to the back end. We have what is called mandatory reentry
supervision, and for those who do not achieve parole, we are
releasing them into a very controlled environment 6 months
prior to the expiration of their sentence, so that, as studies
indicate, we can focus on that all-important 6 months, because,
again, as experts tell us and as has been validated through
science, if you catch that offender in the first 6 months of
reentry, you can hopefully achieve a more successful reentry
and then lower recidivism, which is the goal, and that is
significant.
The public demands that--again, as has been said today, it
is roughly the same in Kentucky, about 95 percent of all our
offenders are going to come back to a community, and in that
community I think taxpayers and constituents deserve our best
effort of making sure that offender does not re-offend. And so
that is important and I think very translatable.
There are a number of things we can do and are doing beyond
just that. Another example, Chairman, would be intermediate and
graduated sanctions for technical parole violators. Rather than
sending them back--we found that we were sending them back for
longer than their original sentence, and that was not serving
anyone. What we found now, similar to what they are doing in
Hawaii, in the Senator's home district, and Judge Steven Alm
there, what he is doing is remarkable. We are mimicking that in
Kentucky.
Senator Whitehouse. Steve Alm and I were U.S. Attorneys
together back in the day, so I am familiar with his work.
Mr. Tilley. I Googled that, sir.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Tilley. Yes, and I have been with Steven.
Senator Whitehouse. So your experience has been the same,
that making parole violation responses swifter, more certain,
more immediate, even if less impactful in terms of how long
they take out of the probationer's life, you get a better
result from a quicker--you can have a smaller reaction if it is
quicker and more certain to probation violations.
Mr. Tilley. Absolutely. At the State level, we were backing
up on multiple violations, and there was this waiting period
before the offender knew whether or not parole was going to--
you know, they were going to be revoked and sent back to
prison, and so it was very ineffective. And now we are seeing
results that are being proven effective, and hopefully we can
mimic the success they have had in Hawaii.
I will add one thing on the front end, the remarkable
success and really unexpected success we have had with low-
level offenders, in particular misdemeanants that were filling
our county jails. And, again, I still think it is translatable
because we are using science, we are using risk assessment, as
has been mentioned here today, to figure out who presents the
most risk and who can be released prior to adjudication, or who
needs to stay in potentially. And in doing so----
Senator Whitehouse. How do you develop those assessment
tools?
Mr. Tilley. There is a tool called the LSCMI, and, again,
it is something that is developed and used and chosen not by
the legislature--that would be a mistake to have us choose that
science, I think, but the court system has chosen it, and our
pre-trial system--in Kentucky we have, like DC, one of the only
unified, maybe the only true unified pre-trial system in the
country, which means it is State run, State driven, so we can
do that. And what we have seen is an increased public safety
rate. They are committing fewer offenses on release. They are
showing up to court at a greater rate. And we are actually
saving our counties, who pay for this, prior to adjudication
pay for incarceration, saving them millions. And I think that
is also translatable as so many offenders await trial. And it
also preserves the presumption of innocence until proven
guilty, and I think that is important, unless there is an
overriding reason that a judge may see in his or her
discretion, which that is in our bill, to detain an offender.
And that is important as well.
Senator Whitehouse. Obviously as a State representative and
as the Chairman of your State's House Judiciary Committee, you
have responsibilities to a wide array of stakeholders and
constituents and parts of your community. I can remember going
around Rhode Island with Director Wall with a map that showed
where people went when they left the ACI, adult correctional
institution, and went back into the community. And I think we
did it by zip code, and there were some zip codes where reentry
had virtually no impact--I mean virtually nobody returned to
those communities--and there were other communities that were
really receiving an avalanche of people coming out of the
prison system.
And so when you talk about reentry, did you consider not
just reentry from the individual offender's point of view and
trying to make them more successful at reentry and to reduce
their recidivism, but also what it means to the surrounding
community, particularly the ones that are very, very heavily
impacted by high returns from the prison population?
Mr. Tilley. Absolutely. In fact, we talked a lot about what
has been referred to as ``community supervision.'' You know,
``community corrections'' does not play quite as well to the
ear, but ``community supervision'' in the sense that you want
to direct that offender closer to their community and help them
reintegrate, because as we found, when you modify behavior in
one setting, for instance, the prison, and they return to their
home, they immediately maybe return to that behavior without,
you know, certain controls and certain behavior modification
strategies in place.
And so, yes, we did focus on that, and we do have that kind
of community supervision in place in our bill. It runs all
through our bill. And what we are trying to do is redirect some
of the savings, again, to those communities so that we are not
having to find new dollars to pay for this increase in
community supervision. But it is clearly less expensive, and we
can monitor in so many ways. With our reentry supervision, you
know, we have several minimum conditions. We have over ten of
those minimum conditions. And with technology we can monitor in
so many ways. And it is much less expensive and more effective
than what it costs in Kentucky, which is roughly $21,700 per
year to incarcerate a State inmate. And so we are not that far
off from the number that has been thrown out here today.
And so when you have this substantial savings and a
decrease in recidivism and this successful reentry, I think
your communities begin to buy in as well, and I know mine has.
Senator Whitehouse. I forgot to ask Secretary Wetzel, what
is your experience of the effects of overcrowding in
Pennsylvania's prisons, the ones that you supervise and manage?
Mr. Wetzel. We are at about 109 percent of capacity. I
think that the challenge really becomes the decisions on the
ground, the decisions with who you put in a cell together. So I
think I am guessing that if you looked at the numbers as we
became more and more crowded, I am not sure that the overall
number of misconducts would skyrocket, but I would guess that
the severity and some of the in-cell violence would--because at
the same time as crowding occurred, we got better at our
practices. We got more technology, more cameras. But those in-
cell decisions, and then I think the second area that really
gets impacted by crowding would be segregation. And
historically, without crowding you rarely double segregation
cells when, you know--we are like Motel 6. The light is always
on. So you have got to find someplace to put somebody. So
sometimes you make some decisions in putting people together
that you would rather not have to make as a specific result of
crowding.
Senator Whitehouse. But it is your experience as a
practitioner that, other things being equal, higher
overcrowding will have a tendency to increase violence and risk
within the population?
Mr. Wetzel. Absolutely, especially if the staffing does not
increase at the same scope as the inmates.
Senator Whitehouse. So at a minimum, it would require
additional costs.
Mr. Wetzel. Correct.
Senator Whitehouse. Dr. La Vigne, any suggestions for us
that you would highlight in your report that you think would
have particular effect for the Bureau of Prisons?
Ms. La Vigne. Well, as I already stated, the proposals in
our report are not the Urban Institute's proposals, so what we
set out to do is to project the impact of these various
proposals on populations and costs.
Senator Whitehouse. Which ones would you highlight for us
for the Federal Bureau of Prisons?
Ms. La Vigne. I will highlight any number of them that you
are interested in. The ones represented in the Smarter
Sentencing Act, for example, reduces mandatory minimums in
three ways. It cuts the mandatory minimums for certain types of
drug offenders virtually in half, and that alone we predict
could reduce overcrowding by 20 percent in 10 years' time and
save over $2 billion. It also reduces mandatory minimums by
extending the safety valve to Criminal History 2 categories. So
that gives more judicial discretion to deviate from mandatory
minimums.
But as I referenced in my formal statement, there is a lot
of restrictions to our projections. We do not assume that this
means that everybody with a criminal history Category 2 is
going to be subject to reduced sentences. There is a lot of
judicial discretion involved, and our own assumptions assume
that a lot of offenders will not be subject to that because of
their risk levels and their criminal history.
Regardless, we find that that alone would reduce
overcrowding by 46 percent in 10 years. It would save $544
million. And then there is also the Fair Sentencing Act crack
retroactivity, which would also save a tremendous volume to the
tune of $229 million. And even that reflects a conservative
estimate on our part. We actually assume that 10 percent of
those who could be subject to the crack retroactivity in the
Fair Sentencing Act proposal would not because they pose too
high a risk to society based on their in-prison behavior.
Senator Whitehouse. Thank you very much.
Dr. Sedgwick, as I understand your testimony, if I could
restate it in a single sentence, it would be that you are
warning us against either sweeping or overbroad measures that
might create a public safety cost outside the prison system
that more than offsets any savings within the prison system.
But you accept that if this is done in the smart way and in the
right way, there is, in fact, opportunity here to both improve
public safety and lower corrections costs.
Mr. Sedgwick. I think you summarized it beautifully. One of
the bugaboos that I have is that we very often talk about these
complex issues and treat offenders either as generic, like they
are all the same, or we treat them as dichotomous. We will say,
well, there are the violent ones and the non-violent ones. And
if you know the research on, for example, career criminals and
criminal histories and specialization, one of the things that
you realize is, yes, there is a subset of the offender
population that are purely property offenders and never commit
a violent offense. But among violent offenders they have a mix
of property offenses and violent offenses in their history, as
Professor DeLisi mentioned, and so you cannot just look at what
is the offense that this particular offender is in for and make
a judgment about their particular risk. We need to be much more
granular and much more careful about this.
Senator Whitehouse. Let me ask Representative Tilley and
Secretary Wetzel, are you comfortable that the assessment tools
that you have used in Kentucky and Pennsylvania meet that
standard and are sensitive to Dr. Sedgwick's concerns?
Mr. Wetzel. Yes.
Senator Whitehouse. So it is doable.
Mr. Tilley. I would concur.
Senator Whitehouse. Okay. Very good.
I will ask unanimous consent, which I will achieve since I
am the last one here----
[Laughter.]
Senator Whitehouse [continuing]. That two articles be added
to the record. One is a New York Times article or opinion
piece, ``For lesser crimes, rethinking life behind bars,'' by
John Tierney. The other is ``Rhode Island halts growth in the
inmate population while increasing public safety,'' by our
corrections director, A.T. Wall.
[The articles appear as submissions for the record.]
Senator Whitehouse. The record of this hearing will remain
open for one additional week for any further questions or
testimony that anybody wishes to offer.
Let me once again thank each of the witnesses for coming
and lending your expertise, and in the case of Chairman Tilley
and Secretary Wetzel, your very long and well-earned personal
experience in this area. I think that what you have done
politically to make these changes happen in your home States is
very impressive. I am sorry you missed by one in getting
unanimity the way Pennsylvania did, but I got to tell you,
unanimity by all but one vote is pretty darn impressive. So
obviously a lot of careful work went into the kind of product
that can both be unanimous and impactful. You can do unanimous
all day long if you end up with no results. But doing something
that really makes a change and getting the kind of political
support at home that makes it unanimous in the legislature is a
very significant achievement. So I am delighted that you both
had the opportunity and the ability to come here today, and I
thank you very much for being here. I thank all the witnesses.
Everyone's testimony was extremely helpful. To the Urban
Institute, we look forward to continuing to work with you, and
thank you for the report.
And, with that, we are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:04 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
[Additional material submitted for the record follows.]
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