Prison blues

Dennis Malone says Amity's Right Turn program helped him get his life on track. (Photo by Angela Carone)

On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Mark Faucette, vice president of the Amity Foundation, a nonprofit substance-abuse-treatment provider, will be at Donovan State Prison in Otay Mesa, saying goodbye to the roughly 500 inmates currently enrolled in Amity’s Right Turn program. The highly regarded program, held up as a national model for effective prisoner rehabilitation, is being closed down, a casualty of state budget cuts.

Last week, Elias Contreras, the prison’s associate warden, told a KPBS reporter that Right Turn would be replaced with a 90-day detox program. That’s actually not the case: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Peggy Bengs confirmed for CityBeat on Tuesday that Donovan is one of eight prisons statewide that won’t provide any sort of professional in-custody substance-abuse treatment. Rather, those facilities will rely entirely on outside volunteers from programs like Narcotics Anonymous and inmates who’ve been trained as substance-abuse counselors.

Not only are in-custody treatment programs being cut—so, too, is funding for residential aftercare programs like Amity’s 50-bed Vista Ranch, where just-released inmates can spend up to six months getting their lives together.

“We already don’t have enough treatment beds and services in the community,” Faucette said. “But with this kind of situation and with these closures happening, it’s going to be pretty difficult.”

Faucette said he’s been inundated with calls from people who want to make sure they’ll have a bed when they get out of prison.

According to numbers provided by CDCR, in July 2009 the state was funding 8,162 post-release residential treatment slots, serving an estimated 17,063 parolees a year. Plans are to reduce that number by half, to 4,000 treatment slots serving an estimated 8,308 parolees.

The cuts are part of a $1.2-billion reduction in CDCR’s overall $10-billion budget. A total of $250 million is being cut from programs that focus on adult prisoner rehabilitation.

To cope with the cuts, Bengs said CDCR is moving ahead with what she described as a “streamlined rehabilitation model.”

“We’re trying to identify inmates much more carefully and trying to target our resources more effectively,” she said.

But, she added, “everyone wishes we still had our former budget.”

The irony of the cuts is that last week CDCR released a report showing that in-custody substance-abuse treatment significantly reduces prisoner recidivism, which, in California, hovers around 60 percent. Chronic recidivism is one of the reasons the state’s prison population has increased by 73 percent in the last two decades and partially why state prison spending has more than doubled since 2001. Drug use is cited as a main reason people land back in prison. A 2007 report by the Little Hoover Commission found that roughly two-thirds of prison inmates would benefit from substance-abuse treatment, but, at that point, only about 2 percent were receiving it. With the recent budget cuts, one-half of 1 percent of state prison inmates will have access to treatment.

The state needs to find a way to keep people from returning to prison, and fast. In August, a panel of federal judges ruled that by 2011, California must reduce its prison population to 110,000 inmates—40,000 fewer than the current population and 30,000 more than the system’s designed to hold.

A 1999 study, published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior, showed that among inmates who completed Amity’s Right Turn program, including the aftercare portion, only 14 percent ended up back in prison after two years. And, researchers found, “Positive program benefits were also found even for inmates who were ultimately reincarcerated.”

“It’s not a drug program,” Faucette said. “It’s not, like, ‘Here’s what drugs do to your brain.’ They’re learning about a lot of issues in terms of family, in terms of building community with each other, and when they leave prison, there’s a lot of focus on that, too. It’s not just about you taking care of yourself and being at some parolee flophouse. We’re dealing with these issues, like racism and prejudice and all of these things that are magnified in the prison system…. We don’t want that kind of culture brought into our communities.”

Dennis Malone, whom CityBeat featured in a 2007 story on prison reform, participated in—and later worked as a counselor for—the Amity program.

“Most people who went through the Amity program, they either stayed out a whole lot longer than most people or they really never went back,” Malone said. “The success rate was really off the charts. That’s why it’s unfortunate that those who control the money aren’t seeing that—they’re not seeing the great need to have programs that assist folks when they hit the street.”

The loss of the Amity program will affect SB 618, 2006 legislation that carved out funding for a pilot program at Donovan that focuses on helping inmates transition from prison to the community. The program is run out of the San Diego County District Attorney’s office.

“Studies show that inmates are far more likely to succeed if they receive treatment in prison with an aftercare component in the community,” said DA spokesperson Steve Walker. “There was a time when Amity was closed down for a while at [Donovan] and we were having a tougher time with our participants released in the community at that time because they weren’t treatment-oriented.”

A second piece of legislation aimed at curbing recidivism, SB 1453, is also being affected by budget cuts. Previously, inmates who enrolled in SB 1453 received in-custody treatment and were mandated, as a condition of parole, to follow up with residential aftercare. Parolees who completed five months of aftercare were discharged from parole. If aftercare ceases to be mandatory, said Alan Mobley, professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University, program participants are less likely to enroll.

“They [CDCR] know that the numbers of aftercare folks will drop in half when they make it voluntary,” Mobley said.

Aaron Edwards, a budget analyst focusing on criminal justice for the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, said the cuts CDCR is making now could have long-term consequences.

“Community treatment beds are comparatively much cheaper than the $50,000 a year cost of incarcerating parolees who are returned to prison,” Edwards said. “By drastically reducing the availability of community-based treatment for parolees, we run the risk of increasing correctional costs in the long run.”

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