Source: https://civilrights.org/resource/vote-no-first-step-act/
Timestamp: 2019-09-16 06:26:20
Document Index: 39068968

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 13632', '§ 404', '§ 498', '§ 42', '§ 57', '§ 15', '§ 2967']

Vote “No” on The FIRST STEP Act - The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the 74 undersigned organizations, we urge you to vote “No” on the FIRST STEP Act that will be considered during the mark up. Any effort to pass prison reform (or “back-end” reform) legislation without including sentencing reform (or “front-end” reform) will not meaningfully improve the federal system. Across the country, states that have enacted legislation containing both front and back end reforms have reduced rates of incarceration and crime.[1] Any legislation that addresses only back end reforms is doomed to fail in achieving these goals. Without changes to sentencing laws that eliminate mandatory minimums, restore judicial discretion, reduce the national prison population, and mitigate disparate impacts on communities of color, the FIRST STEP Act alone will have little impact. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights plans to include your position on The FIRST STEP Act in our voting scorecard for the 115th Congress.
The FIRST STEP Act, as introduced, would exclude too many in people in federal prisons from receiving time credits for participating in the rehabilitative programs authorized by the bill. The long list of exclusions in the bill sweep in, for example, those convicted of certain immigration offenses and drug offenses.[2] Because immigration and drug offenses account for 53.3 percent of the total federal prison population,[3] many people could be excluded from utilizing the time credits they earned after completing programming. Furthermore, these exclusions could also have a disparate impact on racial minorities, since the majority of those held in federal prison for immigration and drug offenses are people of color.[4] Any person who will return to our communities from prison someday should get time credit incentives for completing rehabilitative programs. Any reforms enacted by Congress should impact a significant number of people in federal prison and reduce racial disparities or they will have little effect on the fiscal and human costs of incarceration.
Moreover, the purported incentives towards rehabilitation are not real or meaningful. The FIRST STEP Act’s earned time credits are not real time off a sentence, but more time in a halfway house or home confinement.[5] This is inadequate. Limited space already reduces the amount of time individuals can spend in halfway houses. Recent closures of residential reentry centers have further exacerbated the problem, making it unlikely that people will be able to use all the “time” they earn under the bill. [6] Existing programs have been successful precisely because they provide real time off of an individual’s sentence. For example, the residential drug abuse program (RDAP) provides a one-year sentence reduction to those who complete the program. However, RDAP currently faces a 5,000 person wait list due to limited resources. Additionally, home confinement is rarely used by the Bureau of Prisons[7] and the bill eliminates the option of community supervision altogether. For the incentive structure to be real, earned time credits must equate to an actual reduction in sentence to encourage individuals to engage in rehabilitative programming. Such a real incentive structure would result in fiscal savings. For example, if only one in nine individuals earned 60 days of credit in a year, $100 million in savings would be realized. Congress should be following the model of RDAP in any prison reform and give people real time off their sentences, not a promise of more of something they already cannot get.
The FIRST STEP Act is unlikely to reduce recidivism because it focuses time credit incentives for completing rehabilitative programs on minimum- and low-risk category prisoners who need less rehabilitation and intervention and who likely shouldn’t have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the first place, not on medium- and high-risk prisoners who are more in need of the incentives to complete programs. Only minimum- and low-risk category prisoners can “cash in” the time credit incentives they earn, and these prisoners are able to earn more time credits than medium- and high-risk prisoners. This approach is not evidence-based. Data has demonstrated that effectively reducing recidivism requires focusing programs, jobs, and real and meaningful incentives on those most likely, not least likely, to reoffend. While the bill rightly attempts to incentivize participation in rehabilitation programs, it wrongly ties those credit incentives to an individual’s risk category. Conversely, state correctional systems typically award time credits based on performance and/or disciplinary record, not a risk and needs assessment and according to research these systems should be used to identify appropriate correctional interventions, not to set the length of prison sentences. Ultimately, the bill takes a flawed and untested approach that is unlikely to reduce recidivism – a result that could dissuade future prison reforms and embolden critics of reform who believe that “nothing works.”
Instead of this approach, earned time credits should vest at the end of each year, which will enable BOP to adjust sentences automatically and incentivize participation in recidivism reduction programs. In particular, we recommend that individuals at any risk level should be eligible to earn ten days of earned time credit for every 30 days of programming completed, vesting at the end of each year. Earned time credits that lead to actual sentence reductions – earlier release from confinement altogether – are powerful incentives for participation and meaningful rewards for individuals committed to their personal rehabilitation and reentry.[8] Automatic adjustments would eliminate delays in prerelease, decrease court costs, and allow BOP and courts to focus their time elsewhere.
Using a risk assessment system to determine time credits is novel and untested. State correctional systems typically award time credits based on performance and/or disciplinary record, not a risk assessment. Research shows that risk assessments often do not accurately predict risk and risk assessments often classify many people as high risk who do not reoffend. One study showed that only 52 percent of those assessed as moderate or high risk by risk assessment tools went on to commit any offense, meaning that almost half of all persons classified as moderate or high risk were actually low risk. Another study found that risk assessments were no better at predicting recidivism than regular human beings provided with the same information.[9] An assessment of the tool used by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the Federal Post Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA), found that 58 percent of offenders on probation or supervised release classified by the PCRA as high risk are not re-arrested. Risk assessments do not predict the recidivism risk of any person; they only roughly group people into a limited number of categories. When risk and needs assessment evaluations are adopted, they are typically used by states to identify programming for people in prison, rather than to award time credits.[10]
Finally, relying on a risk assessment tool for earning time credits could amplify racial disparities and perpetuate other injustices in the criminal justice system. Studies have shown that these tools can produce results that are heavily biased against Black defendants and have a disparate negative impact on African Americans.[11] Risk assessments rely on static factors, including criminal history and age at the time of the offense, and dynamic factors, including work history and educational achievement. Both static and dynamic factors tend to correlate with socioeconomic class and race, and studies show that African Americans are more likely to be misclassified as high risk than White or Hispanic offenders. Therefore, although risk assessments may seem objective or neutral, the data driving many predictive algorithms is profoundly limited and biased. Furthermore, decades of criminology research has shown that such data primarily documents the behavior and decisions of police officers and prosecutors, rather than the individuals or groups that the data is claiming to describe.
The federal prison system’s method of calculating earned credit reduces a prisoner’s sentence to a maximum credit of 47 days per year – below the 54 days that Congress intended. This decision results in unnecessary increases in time served by prisoners, at significant cost. The FIRST STEP Act attempts to fix the good time credit calculation, such that prisoners would receive 54 days of good time credit per year, not 47 days, for following prison rules, which is a prospective fix only. Further, many have suggested that this fix could immediately impact 4,000 individuals if made retroactive, however this number has not been verified. According to a BOP calculation done over a decade ago, approximately 4,000 people could be eligible for release within a year, not on the first day of implementation.[12] While the “good time fix” is a much needed, positive reform, which should become law, this provision alone is not enough to overcome our overwhelming concerns with the core of the bill as outlined above.
[2] See FIRST STEP Act. 115th Cong. § 13632(d)(4)(D)(xlii), (xliii), (2018).
[5] See FIRST STEP Act, 115th Cong. § 404(a)(1)(A) (2018).
[8] For example, participation in the BOP’s residential drug abuse program (RDAP) results in a one-year sentence reduction and has had as many as 7,000 people on its waiting list. See American Bar Association. (n.d.). Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP). Retrieved from https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/individual_rights/Ch 3-RDAP.authcheckdam.pdf.
[9] See Walrath, Rowan. “Software Used to Make “Life-Altering” Decisions Is No Better Than Random People at Predicting Recidivism.” Mother Jones. Jan. 2018. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/01/compas-software-racial-bias-inaccurate-predicting-recidivism/
[10] See, e.g., Tex. Gov’t Code § 498.002 (classifying inmates’ “time-earning category” based on factors other than risk assessment); R.I. Gen. Laws § 42-56-24 (determining amount of sentence credit based on factors other than risk assessment); Okla. Stat. § 57-138 (same); N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-1340.18 (same); Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2967.193 (same)
[11] See, e.g., Skeem, J. & Lowenkamp, C. (2015). Risk, Race & Recidivism: Predictive Bias and Disparate Impact. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2687339.
[12] The U.S. Supreme Court upheld BOP’s methodology against a challenge brought by inmate petitioners.41 However, BOP officials told us that the agency was supportive of amending the statute, and had submitted a legislative proposal to Congress such that 54 days would be provided for each year of the term of imprisonment originally imposed by the judge, which would result in inmates serving 85 percent of their sentence.42 BOP provided us estimates in December 2011 showing that if the GCT credit allowance was increased by 7 days, as proposed, BOP could save over $40 million in the first fiscal year after the policy change from the early release of about 3,900 inmates. As of December 2011, the legislative proposal had not been introduced on the floors of the House or Senate.