California voters do not want to spend any more money on prisons and the Supreme Court has ordered the state to reduce its prison population. In either case, public safety was obviously not a consideration.
PRISONERS RELEASED AS STATES CUT SPENDING
By Christopher Palmeri
Bloomberg
July 20, 2011
Zackariah Lehnen, a 30-year-old transient, was paroled from a California prison in November after serving five months of a 16-month sentence for drug possession. He left under a program intended to reduce state costs by freeing nonviolent prisoners without supervision.
Six months later he was arrested and charged with murder in the torture and stabbing deaths of an 89-year-old man and a 27- year-old woman in a Los Angeles suburb, according to court documents. He’s in jail, with a plea hearing set for July 28.
Lehnen’s case, reminiscent of Willie Horton, the Massachusetts inmate who committed rape in 1987 after failing to return from a weekend pass, is an extreme illustration of the risks states face when they look to reduce prison spending by locking up fewer convicts.
“It’s a perfect example of what goes wrong when you prioritize saving money over public safety,” said Ted Lieu, a former military prosecutor who’s now a Democratic state senator from Torrance, in a telephone interview.
“We’re going to release more prisoners around the country,” former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, who heads the security consulting firm Kroll Inc., said in a telephone interview. “A large share of those being let out are going to be people who are clearly a danger to society.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered California to take 33,000 inmates out of prisons in two years to resolve overcrowding and substandard health-care. California runs the nation’s largest correctional system, with about 161,000 inmates.
Governor Jerry Brown, a 73-year-old Democrat, plans to meet the Supreme Court order by no longer admitting low-level offenders to state prison, leaving that responsibility to local law enforcement.
“The system of corrections itself is failing with a 70 percent recidivism rate, and at a cost of $50,000 per inmate, this is not a sustainable system,” Brown, who was previously the state attorney general, said in an April press conference. “The realignment plan is a very well-thought-out response to the problem.”
Lehnen, accused of the double murder in California, is an example of how the state’s system for sorting inmates by the risks they pose can fail, Lieu said. A month after his release from prison, Lehnen was in a state court in Beverly Hills, where he pleaded no contest to assault.
Though on parole at the time, and with prior convictions for spousal battery and drug possession, Lehnen was released again, unsupervised, on Dec. 23, court records show. Lehnen was given credit for time served and good behavior, according to court records.
“I don’t understand why he got the credits he did,” Steve Katz, a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, said in a telephone interview.
Lehnen met the criteria for unsupervised release in November because his most serious prior conviction was for drugs, according to Luis Patino, a spokesman for the state Corrections Department.
Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department medical records on file in the murder case indicate Lehnen has bipolar paranoid schizophrenia and takes medication.
Kathryn Doyle, the mother of Erica Escobar, the 27-year-old that Lehnen is charged with killing, said she is studying California’s changing parole process with the goal of preventing violent criminals from being released.
“I understand prisons are overcrowded and the inhuman treatment in them, but I don’t understand why my daughter’s dead,” Doyle said while choking back tears in a telephone interview. “I know she would want me to find out.”
“This guy was bipolar and supposed to be on psych meds -- who is making sure he takes his meds?” asked Doyle. “He’s not the only one. It’s a major concern.”
No comments:
Post a Comment