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Can Mental Health Courts Fix California’s Prison Overcrowding?

by PearlinGuthrie Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Passed in 1994, California’s “three strikes” law is the nation’s harshest sentencing law. Designed to imprison for life anyone who commits three violent crimes, the law has inadvertently resulted in the incarceration of a lot relatively harmless people, for a long time and at great public expense. Crimes that have earned people life sentences: Stealing a dollar in loose change from a car, breaking into a soup kitchen to steal food, stealing a jack from the open window of a tow truck, and even stealing two pairs of children’s shoes from Ross Dress for Less. The law is one reason that California’s prison system is dangerously, and unconstitutionally, overcrowded. More than 4,000 people in the prison system are serving life sentences for non-violent crimes.

In 2012, with corrections costs consuming ever more of the state budget, the voters in the state had had enough, and they approved a reform measure that would spring many of these low-level offenders from a lifetime of costly confinement. By August of last year, more than 1,000 inmates had their life sentences changed and were released; recidivisim rates for this group has also been extremely low. But further progress in the reform effort is being stymied by one thorny problem: Nearly half of the inmates serving time in California prisons suffer from a serious mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. So far, judges have been reluctant to let these folks out of their life sentences.

A new report from Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes project notes that the number of mentally ill prisoners denied relief from a life sentence is three times larger than those without a brain disease. The disparity largely stems from the fact that judges and juries tend to give people with brain diseases much harsher sentences to begin with.

Once in prison, their illnesses go untreated, and the prison conditions exacerbate their behavioral symptoms. As a result, they are at greater risk of getting in trouble for breaking prison rules and being sanctioned with severe disciplinary measures, including solitary confinement—a vicious cycle that can make their symptoms even worse, getting them in even more trouble. A long record of rule-breaking is one thing judges consider when weighing a request to reduce a life sentence under three-strikes reform, and a reason so many mentally ill people have been denied resentencing.

All of these factors are now driving a push in California to work harder to ensure that people with brain diseases don’t end up in the correctional system in the first place. Led by State Senator Darrell Steinberg and Stanford law professors who published the new report, the effort includes a call for more investment in mental health courts that focus on treatment rather than punishment. California currently has 40 such courts in 27 counties, and people like Steinberg think they should be expanded state-wide thanks to their effectiveness and cost-savings.

In 2006, Santa Clara County calculated $20 million in savings from its mental health court’s success in keeping mentally ill people out of prisons. Sacramento County saw the cost of keeping mentally ill people out of traditional courts fall 88 percent thanks to its mental health court. Other research has shown that the specialized courts also keep mentally ill people from cycling back into the justice system. Mentally ill people in Michigan’s mental health courts commit new crimes at a rate 300 percent lower than those who weren’t in those courts.

But money isn’t the only reason Steinberg wants to see mental health courts expanded. He notes in the Stanford report that this new approach “saves lives from being forsaken.” He invokes the moral cost of failing to treat sick people with compassion, and the tragedy of the lost human potential that occurs when the only place for a person with a brain disease today is in a prison.

Watch the video directed by Kelly Duane de la Vega and Kattie Galloway of Loteria Films (above) about the mental health courts that makes his point and shows just how powerful such venues can be in reclaiming lives and helping sick people return to normal functioning in the community.

All charts courtesy of Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes project

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Can Mental Health Courts Fix California’s Prison Overcrowding?

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Factory farms get even grosser

by CherieMartino Posted on April 29, 2014

Factory farms get even grosser

By

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Residents of some farming communities are being forced to put up with serious airborne bullshit.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reports on the growth of the revolting practice of using water irrigation systems to squirt manure over farmland.

So far, 14 of Wisconsin’s 258 dairy factory farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are using the practice, which involves spraying fine mists of dung out of commercial sprinklers. Nearly all of North Carolina’s hog farms do likewise. The practice is also used in Iowa, Michigan, and other Midwestern farming states. From the Wisconsin Watch report:

Applying liquid manure to fields using pipelines and farm irrigation systems is less expensive than trucking manure and applying it with traditional land-spreading rigs. …

The issue is tied inextricably to the controversial spread of CAFOs across the Wisconsin landscape. The farms produce overwhelming amounts of manure and have angered and frustrated nearby residents who feel they have little control over the growth and operations of the industrial farms. Cattle on Wisconsin farms produce as much waste each year as the combined populations of Tokyo and Mexico City, according to calculations by Gordon Stevenson, a retired former chief of the [Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s] runoff management section. …

Spraying manure doesn’t just sound gross. It poses real human health risks:

Some research suggests that the plethora of chemicals and pathogens found in liquid manure can have serious health impacts, ranging from respiratory disease to potentially lethal antibiotic resistant infections. Opponents fear wider use of manure irrigation will increase the risk of human illness …

[C]ritics and even some proponents of manure irrigation say the practice can threaten water supplies.

Backers defend the spraying by saying it helps farms more precisely place their manure on their land. But try selling that crap to Wisconsinite Scott Murray, who sold his home several years ago after he and his family could no longer stand the manure mist drifting over from a neighboring CAFO. “It even got into the walls of our home,” Murray said. “It hurt so bad even to breathe.”


Source
Manure spraying under scrutiny, Wisconsin Watch

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Factory farms get even grosser

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READ: Conspiracy Theorist Dick Morris Blasts Clinton Conspiracy Theorists in Unsealed ’95 Memo

by FredricHumphrey Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dick Morris, the one-time adviser to President Bill Clinton, has carved out a strange, multi-faceted career in recent years, engaging in questionable political dealings, pitching misguided punditry (he predicted Mitt Romney would win in a landslide in 2012), and peddling conspiracy theories. On his website, Morris argues that the CIA, FBI, and the mob were behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He co-wrote a book pushing right-wing conspiracy theories about the United Nations, international agencies, and the like. (“Black helicopters is the crazy word for the UN invading the United States,” Morris said in previewing the book. “But it’s really going to happen.”) He’s banged the IRS-scandal drum, insisting that Obama was secretly behind the agency’s supposed scrutiny of conservative groups. He pushed anti-Obama Benghazi theories. He backed Donald Trump’s birther talk.

Morris wasn’t always this, uh, unconventional. In fact, in a newly released memo from Clinton’s presidential archives, Morris advised the president to call out the conspiracy theorists of the 1990s and to combat the widespread right-wing paranoia of that time—the same sort of paranoia that Morris now exploits to make a buck.

Morris’ May 1995 memo offered comments on a speech Clinton was to give at Michigan State University. It was just two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing, and Morris urged the president to take a tough line against the right-wing militia crowd and those conservatives who had been asserting that the federal government was encroaching on their lives and eviscerating their civil liberties. Such incendiary rhetoric had been on the rise for several years, and the Oklahoma City attack was seen by some political observers as the culmination of this anti-government campaign.

“I’d propose tougher language,” Morris wrote. He suggested these lines: “How dare you say that the government is in a conspiracy to take your freedom. This is the government you helped elect and you can change… How dare you appropriate to your paranoid ways, our scared national symbols… How dare you invoke the Founding Fathers who created the elective government you claim as you persecutor.”

Clinton ended up using several of Morris’ suggestions in his speech. “How dare you suggest that we in the freest nation on earth live in tyranny?” Clinton asked. “How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes?”

Read the full memo:

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READ: Conspiracy Theorist Dick Morris Blasts Clinton Conspiracy Theorists in Unsealed ’95 Memo

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Here’s Some Stunning and Unexpected Good News About Obamacare

by JuliaPage Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today brings yet another take on Obamacare from Rand’s latest survey of the health insurance market. Rand’s sample size is fairly small, so there are large error bars associated with their numbers, but they also break them down in interesting ways. The number we’ve been tracking most closely in the other surveys on insurance is the number of uninsured who got coverage via Medicaid or the exchanges, which Rand displays in the top row of this table:

About 5 million previously uninsured people got coverage via Medicaid and the exchanges. This is slightly lower than other estimates, but only slightly. When you account for the March surge and the sub-26ers on their parents policies, you’re probably back up to about 8 million. We’ll have a better idea about this next month, but so far this is roughly consistent with other surveys we’ve seen.

But there’s one stunning number in the Rand survey that we haven’t seen before: the dramatic surge in people who have employer insurance (ESI). According to Rand, 8.2 million new people—7.2 million of them previously uninsured—have gotten employer insurance since mid-2013. Adrianna McIntyre is agog:

I can’t overstate how stunning this finding is if it’s true; CBO expected that ESI gains and losses would pretty much break even in 2014 and that employer coverage would decline modestly in future years.

If it’s correct, it was probably motivated multiple factors—I hate the word “synergy” on principle, but it comes to mind. The economy has been improving, so some of the previously unemployed have secured jobs with benefits. But CBO built in expectations about economic recovery, so I don’t think it’s quite right to try pinning all (or even most?) of the 8.2 million on that. The individual mandate, while weak in its first year, might be a stronger stick than we expected, nudging people to take their health benefits where they’d previously been opting out. Employers could be helping this move this trend along; the University of Michigan, for example, eliminated “opt out dollars” in 2014 (cash compensation for employees who declined coverage).

If this finding is confirmed, it’s a genuine shocker. Although CBO projected that ESI would stay steady, there’s been a lot of chatter about the likelihood of employers dropping coverage thanks to Obamacare. But that sure doesn’t seem to have happened. So in addition to the usual sources of coverage—Medicaid, exchanges, sub-26ers—it looks like Obamacare has yet another big success story to tell, one that was almost completely unexpected.

For now, this should all be considered tentative. We’ll have firmer numbers in April and May, once the March surge is fully accounted for and we know how many people have paid for coverage. But for now, it looks as if Obamacare is not merely hitting its target, but in a broadly unforeseen way, it’s wildly exceeding it. This is terrific news.

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Here’s Some Stunning and Unexpected Good News About Obamacare

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Michigan’s Gay Marriage Ban Struck Down Pending Appeal: See How Fast The Movement Is Spreading

by Rosaura19L Posted on March 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Update, Saturday, March 22, 2014, 5:05pm ET: A federal appeals court has issued a temporary stay of Judge Friedman’s ruling until the 26th. That means that the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Michigan is suspended until at least Wednesday.

Same-sex couples may soon be able to wed in Michigan, following a ruling by US District Judge Bernard Friedman finding the state’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has asked the courts to freeze Friedman’s ruling while the state pursues an appeal. Since December 2013, courts have also ruled against gay-marriage bans in Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, and Virginia.

The animated map below shows how marriage equality is spreading across the country. Read more about that here.

Molly Redden and Matt Connolly

Here’s the full text of Judge Friedman’s ruling:

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Michigan Marriage Equality Ruling (PDF)

Michigan Marriage Equality Ruling (Text)

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Michigan’s Gay Marriage Ban Struck Down Pending Appeal: See How Fast The Movement Is Spreading

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The Money Bracket: What If the Richest Team Won?

by TangelaCulpeppe Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Data from the US Department of Education

March Madness is big business. The tournament rakes in $1 billion in ad sales, $771 million in broadcast rights, and a countless amount in office pool payouts that you never win. (Players will make $0, though a select few are compensated in torn nylon.) Here’s what two NCAA tournament brackets would look like if teams advanced by measures other than points scored: total athletic revenue and total men’s basketball expenses per win this season.

How would the bracket look if it were based on funding for women’s teams?

Revenue
What’s amazing about filling out a bracket based on athletic department wealth (see above) is how similar it looks to a bracket based on real tournament predictions. The school with the least revenue, Mount St. Mary’s at $7.5 million, doesn’t even make it out of the play-in game with Albany (a result that mirrors real life). Deep-pocketed Texas emerges from a difficult region (Texas, Michigan, and Tennessee all have nine-figure revenues, with Louisville coming close) to take home the trophy.

Win Cost
By taking a school’s total men’s basketball expenses, we can figure out how much each team spent per win this season. North Carolina Central, with its relatively small budget and 28-5 record, spent only about $34,000 on each victory. (This ignores strength of schedule—wins in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference can be easier to come by than wins in a more powerful conference). On the other end, Ohio State took home the “least efficient” title, dropping more than $750,000 per win. Five other teams—Duke, Kentucky, Louisville, Syracuse, and Oklahoma State—also broke the half-million-per-victory mark.

Data from the US Department of Education

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The Money Bracket: What If the Richest Team Won?

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Europeans Unhappy Over High American Capital Standards

by Chadwick15O Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Fed has adopted rules that require foreign banks operating in the US to maintain the same capital standards as US banks. German bankers are unhappy about this:

In comments prepared for a speech in Berlin Monday, Andreas Dombret said that recent U.S. regulatory initiatives, “such as the enhanced standards for bank holding companies and foreign banking organizations, worry me. They seem to contradict the need for international cooperation.”

….The Fed recently approved new rules that force the largest international banks operating in America to establish U.S.-based “intermediate holding companies,” which will be subject to the same capital and liquidity requirements as domestic banks….European bankers have sharply criticized the move. “This is a considerable competitive handicap for European banks, as their U.S. competitors aren’t subject to any equivalent requirements in the EU,” said Michael Kemmer, head of the Association of German Banks last month.

Well, in that case, I recommend that the EU raise its capital standards and then subject American banks to it. Instead, last month they decided to ease leverage standards. I guess they’ve already forgotten what things looked like back in 2010. In case you have too, the chart on the right tells the story.

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Europeans Unhappy Over High American Capital Standards

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Let’s Please Put the Myth of the Iron-Willed Putin to Rest Once and For All

by Giuseppe4532 Posted on March 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here is Doyle McManus today:

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, one of his selling points was the promise of a more modest foreign policy than that of his predecessor. And when Obama won reelection 16 months ago, he renewed that pledge….Mitt Romney warned at the time that Obama wasn’t being tough enough on Vladimir Putin, but the president scoffed at the idea that Russia was a serious geopolitical threat.

It’s not quite fair to accuse Obama of direct responsibility for Putin’s occupation of Crimea, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other hawkish critics have. After all, Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, when George W. Bush was president, and no one accused Bush of excessive diffidence in defending American interests.

But it’s still worth asking: Has Obama’s downsizing of U.S. foreign policy gone too far?

This stuff is driving me crazy. Later in the piece, McManus mentions Obama’s Middle East policy, and I suppose that’s fair game: Obama really has downsized our military footprint there. Personally, I’m just fine with a president who conducts foreign policy in the interests of the United States, regardless of whether Israel and Saudi Arabia approve, but I suppose your mileage may vary. Feel free to argue about it.

But it’s nuts to talk about Ukraine the same way. Putin didn’t invade Crimea because the decadent West was aimlessly sunning itself on a warm beach somewhere. He invaded Crimea because America and the EU had been vigorously promoting their interests in a country with deep historical ties to Russia. He invaded because his hand-picked Ukrainian prime minister was losing, and the West was winning. He invaded because he felt that he had been outplayed by an aggressive geopolitical opponent and had run out of other options.

None of this justifies Putin’s actions. But to suggest that he was motivated by weakness in US foreign policy is flatly crazy. He was motivated by fear; by shock over the speed of events in Kiev; by a sense of betrayal when the February 21 agreement collapsed; by nationalistic fervor; by domestic political considerations; by provocative actions from the new Ukrainian parliament; by an increasing insularity among his inner circle; and by just plain panic.

The one thing he wasn’t motivated by was US weakness. Can we at least get that much straight?

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Let’s Please Put the Myth of the Iron-Willed Putin to Rest Once and For All

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Obamacare Rate Shock Probably Affects Less Than 1 Percent of the Country

by JaimieBusey Posted on March 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Like most human beings, I love it when I turn out to be right. Or even when someone provides evidence that I might be right. So naturally I’m thrilled that a pair of researchers have confirmed my horseback estimate that 1-2 million people may have suffered from canceled policies and rate shock during the introduction of Obamacare.

How did they go about it? Well, it’s really hard to use raw number crunching to figure out how many people in the individual health care market had their policies canceled. Clean data just doesn’t exist. But there’s a way to cut through this Gordian Knot: just ask people. In December 2013, the Health Reform Monitoring Survey did just that, and concluded that about 18.6 percent of those with individual health insurance reported that their policies were no longer being offered to them. The best estimate we have is that about 14 million people had individual policies last year, which means that 2.6 million people faced cancellation:

Many whose non-group policy was cancelled appear to be eligible for Marketplace subsidies or Medicaid….While our sample size of those with non-group health insurance who report that their plan was cancelled due to ACA compliance is small (N=123), we estimate that over half of this population is likely to be eligible for coverage assistance, mostly through Marketplace subsidies. Consistent with these findings, other work by Urban Institute researchers estimated that slightly more than half of adults with pre-reform nongroup coverage would be eligible for Marketplace subsidies or Medicaid.

So that means about 1.3 million people had their policies canceled and had to pay full freight for a new policy. Since the error bars on this estimate are fairly large, that comes out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2 million people. In other words, less than 1 percent of the country, mostly made up of people with incomes that are higher than average.

You can decide for yourself if this is a lot or a little. My own take is that it’s pretty modest given that Obamacare probably benefits about 20-30 million people. Any big new piece of policy is going to have winners and losers, and a ratio of 20:1 or so is about as good as it gets in the real world.

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Obamacare Rate Shock Probably Affects Less Than 1 Percent of the Country

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George Bush Lost an Entire Generation for the Republican Party

by WDURorycdmmnca Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Pew has released a new survey about the social and political attitudes of various generations, and it makes for interesting reading. The thing that strikes me the most is just how clear the trends are. Each successive generation is more politically independent; more religiously independent; less likely to be married in their 20s; less trusting of others; less likely to self-ID as patriotic; and less opposed to gay rights. There’s virtually no overlap at all. It’s just a smooth, straight progression.

But the single most interesting chart in the report is one that doesn’t show this smooth progression. You’ve probably seen this before from other sources, but the chart on the right basically shows that for the past 40 years voting patterns haven’t differed much by age. In fact, there’s virtually no difference between generations at all until you get to the George Bush era. At that point, young voters suddenly leave the Republican Party en masse. Millennials may be far less likely than older generations to say there’s a big difference between Republicans and Democrats, but their actual voting record belies that.

Whatever it was that Karl Rove and George Bush did—and there are plenty of possibilities, ranging from Iraq to gays to religion—they massively alienated an entire generation of voters. Sure, they managed to squeak out a couple of presidential victories, but they did it at the cost of losing millions of voters who will probably never fully return. This chart is their legacy in a nutshell.

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George Bush Lost an Entire Generation for the Republican Party

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