California's sentencing and parole problems

A reader thoughtfully pointed me to this recent commentary from the Los Angeles Times by Professors Joan Petersilia and Robert Weisberg entitled "Parole in California: It's a crime."   Here are a few snippets from an interesting read:

California's prison system is reeling. The corrections chief and his acting replacement have both quit in the last two months . But a major cause of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's growing dysfunctionality has nothing to do with how it runs its prisons and administers parole.  Rather, it's the state's laws that determine the lengths of prison terms and inmate-release policies....

[M]any dangerous prisoners on parole receive too little monitoring, are released from parole too early and commit serious new crimes, while many non-dangerous ex-convicts stay on parole too long, wasting the state's resources, and are sent back to prison for trivial reasons.

There are three main reasons for California's high recidivism rate: illconceived sentencing laws, rigid parole practices and an inexcusable neglect of programs to help prisoners adapt to life on the outside....

Given the inefficiencies of how we sentence and imprison our criminals, the wonder is that our inmate population and prison costs aren't greater.  But there's no denying that our high recidivism rate wastes human opportunity and disrupts family life in unquantifiable ways.  New leadership at the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will help some.  Reforming the state's determinate sentencing law will do even more.