New Jersey spends $90 million a year to incarcerate probation violators, despite no new crimes • New Jersey Monitor

About 1,200 people in New Jersey prisons on any given day are parolees who were brought back to prison, not for committing new crimes, but for missing curfews, relapsing into addiction, not check with your parole officer or break other conditions of your condition. parole

They stay behind bars for months, sometimes years, collectively costing taxpayers about $90 million a year, or nearly $250,000 every day. If state officials stop reincarcerating people for violating their parole conditions, known as “technical parole violations,” they could shut down an entire prison, critics say.

“We’ve done a lot in New Jersey to address mass incarceration, but instead we have mass oversight. Extensive parole conditions breed parole violators. But you’re not increasing public safety by imprisoning people with technical parole violations probation,” said Joseph Russo, director of the state Office of the Public Defender’s probation revocation and sentencing unit. “It’s a punitive model of probation supervision.”

Now, Russo and other advocates are calling on state parole officials and lawmakers to stop relying on re-incarceration as a “knee-jerk response” to technical parole violators and instead keep people in the community while addressing underlying reasons why they violate probation.

“If probation was built as a useful entity instead of a monitoring entity, I think we would be much more successful,” said Bonnie Kerness, coordinator of the Prison Oversight Program at the Friends of the States Service Committee united

Both Russo and Kerness have issued reports urging policymakers to act on the issue.

Although lawmakers didn’t bite, Gov. Phil Murphy indicated he would act. In his February budget proposal, he included funding for a consultant to develop a tool that state parole boards could use to weigh the seriousness of a violation and the offender’s level of risk, as well as “determine the appropriate intermediate sanctions that can limit the overuse of revocation,” Murphy wrote.

A spokeswoman for Murphy said Thursday that the administration is working on the issue now.

“In addition to legislation signed last year to provide public defender representation at parole revocation hearings, this year’s enacted budget allocates $1 million to a consultant who will assist in the development of new tools for help streamline the Parole Board’s parole violation review process that allows us to keep our communities safe and prevent people from returning to prison unnecessarily,” said Murphy spokeswoman Maggie Gabarino. .

The parole board reincarcerates 80 percent of inmates who violate parole, even though it costs more than 10 times more — $74,750 a year, on average — to incarcerate someone than to supervise them on parole in the community, which costs about $6,351 per person. a year, state budget documents show.

Those pushing for the change say the reincarceration of technical parole violators also threatens to undo the progress New Jersey has made in reducing its prison population.

Department of Corrections data show the number of people New Jersey holds in state prisons, juvenile detention centers and halfway houses has dropped 55 percent in the past two decades, from nearly 29,000 in 2000 to about 13,000 this year.

The downward trend came after lawmakers expanded community-based restorative justice programs, decriminalized some low-level crimes like marijuana use and possession, allowed judges to release defendants without bail in cash and posted scores during the pandemic to slow contagions. Murphy also launched a new clemency program in June, aimed at potentially pardoning thousands of New Jerseyans now in and out of jails and prisons.

A spokeswoman for the parole board did not respond to questions from the New Jersey Monitor about the issue.

Criminalize addiction and poverty?

Most people violate the terms of their probation because they use drugs or alcohol, move without notifying their probation officer, fail to report to required registrations, and fail to complete a rehabilitation or mental health program, according to Russo and the testimony that probation officers gave during state budget hearings.

But, Russo added, re-incarceration shouldn’t be the penalty, especially since these violations often stem from poverty, addiction, unaffordable housing, lack of transportation and other challenges people endure in the weeks and months after being released from prison.

“We shouldn’t criminalize addiction. We shouldn’t criminalize housing insecurity,” he said.

Al-Tariq Witcher, an Avenal resident who runs a citizen support group returning to Newark, remembers how difficult it was to comply with some of his probation conditions when he was paroled in 1995.

“Probation wanted me to report in the middle of the day, during the time I was supposed to be working,” Witcher said. “I’m like, ‘I can’t leave work to come report. First of all, I don’t drive. I trust public transport. I just came home after eight years of service and I can’t leave my job. So that became a contentious situation with me and my probation officer.”

Bureaucracy and burdensome parole conditions, as well as the threat of re-incarceration, make some incarcerated people reluctant to be paroled, Witcher added.

“We have people in prison who actually say, ‘I’m going to stay a few more months instead of dealing with probation,'” he said.

The parole problem is compounded by the parole board’s months-long delays in holding final revocation hearings, Russo said. Most people arrested for technical parole violations are sent back to prison before the board has confirmed a violation has occurred and warrants reincarceration, he said. That means some inmates spend months behind bars, even if the parole board ultimately finds them not guilty of violating their parole.

“Even if they win, they lose, because they’ve been incarcerated for four or five months before the matter is finally resolved,” Russo said.

In that time, they can lose jobs, housing and relationships, erasing any progress they had made since their initial release, he added.

While reformers wait to see what the Murphy administration does on the issue, they hope it will follow New York’s lead. State lawmakers there passed the Less Is More Community Supervision Repeal Reform Act of 2021. That law, which took effect in March 2022, limited the penalties that probation violators faced technical condition.

The caseload of probation officers fell by 40 percent and 13,000 people completed probation before that law passed, according to an analysis by a coalition of lawyers who support the law. Some critics, however, recently called for the law to be withdrawn after a paroled murderer escaped and returned to the community where he had raped and murdered his victim in 1999. He was later sentenced to seven days in jail for violate probation.

But Russo and Witcher said New Jersey policymakers could also act in other ways to make parole fairer and increase the odds of successful reentry.

Russo urged parole officials to consider specialized training for some parole officers to better deal with people with mental health disorders, just as the state has invested in helping police officers respond better to people in mental crisis.

Witcher called on corrections officials to help people save more money behind bars to ensure a smoother transition back into the community when they are released. The state Department of Corrections recently increased the wages incarcerated people are paid for prison work after at least two decades of stagnant wages. Most still earn just a few dollars a day, Witcher said.

“People inside should be able to save more money before they go home because they don’t really have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of when they go out,” Witcher said. “That would prevent some of the parole violations, because people would go home with a little more cushion to land on.”