This report concludes that overall, Corrections¿ payments for hospital care services have risen $59.4 million from FY1998-99 through 2002-03, and grew at an average rate of 21% per year, outpacing the nat. consumer price index average of 8% annual growth for hospital services during this same period. The reasons for this growth can be attributed to the combination of more expensive health care and to Corrections¿ increased use of contracted hospital facilities. Analysis indicates that increases in its inpatient hospital payments are driven primarily by more expensive services, whereas increases in its outpatient hospital payments are driven by increases in both the price of services and number of hospital visits. Charts and tables.
Corrections¿ expenditures increased by 32% in the past 3 years to $10 billion; however, its ability to determine the impact various factors such as overcrowding, the transition of the health care function to a fed. court-appointed receiver, escalating overtime costs, and the presence of aging inmates have on the cost of its operations is limited by a lack of information. Nearly 25% of California¿s inmate population is incarcerated under the three strikes law, which requires individuals to serve longer terms. This report estimates that the increase in sentence length for inmates incarcerated under the three strikes law will cost the State $19.2 billion for the additional time these inmates are sentenced to serve. Charts and tables.
'This voluminous reference is, indeed, a handbook...But what distinguishes the collection is not its breadth but its continuity.' -- American Bar Foundation Research Journal, 1981
Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award An incisive look at how evangelical Christians shaped—and were shaped by—the American criminal justice system. America incarcerates on a massive scale. Despite recent reforms, the United States locks up large numbers of people—disproportionately poor and nonwhite—for long periods and offers little opportunity for restoration. Aaron Griffith reveals a key component in the origins of American mass incarceration: evangelical Christianity. Evangelicals in the postwar era made crime concern a major religious issue and found new platforms for shaping public life through punitive politics. Religious leaders like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson mobilized fears of lawbreaking and concern for offenders to sharpen appeals for Christian conversion, setting the stage for evangelicals who began advocating tough-on-crime politics in the 1960s. Building on religious campaigns for public safety earlier in the twentieth century, some preachers and politicians pushed for “law and order,” urging support for harsh sentences and expanded policing. Other evangelicals saw crime as a missionary opportunity, launching innovative ministries that reshaped the practice of religion in prisons. From the 1980s on, evangelicals were instrumental in popularizing criminal justice reform, making it a central cause in the compassionate conservative movement. At every stage in their work, evangelicals framed their efforts as colorblind, which only masked racial inequality in incarceration and delayed real change. Today evangelicals play an ambiguous role in reform, pressing for reduced imprisonment while backing law-and-order politicians. God’s Law and Order shows that we cannot understand the criminal justice system without accounting for evangelicalism’s impact on its historical development.
Despite 15 years of reform efforts, the incarceration rate in the United States remains unprecedentedly high. This book provides the first comprehensive survey of these reforms and explains why they have proven to be ineffective. After many decades of stability, the imprisonment rate in the United States quintupled between 1973 and 2003. Since then, nearly all states have adopted multiple reforms intended to reduce imprisonment, but the U.S. imprisonment rate has only decreased by a paltry 2 percent. Why have American sentencing reforms since 2000 been largely ineffective? Are tough mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders the primary reason our prisons are always full? This book offers a fascinating assessment of the wave of sentencing reforms adopted by dozens of states as well as changes at the federal level since 2000, identifying common themes among seemingly disparate changes in sentencing policy and highlighting recent reform efforts that have been more successful and may point the way forward for the nation as a whole. In The Failed Promise of Sentencing Reform, Michael O'Hear exposes the myths that American prison sentencing reforms enacted in the 21st century have failed to have the expected effect because U.S. prisons are filled to capacity with nonviolent drug offenders as a result of the "war on drugs" or because of new laws that took away the discretion of judges and corrections officials. O'Hear then makes a convincing case for the real reasons sentencing reforms have come up short: because they exclude violent and sexual offenders, and because they rely on the discretion of officials who still have every incentive to be highly risk-averse. He also highlights how overlooking the well-being of offenders and their families in our consideration of sentencing reform has undermined efforts to effect real change.
