How should advocates for reduced prison populations respond to deadly actions by released violent offenders?
In response to recent posts about clemency here and about reducing prison populations here, commentator federalist has flagged two local stories of violent offenders released after relatively short periods of incarceration gong on to commit murder. One story, out of Atlanta, and is discussed in this newspaper piece under the headlined "‘Visionary’ didn’t keep promises to help violent teenager." Here is a snippet:
One day last August, Gwendolyn Sands stood before a Fulton County judge and promised to rehabilitate a teenage boy already well on his way to a life of violence.... Her organization, Visions Unlimited, would pair the boy with a “life coach” for “24/7 supervision,” Sands told the judge. Her staff would instruct the boy in life skills, career readiness and the perils of street gangs. They would hold “family support” meetings every month — “and more often,” Sands said, “as necessary.”
Later, she would even agree to take the boy into her own home. It seemed the only way to shelter him from the streets where he had stuck a pistol in a woman’s face and robbed her.
But Sands kept almost none of her promises to transform Jayden Myrick. Now Myrick is charged with murder, accused of shooting 34-year-old Christian Broder during a robbery on July 8 outside Atlanta’s Capital City Club. Broder, an Atlanta native who lived in Washington, D.C., died July 20. He left behind a wife and an infant daughter. And, at 17, Myrick faces life in prison — the very outcome the judge had hoped Sands would help prevent....
Fulton Superior Court Judge Doris Downs, who twice released Myrick into Sands’ custody, declined to comment. Other court officials would not answer questions about why Downs or other judges trusted Visions Unlimited or whether they vetted Sands’ credentials. In a statement, Chief Judge Robert McBurney deflected responsibility for monitoring the performance of such organizations.
Another story, out of San Francisco, is discussed in this CNN piece headlined "Officials still don't know why a white man allegedly stabbed a black woman to death in a subway station." Here is an excerpt:
Nia Wilson was standing on a Bay Area Rapid Transit station platform in Oakland, California, Sunday night when she was stabbed to death in an apparently unprovoked attack.
By Monday night, John Cowell, 27, had been arrested in connection to the stabbing, but days later, officials still haven't said what prompted the attack, which a police chief compared to a "prison yard assault."...
Cowell was convicted of second-degree robbery and assault with a deadly weapon in 2016, according to the criminal complaint. He was paroled in May after being sentenced to two years in prison for second-degree robbery, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation....
Cowell's family released a statement extending its sympathy to Wilson's, and said Cowell had long been suffering from mental illness. "He has been in & out of jail & has not had the proper treatment," the statement said. He's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, the family said, and they had to get a restraining order at one point "for our own protection." Cowell's been living on the streets since.
In one comment, federalist not unreasonably asks "How, Doug, do we prevent mistakes like Judge Downs'?". I do not have a fully satisfying answer: judges are imperfect at gauging risk, and the only certain way to prevent any and all released offenders from ever committing any serious future crimes is to never release any of them in the first place. I am drawn to using actuarial risk-assessments in our criminal justice system because such tools should help reduce mistakes in forecasts of future violent behavior, but there still will be mistakes (and violent consequences) even with the use of (inevitably imperfect) risk-assessment instruments.
As an advocate of various modern criminal justice reforms, I am in this context eager to (a) lament that we do not have been juvenile and prison programming to better rehabilitate violent persons, and (b) note that modern mass incarceration is the result of many "mistakes" of over-incarceration. But these statements provide cold comfort to anyone reasonably inclined to call the tragic deaths of Christian Broder and Nia Wilson entirely preventable if we had just "gotten tough" with Jayden Myrick and John Cowell.
Another move, of course, is to stress that modern sentencing reform efforts are or should be particularly focused on non-violent offenses and offenders. But sensible folks arguing for dramatic reductions in our prison populations rightly say that violent offenders should not be excluded from efforts to reduce reliance on incarceration, and there is also recidivism data showing that some non-violent offenders will go on to commit subsequent violent offenses.
So, dear readers, is there a "good" answer to the question in the title of this post?
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