The Informant

Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.

The LA Times opines that the state’s recent decision to let mothers incarcerated for non-violent, non-serious crimes out of prison early is akin to having them “plead the belly.” Never heard the term? Apparently, under English common law (when the death penalty was still in effect), women could ask that their execution be stayed if and while they were pregnant–leading, allegedly, to women lying about being pregnant to avoid death. The state’s new policy, which is expected to extend to fathers as well, is no less bizarre, the Times writes:

We understand the rationale for all this. Families are thought to exert a stabilizing influence on former inmates, making them less likely to commit further crimes. The state is under a federal court order to cut its prison population by at least 30,000 before July 2013, forcing officials to find creative solutions to a very difficult problem. Data show that kids are better off living with their actual parents, even when those parents are convicted felons, than they would be in the foster care system.

But that comes with a caveat: If the newly released inmates don’t get the public assistance they need in the form of housing, drug-rehab programs, child welfare and other services, their kids could end up worse off. Moreover, from a fairness standpoint it’s very hard to justify giving reduced sentences to people simply because they’re parents, when the same opportunity isn’t given to non-parents convicted of identical or lesser crimes.

The Sacramento Bee points out that administratively, the program will be hard to carry out:

Two inmates who had been prescreened for release were unable to secure suitable home placements. In one case, the father in the home had a gun collection that he was unwilling to give up. In the other, the mother didn’t want her daughter back in the home.

But the Bee argues the program is worthwhile nonetheless–a policy that uniquely targets the community ripples of incarceration rather than simply focusing on freeing up space in the system. Over half of the women in prison in California have children, and the relatively remote women’s prisons afford few chances for children to visit their incarcerated mothers.

Most strikingly, the fact that the Times had to reach back to 1300s England for an analogy shows how rare this sort of policy is–one that uses a concept of social good rather than justice or fairness as an underlying principle.