Cats Are Obliterating Florida's Endangered Wood Rats
Scientists had hoped a captive breeding program could save the Key Largo wood rat—but even that is unlikely to work.
In tales of the cat and the rat, society has almost always taken the side of the cat. That has largely continued to be the case in Key Largo, Fla.—with disastrous results for wildlife. The Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge there is one of Florida’s last remaining stands of hardwood hammock forest and home to two highly endangered mammal subspecies—the Key Largo wood rat and the Key Largo cotton mouse.Right next door to the refuge is a gated community called the Ocean Reef Club, largely developed since the 1960s. Many of its wealthy residents believe they have a right not just to let their own cats roam free but also to feed and care for stray or feral cats in the area. The home owners have maintained that cats do no damage and that roaming free is simply natural for cats. Camera traps have repeatedly shown the cats climbing onto the wood rats’ nests, waiting, and leaping to the attack. Even talking about the effect of house cats on native wild rats has, however, become such an emotional issue that a new study in the journal Biological Conservation carefully avoids ever even mentioning the word “cat.”
Instead, University of Florida wildlife ecologist Robert McCleery and his coauthors focus on the elaborate efforts people have made to save the wood rat from extinction, in spite of the cats. Their results suggest that what had seemed to be the best hope for recovery—a captive breeding and release program—may offer no hope at all.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began taking wood rats from the wild in 2002, to establish the first captive breeding colony of the species, at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. Disney’s Animal Kingdom later established a second colony. The Key Largo wood rats are about as charismatic as rats get, cinnamon colored and with big, glossy black eyes. Disney featured an educational program for children about them as part of its tourist attraction in Orlando.
- But according to the new study, both programs eventually failed. The Key Largo wood rats lived far longer in captivity—three years versus an average of less than a year in the wildlife. So the reasonable assumption was that the population would grow faster in captivity than in the wild. That has been the case in the past for two flagship efforts to save endangered species—the California condor and the black-footed ferret. But Key Largo wood rats did not breed well in captivity, with fewer than half the females ever giving birth.
For McCleery and his coauthors, the chief lesson from the experience is that it's essential to establish beforehand whether the probable benefits of a proposed captive breeding program outweigh the immediate loss caused by removing animals from the wild. That is, does computer modeling with the best available information indicate that captive breeding has a reasonable chance of expanding the existing population? Or could it move a species closer to extinction, as seems to have happened with the Key Largo wood rat?
According to staff biologist Sandra Sneckenberger, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to use McCleery’s recommendations in the near future, as it decides whether to establish a captive breeding program in the Everglades for the Florida grasshopper sparrow, said to be the most endangered bird in the continental U.S. “Looking at both removals and releases at the same time and modeling different scenarios is a smart approach,” she said.
The other big lesson from the Key Largo wood rat experience is the one McCleery and his coauthors avoid: Even the best-planned and -funded recovery effort cannot protect any small species if people continue to feed and protect a large population of an introduced killer such as the house cat right next door.
FWS has attempted to deal with the problem diplomatically. It traps cats on the refuge and delivers them to nearby animal shelters. The shelters return identifiable cats to their owners, then neuter and release the unclaimed cats.
Ocean Reef Club says “trap neuter release” has caused a “dramatic” decrease in its cat population, to 350 feral cats. But those cats just return to the wildlife refuge to kill.
Once captured, many of the cats become trap-shy, making recapture difficult, according to refuge manager Jeremy Dixon. But the same animals turn up again and again on camera traps. To protect the wood rats, FWS now builds artificial nests fortified against attack. It also sends out letters to owners of recognized cats warning them that they risk fines for harassing an endangered species. So far FWS has not fined anyone, nor has it made a politically risky stand against the failed practice of “trap neuter release.”
The new study estimates that 78 to 693 Key Largo wood rats remain in the wild. Will this subspecies go extinct? It depends on whether humans, who arrived in Key Largo only recently in the grand scheme of things, decide that an animal with tens of thousands of years of evolutionary history in the habitat has a right to continue surviving there, and that Key Largo will be a better place for having it. (Among other functions, wood rats play a key role in distributing seeds around the hardwood hammock forest, speeding recovery after hurricanes or other disasters.) But plenty of precedent says Key Largo wood rats should not count on our protection.
Meatless Mondays: Fried Potato Dumplings With Baby Kale
Because everyone needs a new way to cook spuds and greens in the dead of winter.
(Photo: Ian Knauer)
January 26, 2014
Why
meatless on Mondays? Not only is eating less animal protein a healthy
diet choice, curbing your meat consumption can have a significant
environmental impact too. In 2006 the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization reported that animal agriculture accounts for a full 19
percent of greenhouse gases—more than the transportation sector. Best of
all, with recipes like these, it can be a delicious weekly habit.
Ian Knauer worked for ‘Gourmet’ and is the author of the IACP Award–nominated cookbook ‘The Farm.’
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With so many farmers markets and CSA programs available all over the country, it’s getting harder and harder to find an excuse not to follow an “eat local” mantra. Whether you’re in the country or the suburbs or even—especially, really—a city, you can find terrific locally grown food at your fingertips. And with all we know about the hazards that non-local food can cause our world and ourselves, why would anyone with just a little knowledge not choose to eat as local as possible all the time?
I’ll tell you why. Because it is not even February and I am so sick of eating kale and potatoes. After all the soups and stews and chips and fries, after the kale pizzas and the potato gratins, the last things I’m craving are kale and potatoes. But guess what was in my January CSA box? Kale and potatoes.
It’s easy to follow the eat-local ethos during the bounty of summer. Tomatoes and zucchini and corn and herbs—these days they are the stuff of dreams. But for those of us who try our best to meet the challenge of eating locally year-round, we’re having kale and potatoes for dinner. Still, there’s no reason to suffer. It just takes a little to turn these humble (and at this point, boring) ingredients into an incredibly delicious meal. I look to the arena of the dumpling for inspiration. The Italians make gnocchi. The Germans make Schupfnudeln (basically long gnocchi that are fried in butter). And at my dinner table, I meet them in the middle by making a gnocchi-style dumpling that I then fry in olive oil with some baby kale. It might not be a bright summer tomato salad with lots of fresh herbs, but it is an exciting take on the workhorse winter ingredients that I have to work with.
Fried Potato Dumplings With Baby Kale
Serves 4
1 lb. Yukon Gold potatoes
4 large eggs
2/3 cup all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling
Kosher salt
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
A pinch dried red pepper flakes
6 oz. baby kale
Peel the potatoes and cut into chunks. Cover the potatoes with salted water in a large pot, then bring to a boil and cook until the potatoes are tender, 20 to 25 minutes. Drain the potatoes and let cool to warm. Pass the potatoes through a potato ricer, then stir in the eggs, flour, and 1 1/4 teaspoons salt, forming a dough. If the dough is too sticky, add a tablespoon of flour. Flour a work surface generously, then cut the dough into 6 pieces. Roll each piece into a 1/2-inch log, then cut into pieces. Cook the dumplings in boiling salted water until they float for 2 minutes, about 4 minutes total. Drain the dumplings and let cool to warm.
Heat the oil in a large heavy skillet over high heat until hot. Stir in the dumplings and cook, stirring once or twice, until browned, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and the pepper flakes. Stir the kale into the skillet and toss until just wilted, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and serve.
America’s World Education Ranking Is No Reason to Panic
When the United States came in 36th on the most recent PISA test, everyone had something hopeless to say.
(Photo: moodboard/Getty Images)
January 22, 2014
There has been no shortage of sound and fury about the recently released education rankings from the Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA). Every three years, the organization tests
15-year-olds from across the globe, comparing results from about 60
nations. As soon as the scores from the latest exam were released last
month, Americans began wringing their hands over the results.
Jack Schneider writes the column 'The Learning Curve' for
TakePart. He is an assistant professor of education at the College of
the Holy Cross and the author of two books. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.
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At the top of the heap were the usual suspects from East Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and three Chinese cities—Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macao. The United States came in 36th, trailing nations such as Estonia and the Slovak Republic. The national consensus, articulated in a New York Times editorial, was that America’s students are falling “further and further behind.”
Placing behind 35 other nations can be disheartening. Yet it’s worth asking: What do the PISA test results actually signify?
First, let’s assume that PISA is a gold-standard measure. From this standpoint, we might take heart in the fact that the results showed no statistically significant difference between the performance of American students and those in a place like Norway, which was recently named by the United Nations as the best place in the world to live. So no, we didn’t come in first, but we did land in the middle of the pack among a highly select group of prosperous nations.
But let’s stop assuming so much about PISA. According to Cambridge statistician David Spiegelhalter, the statistical model used to generate PISA scores is “demonstrably inadequate.” As a result, the accuracy of the national rankings is highly disputable. Also, PISA results conflict with trends in other international tests on which American students have performed better. In the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), only seven education systems had higher math performance among fourth graders. The results were fairly similar among eighth graders. In short, we’re 36th in the world; that is, unless we’re seventh.
We might further ask what exactly is on a test such as PISA. How can a test measure all of the different things that students learn across various national school systems? After all, comparative measures require a common denominator, and no such denominator exists. PISA’s approach is to measure a set of “real world” skills “not constrained” by national curricula. This creates an obvious problem: The test measures what many schools do not teach. In short, it establishes a level playing field, but it does so by ignoring what each system is actually trying to accomplish. As my colleague Professor David Labaree put it, “this is leveling the playing field with a bulldozer.” Such issues are further compounded by the fact that the validity of PISA test items is unsupported by research
Finally, when digesting the results of a test such as PISA, it is worth reflecting on the degree to which it presents a complete picture of schools. Unlike the exam-oriented nations perpetually at the top of international rankings, Americans want their schools to be more than just test-prep paddocks. We want students to develop social skills and a work ethic. We want them to grow as citizens and gain a sense of community responsibility. We want them to be physically and emotionally healthy. We want them to be exposed to the arts and to literature. And we want them to feel cared for. These values are not measured by tests such as PISA, nor is it reasonable to think they ever will be.
Keeping all of this in mind is a matter of critical importance because the rhetoric of falling skies causes stakeholders to doubt the quality of our public schools. Without question, most K–12 schools could improve, and a small number of them are truly failing. Yet when we overgeneralize about failure, or when we react thoughtlessly to tests like PISA, we undermine the faith that draws a diverse group of parents and their children into the schools, we erode the goodwill of taxpayers who fund this collective enterprise, and we justify a reactionary and interventionist policy agenda. Heedlessly perpetuating a narrative of crisis, we just might bring one about.
A California measure to reduce prison overcrowding reveals how America is, once again, failing some of its most vulnerable.
January 22, 2014
When Lockinvar Jacobs stepped off the bus at L.A.’s Union Station
last summer, he wasn’t quite sure where to go. The 49-year-old
schizophrenic had just been released from state prison, where he’d done a
five-year bid for felony drug sales. It wasn’t his first time getting
out of the big house; he told me, when we spoke recently, that he’s
spent between 16 and 20 years of his life behind bars for drugs and
other nonviolent felonies, such as burglary. He couldn't be sure of the
exact number, he said, because the Haldol and other meds have clouded
his memory. What he was sure about was that this last time, he was
released without his medication.
Mike Kessler's feature articles have twice been finalists for the National Magazine Award. He has contributed to 'GQ,' 'Los Angeles,' '5280,' and more.
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Jacobs had less than 48 hours to report to a county probation officer; if he failed to appear, he could face “flash incarceration,” meaning he’d get tossed into L.A. County Jail for a week or two. California prisons provide up to $200 gate money for releasees, but Jacobs needed clothes before he left the prison, for which the state had charged him $43. With $157 left over, his first stop would be a Skid Row shelter he knew well. There, he was told the probation office was several miles and city bus rides away. His cash didn’t last long. “I wasn’t very smart at handling my money,” he told me, a coy smile lighting up an otherwise hangdog expression. But he was able to report on time.
At the probation office, an on-site Department of Mental Health worker gave him a referral to a doctor but no medication. Like approximately half of those who get a mental health referral from DMH, Jacobs didn’t make it to his appointment. Without his meds, he had one of the “nervous breakdowns” he’s been experiencing since the 10th grade, some of which have required long-term hospitalization. Wandering Skid Row for hours in a speechless stupor, taunted by voices in his head, dehydrated by Southern California’s hot autumn sun, Jacobs collapsed to the sidewalk and sat against a wall, nearly catatonic, until someone finally called the cops.
Most of California’s prisoners, on whom it spends at least four times as much as it does on its K–12 students, are caged near outposts like Lompoc or Fresno or facilities far enough away from population and media centers that it’s easy to forget they exist. The number of prisoners reached such levels that by 2006, California was embroiled in two class action suits alleging that the overcrowded conditions in which the state was housing its convicts prevented the Department of Corrections from providing adequate health care. This, the suits alleged, violated the ban on cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Brown v. Plata, the case consolidated from the two class actions, went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered the state to thin the ranks of its prisoners to a still-crowded but barely acceptable 137.5 percent of total capacity.
That was in the summer of 2011. In October of the same year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 109, the intent of which was to reduce the state’s burden by shifting responsibility for many prisoners to California’s 58 counties. Contrary to popular belief, A.B. 109 did not call for the early release of prisoners. Rather, state prisoners whose most recent crimes—the ones for which they were doing time—were nonviolent, nonsexual, and nonserious felonies (called N3 crimes) are now turned over to the counties that prosecuted them. (To be sure, this includes N3s who have committed past crimes that were more serious. This glitch in the law has been widely criticized, especially in light of a murder committed by a homeless man on the streets of Hollywood not long after his release.)
Some 18,000 ex-cons have come back to Los Angeles County since the passage of A.B. 109. Of those 18,000, an astonishing 8,300 are in the county’s Department of Mental Health database because of some history of mental illness, be it garden-variety depression or anxiety, PTSD, personality disorders, or schizophrenia.
As A.B. 109ers have surged into L.A. County in the last couple of years, the law has revealed a dirty secret that most in the United States, including its elected officials, would rather not confront: The prison system has become the mental health system. Funding for rehabilitation programs was cut in recent decades amid a frenzy of law-and-order vindictiveness and with little regard for how it might affect recidivism, crime rates, or costs. Meanwhile, mental health treatment is valued less by the health care system than treatment for maladies occurring below the neck. So it should be no surprise that mentally ill criminal offenders, sometimes referred to by the acronym "MICOs," aren’t getting very good treatment either in prison or after they’ve done their time.
Former Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy is the author of 2008’s Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which sought to force health insurance companies to offer better coverage of mental health. “While the old model of warehousing the mentally ill [in psych wards] might seem like ancient history,” he says, “history has in fact repeated itself in the context of prison.”
Had someone like Lockinvar Jacobs committed a crime in certain other countries, things would have been different. In England, for example, he’d have been sent to one of many new “diversion sites,” where proper treatment is available. In a country such as Finland or Denmark, a mentally ill offender would have received a different sentence in the first place, or no sentence at all, and been sent to a treatment center.
Jacobs was lucky enough to be taken to a hospital after he collapsed on Skid Row, where he got his prescription filled and received IV nutrition during a 15-day stay for observation. On release, he could have wound up in any number of scenarios: the street, a shelter, a halfway house with full services for the mentally ill (called a step-down facility), or, if things had really spiraled, a lockdown psychiatric ward. The Department of Mental Health referred him to the Amity Foundation, which houses and feeds some 50 A.B. 109ers among its clientele of 200 other destitute individuals.
Four days a week, Jacobs makes the hour-long round-trip bus-and-foot journey to Project 180, a treatment center that receives funding through A.B. 109 and provides programs in basic life skills such as hygiene and use of public transportation, as well as individual and group therapy.
While Amity can be lenient with time limits, other providers have to send clients away after six months. Jacobs could soon be on the street, where he’s less likely to get his meds, more prone to schizophrenic episodes, and more likely to re-offend. If he slips up, he’ll be sent to L.A. County Jail. There, he’d get his meds, but on release he’d be out on the streets again, this time with nothing but the clothes on his back and a paper prescription, which he’d then need to have filled.Janet, who’s spent half her life in prison, hears voices in her head when she’s off her medication. How could she be expected to show up for appointments, stick to her meds, and stay out of trouble without regular therapy and guidance?
Amity Foundation’s California vice president, Mark Faucette, arranged for me to interview half a dozen mentally ill A.B. 109ers. Gathered around a boardroom table, they told me their criminal and mental health histories. There was Janet, a 45-year-old Latina who’d spent half her life in prison, serving six terms for drug possession or sales charges. She told me she hears voices in her head when she’s off her medication, and by her vacant stare, I didn’t doubt it. We spoke about her many transgressions, which had earned her a term in prison, followed by a recent stint in L.A. County Jail for selling dope to feed her habit. (She certainly wasn’t feeding herself; Janet looked life-threateningly thin.) “When I got out of jail this time I still didn’t have no medication,” she said. “I [couldn’t] see a psych doctor until a month later. I don’t think that shouldn’t be like that.”
It may be easy to dismiss the claims of a mentally ill drug addict who's spent so much time in prison, but even if Janet was bending the truth, it was clear that the odds were against her. Getting out of prison can be a challenge for the most able-minded among us. Marginalized or locked up long ago, many have no family, no resources, and no home.
Troy Vaughn, chief program officer at Lamp Community, a homeless-services provider, explained it to me this way: “If I’ve been incarcerated for a period of time, even if it was a year, I come out and society looks different,” he said. “That’s one barrier that I have to address.” Making things more difficult, A.B. 109ers must now navigate county red tape, rather than state agencies they’ve grown accustomed to while cycling through the system. Mental illness compounds these challenges, says Vaughn, a former Marine who was homeless and addicted to drugs and spent nearly a year in L.A. County Jail in the early 1990s. Anyone whose sanity has been challenged by a trip to the DMV can relate to that idea.
Hearing Janet talk underscored what Vaughn had told me. She seemed to barely understand the difference between state parole and county probation, and without help from Faucette, her explanation of how she’d navigated various state bureaucracies would have been incomprehensible. How, I wondered, could someone like Janet be expected to show up for appointments, stick to a regimen of meds, and stay out of trouble without regular, maybe even daily, therapy and guidance?
Antoinette had a slightly easier time. As instructed, she went straight to the probation office after her release; she told me she was put on a two-week waiting list to get an appointment to re-up her meds. With nowhere to go, she managed to find housing through a friend until she was referred to Amity.
Troy
Vaughn, himself an ex-con with mental health and substance abuse
disorders, now directs programs at a community advocacy organization. He
says he's "living proof" that rehabilitation and treatment are
preferable to incarceration for the mentally ill.
So old and co-occurring were George’s disorders that he wasn’t sure if the meth caused the voices in his head or if he used the drug to quiet them.
As recently as the early 1960s, MICOs like the ones Amity is trying to help would have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward, the type of place that was famously, and accurately, portrayed in the book and film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That began to change in 1963, when John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, the intent of which was to fund local services so those in need could avoid such a fate. The mentally ill, JFK memorably said, had for too long been “alien to our affections.”
Similar congressional measures followed, but funding didn’t, leaving few resources for the mentally ill. With the best intentions, California in the late 1960s passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which practically did away with involuntary commitment in the state. Trouble was, it left many vulnerable Californians to depend on a disintegrating mental health care system. Suddenly, the streets became a de facto mental hospital—with no staff. What happened next is no surprise. As the psychiatrist Marc Abramson wrote, law enforcement began to “regard arrest and booking into jail as a more reliable way of securing involuntary detention of mentally disordered persons.”
Under President Reagan, federal funding for mental hospitals dwindled and the cycle continued. With fewer community services in place, mentally ill criminal offenders began finding themselves on the street and then behind bars, where a culture of chaos, stigmatization, and abuse by prisoners and guards would exacerbate their afflictions.
Many of Los Angeles' homeless and mentally ill find themselves on the notorious Skid Row.
Amity’s Mark Faucette, who daily sees the results of untreated mental illness, concurred. “The only way to make any kind of headway,” he said, “is to have the right treatment services set up in the community.”
Even if those services were in place, organizations like Amity would just be fed a constant stream of mentally ill people from a health care system that turns its back on the sick by not incentivizing early diagnosis and treatment. Mental illness usually begins long before sufferers have run-ins with the law or descend into dysfunction; half of mental health disorders are diagnosable by age 14, when they can be treated before blossoming into full-blown mental illness or drug addiction. But the health care system often doesn't identify and provide treatment for these people, even though depression is the country's No. 1 disability and mental health disorders have overtaken physical disorders as the most predominant among kids. With any luck, this will change under Kennedy’s mental health parity law, which is only just going into effect, five years after passage.
It follows, of course, that proper treatment is also the best way to prevent people from joining (or rejoining) the ranks of the incarcerated. It’s also cheaper to keep someone healthy outside of prison walls than it is to lock him or her up—and not give treatment. To say nothing of kinder.
That the county spends 5.7 times more on incarcerating MICOs than it does on their mental health care is a source of frustration for people such as Peter Eliasberg, the rumpled and fiercely articulate legal director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. “We’ve just chosen to replicate at the county level what the state did for 30 years,” he said, sipping yerba maté from a handcrafted gourd.
On any given day, around 5,000 alleged offenders are held in L.A. County’s Men’s Central Jail; by some counts, more than half have some form of mental illness, and 1,000 or more mentally ill are often housed among the general inmate population. Men’s Central is infamous for its cold temperatures and dungeon-like atmosphere. Last July, when L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez (whose acquaintance with a mentally ill resident of Skid Row was depicted in the film The Soloist) asked a jail psychologist what “makes a desirable therapeutic environment,” she simply told him, “This ain’t it.”
The jail, which the ACLU claims is the world’s largest, is known by its own top brass as “the nation’s largest mental institution.” What’s more, Men’s Central has become notorious for violence by inmates and sheriff’s deputies, often against the mentally ill. A federal investigation into abuse of inmates made headlines late last year when 18 current and former deputies were indicted. Under pressure, the head of the department, Sheriff Lee Baca, resigned in January. All the while, the jail has gotten so crowded and decrepit that county officials are considering a billion-dollar teardown and rebuild of the facility to bring it out of the Dark Ages.
Though a new jail would, in theory, be a better environment for the mentally ill (and everyone else), advocates point out that jail, no matter how modern the facility, is still a place to incarcerate, not rehabilitate. As Eliasberg puts it, mentally ill criminal offenders still need to be seen “as a whole human being.”Other cities seem more committed to policies that will succeed at preventing recidivism among mentally ill criminal offenders. Miami’s diversion program decreased the jail population by about the same rate as the Supreme Court mandated for California.
Instead, he said the county’s attitude can be read by its budget allocation. What it is essentially saying, Eliasberg told me, is “We’re going to need more mental health beds, and one of the principal reasons is that we don’t spend enough money on community treatment." He added, "The irony of that is blinding.” Eliasberg and others feel that if the county provided more funding for community treatment, then it would need fewer jail beds.
None of L.A.’s five county supervisors—the officials who decide how the funds should be divided—would comment. Anna Pembedjian, justice deputy for Supervisor Mike Antonovich, told me that her boss is “a strong proponent of mental health services to individuals who frankly don't have the mental capacity to voluntarily choose mental health services.” She then implied that even if the money were made available, there’d be no one to put it to use. “There's actually not a lot of community-based organizations that provide the sort of bed treatment that [you’re asking] about,” she said. She was referring to a shortage of treatment beds at service providers that are on contract with the county. “I take that not as a lack of county investment,” she said.
In fact it’s just that. With a bigger chunk of the A.B. 109 budget, the Department of Mental Health could expand capacity and staff at existing facilities, or contract with new ones. “That’s just one example of how money could be put to good use,” said Peggy Edwards, executive director at the advocacy group Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership. Edwards noted that such investment could also be spent on personnel who could help mentally ill patients like Lockinvar Jacobs and Janet, who have had trouble navigating bureaucracies and keeping appointments, to get from the sites where referrals are given to their actual appointments.
When I asked the board’s CEO to explain the division of A.B. 109 money, a spokesperson informed me, via email, that “budget allocation between the County departments reflects our chief priorities in mitigating the impacts A.B. 109 has on our communities.” Priority No. 1, he said, was “safeguard[ing] public safety by providing custody and supervision.” In other words, the money is divided based on the assumption that it’s too risky to not lock people up, even if treatment could make society safer in the long run.
A notable example is Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco. There, before a prisoner is released, someone from the Probation Department meets with the offender and prison officials to create a course of action. Then, said the county’s chief probation officer, Philip Kader, “we try to coordinate with mental health services, housing, county social services. We try to get [offenders] enrolled in MediCal, try to get all those things done before they exit the facility.” In that way, the country can “ensure in the best way we can that they’re getting to appointments.”
Contra Costa D.A.s are proponents of “split sentencing” for N3 offenders, Kader said, meaning convicts spend less time in jail and more time in the community, under the supervision of probation agents. Under split sentencing, mentally ill offenders are able to seek counseling in a healing environment, rather than an oppressive one. Ninety-two percent of Contra Costa’s N3s receive split sentencing; in L.A. County, that figure is around 5 percent.
And in San Diego County, every A.B. 109er coming out of prison is transported “to a community transition center before they even hit the street,” said County Probation Division Director Scott Huizar. The transition center even serves as a stopgap home for up to 60 A.B. 109ers. “We try and get them in and out within a period of seven days,” said Huizar, but “we’ve had offenders there a number of weeks” while waiting for space at a drug or mental health treatment center.
Leifman said that since the start of the program, law enforcement has responded to approximately 10,000 calls involving the mentally ill. “Out of the 10,000 calls, [officers] only made 27 arrests, which resulted in a decrease of our jail [population] from about 7,800 to 5,000,” Leifman said. (That’s a 36 percent drop, which is more than the prisoner reduction mandated by the Supreme Court.) At the same time, he said, there hasn’t been a shooting by a mentally ill offender “in a really long time.” Inspired by the program's efficacy, Miami-Dade applied it to nonviolent felons, who Leifman says recidivate at a rate even lower than misdemeanor offenders. Thanks to the program, the nonviolent felon population is holding at 6 percent, he said. It's been such a success that Miami-Dade County closed one of its jails for lack of inmates, saving taxpayers $12 million a year.
For good measure, Miami-Dade started a program with the American Psychiatric Association that trains every middle and high school teacher to recognize signs of mental illness so that kids can be treated early and become functioning, psychologically sound adults.
Last year, a few city and county officials from Los Angeles paid a visit to Miami, where Leifman showed them around. He said they seemed impressed by what they saw, and he assured them that what Miami was doing could work elsewhere, even in a massive county like L.A.
Over at Lamp Community, Troy Vaughn couldn’t agree more. “I’m the evidence,” he said. “I walk around every day as evidence. I’m the evidence that recovery of a person with mental illness, depression, anxiety, substance abuse issues, estrangement from society, is a person who can be redeemed. I’m the living proof that it’s possible.”
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