Santa Cruz County’s new chief probation officer Fernando Giraldo is trying to secure funding for treatment of criminals who get rehab instead of jail time under Prop. 36. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
[Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part series on recidivism in Santa Cruz. Part one.html ran last week.]
Paul M. Marigonda, presiding judge for Santa Cruz Superior Court, has heard what people say about him and his colleagues. Public Safety Task Force members pressured judges to get tougher on criminals last year, and activists from the Santa Cruz Hall of Shame have criticized the court for supposedly creating a “revolving door” for repeat offenders. It is true that the few statistics available show recidivism—a crux of the Hall of Shame’s frustration—is higher among some criminals in Santa Cruz than it is statewide.
But Marigonda says it’s much more complicated.
“It’s easy to say the judges let people out of the door, but there are a lot more pieces to the puzzle,” Marigonda says.
Sitting in his office, Marigonda, who has a close-cropped haircut, is sympathetic to community concerns. But he says county judges can’t control what happens to criminals after they go across the street to the jail.
“There are so many aspects that go into it—what crime a person is arrested for, what charges the district attorney brings, what agreements do the district attorney and the defense attorney reach in resolving the case, and then what capacity does the sheriff have in the jail? And lastly, what can the community provide as far as treatment?” Marigonda says.
Proposition 36, passed by California voters in 2000, allows rehab instead jail time for people convicted of being under the influence or in possession of drugs—even when they’re already on probation. The problem is that the law doesn’t guarantee they’ll actually get any help, because it’s up to the cash-strapped county government (not the courts) to provide it. Instead, addicts can go through the motions and end up back in the community.
“The concept was good as long as you had the funding source to provide the treatment,” Marigonda says. “That ran out.”
But the county’s probation department, under new chief probation officer Fernando Giraldo, is currently trying to secure funding for treatment through the newly implemented Affordable Care Act.
Giraldo is also working hands-on with the effects of AB 109, the realignment bill to reduce prison overcrowding—a law Marigonda notes is changing how long criminals stay off the streets.
Aiming to reduce state prison populations, AB109 forces non-violent, non-serious, non-sex offender convicts to serve locally at the county jail, which is currently 25 percent over capacity, instead of state prisons. Many of them serve part of their sentences on probation instead of in county jail. The probation department nearly doubled its probation officers to accommodate the 8 percent increase in its population.
So how is this group doing? Countywide, recidivism among the types of criminals relocated under AB109 fell from 70 percent to 66 percent one year following release, which is still high. Statewide, the rate among those offenders went down from 59 percent to 56 over that same span.
“The folks under AB109 are high-recidivist. Any progress you make in reducing recidivism is progress,” Giraldo says.
Due to jail crowding, the Sheriff’s Department has also expanded its electronic monitoring programs for locally sentenced convicts, who stay under supervision. “If you mess up, we can bring you right back down to the jail and put you back in a cell,” Chief Deputy Jeremy Verinsky says.
Not all judges have stayed as far from the political frays as Marigonda when it comes to public safety. Last summer, county judge Ariadne Symons spoke at a public safety task force to share what she’s seen as a judge and a lawyer. She called Santa Cruz a “magnet” for homeless people and people who want to break the law.
“We have people who come to Santa Cruz with the intent of leading a criminal lifestyle on our streets,” she said. Symons, who was out of the office and unavailable for comment last week, cited several criminal cases with transplants and transients over the past 15 years at the August meeting.
If Marigonda has any thoughts about broke people who move to Santa Cruz, he isn’t interested in sharing them. “Someone is going to come before me, who may be a transient, and I have to be impartial to everyone,” he says. “I can’t pick and choose.”
Craig Reinarman, a UC Santa Cruz sociology professor, says the rhetoric around recidivism is nothing new.
“This is what the right-wing agenda has always said: ‘It’s liberal judges letting them go,’” Reinarman says. “We’ve just had the biggest wave of imprisonment in American history. We have a system that doesn’t accommodate people. And then we wonder why these people keep being offenders.”
