Public Safety & Domestic Violence

By Matt Gray

By focusing upon intervention, prevention, rehabilitation, and appropriate punishment, Matt brings a balanced approach to improving public safety. For his proven track record of working to solve problems above all else, Matt has earned the support of public safety advocates, individual rank and file police officers, and other public safety professionals.

Instead of prevention, intervention and rehabilitation when possible, government focuses almost exclusively upon punishment. But punishment, after the fact, is only part of the equation improving public safety.

It is fiscally irresponsible to keep blindly building more prisons because we already have the most expensive and unsuccessful prison system in the world. More prisons either 1) cost us more in taxes, or 2) they siphon off money from local public services like senior services, health care, and schools. Both approaches to building more prisons endanger California's economic stability.

While every candidate wants to appear "tough on crime," it is tougher on crime to pro-actively prevent criminal acts from happening. It is not enough to just forget about prevention and step-in after the crime occurs, dole out some punishment (that may or may not work), and pat yourself on the back for a job well done as we now do.

Clearly, prevention directly improves public safety, while punishment after the face merely reacts to whatever damage has already occurred.

As your City Council Member, Matt Gray will advocate for proven rehabilitative programs within Sacramento County and push for validated risk assessments for offenders so we can treat offenders before they return to our communities. Matt recognizes that jail & prisons are the most expensive response to crime; and public schools, public safety, healthcare, and every other important public program will continue to suffer until we get our prison spending under control.

- Domestic Violence is 100% preventable if we have the will to intervene.
- Although local domestic violence shelters provide critically important intervention services, they struggle to stay open due to lack of funding.
- For the little money California puts into helping victims of domestic violence, it puts even less into preventing domestic violence.
- Offenders normally do not receive risk assessments to determine how dangerous they are and what the best strategy is for programs that will keep them from re-offending. We have the ability to determine their dangerousness with a high degree of accuracy, if we really want to. We just don't because lawmakers believe taxpayers don't care about the cost savings.
- But there are 2 basic types of offenders: those who acknowledge their misdeeds and want to improve themselves; and then there are those who do not. But our prisons mix them all together in general population and a one-size-fits-all model that obstructs rehabilitative efforts.
- This failure to responsibly respond to the individual needs of the offender is why we have a 79% failure rate when the offenders are released onto parole. It is the highest failure rate in the nation and they return to the most expensive prison system. We could cut our parole failure rate in half to match most other states. For each person we can prepare to not re-offend, we prevent the creation of another victim, we prevent loss of property, and we directly improve public safety for all Californians. SAVINGS RANGE: $900 million to $1.26 billion
- We need to make room in our prisons so we can continue to house the truly dangerous offenders, while also providing services to those who want to take the initiative to change their dangerous way.
- More than 22,000 undocumented foreign inmates are now housed in California's prisons. While the cost for housing them is the responsibility of our federal government, California has not been reimbursed for years. MONEY OWED TO CALIFORNIA: $3.8 - $4 billion.
- More than 60 countries are party to international treaties along with the United States, allowing California to return foreign prisoners with a guarantee that the sentence will be served out in their home country. Since these prisoners are already returned home at the end of their sentence (after we paid for housing them for years), we need to instead use these treaties to return the prisoners from the start because California taxpayers should not have to pay for it all. SAVINGS: $1.2 billion.
- Drugs play a major role in more than 80% of all offenses, and yet drug treatment inside prisons is scarce and seldom available. When it is available, it is usually a group of inmates running the program on their own.
- California has many prisoners who are elderly and so ill that they are bed-ridden, have dementia, and need around-the-clock medical care. A clinically brain-dead inmate was even kept locked up. The current cost of keeping these infirm inmates in high security prisons runs between $120,000 and $1 million per person, but it would be much lower in secure community facilities. SAVINGS: $450 million.
- California should adopt indeterminate sentencing ranges so that those offenders who show us they want to change have the opportunity to do so, and those offenders who want to keep misbehaving will serve out their entire sentence. By example, instead of an average of 4 years for a crime, the range would be 2-3 years low term for those who learn a vocation and are involved with rehabilitative programs; 3-4 years for middle term like it is now; or 5-7 years for high term and those offenders who refuse to participate in rehabilitation.

As your City Council Member, Matt Gray will push local lawmakers to seek full reimbursement from the federal government for the cost of housing foreign inmates, improve intervention programs such as domestic violence support services, remove the bottleneck within the Department of Corrections that slows down inmate transfers, and offer immediate drug treatment for inmates who were involved in a crime surrounding drug abuse.

Matt will also push for flexible sentencing ranges so that offenders who undergo a validated risk assessment and take the initiative to show they participate in rehabilitative programs to earn their diploma or degree and learn employable skills, can earn their way out of prison differently than the non-programming and dangerous offenders.

Simply put, the model we have in place for our prisons and rehabilitative programs clearly is not working. Therefore we need to reassess and revamp the system so it delivers the results we want. We need to stop responding to offenders with a one-size-fits-all model and implement proven programs that have already worked well for other states who now enjoy much lower re-offense rates for their offenders.