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| Volume 106 |
| An Online Symposium on Pay-to-Stay Programs in Correctional Facilities |
| Approximately fifteen California jails have implemented pay-to-stay programs. These programs allow some offenders to pay a daily fee in order to serve their sentences in a city-run or privately-managed correctional facility rather than in a county jail. In some programs, benefits include assignment to a private cell with a regular door, separation from violent offenders, access to the jail’s movie collection, and the ability to carry an iPod or cell phone. The symposium considers the implications of these pay-to-stay programs. |
Pay-to-Stay in California Jails and the Value of Systemic Self-Embarassment
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Robert Weisberg, Stanford Law School
The website of the Santa Ana, California-version of Pay-to-Stay uses hotelier-type verbiage in describing features of its alternative jail program. . . . Surely this manifestation of pay-to-stay is embarrassing. But, as so honestly represented, pay-to-stay could prove salutary for the criminal justice system if recognized as part of our somewhat ritualized cycle of constructive self-embarrassment over the role of wealth in criminal justice. More specifically, pay-to-stay could become one of those occasional eruptions of transparency about the forms of currency exchanged in the market for punishment. 
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It Could Happen to "You": Pay-to-Stay Jail Upgrades [HTML] [PDF]
Kim Shayo Buchanan, USC Gould School of Law
[W]hen people are arrested in southern California, they face a two-tiered jail system in which the overwhelming majority of detainees and offenders are crammed together in crowded, dirty, violent, unsafe conditions that Judge Pregerson recently observed violate “basic human values.” Governments offer certain inmates an escape hatch: in exchange for payment, their jailers will keep them safe. The perceived legitimacy of this arrangement, I will explain, depends in part on the implicit acceptance of two racial stereotypes: that most criminals are violent black men, and that white people, including white lawbreakers, are vulnerable victims. |
The Dirty Little Secrets about Pay-to-Stay [HTML] [PDF]
Laurie L. Levenson & Mary Gordon, Loyola Law School Los Angeles
The dirty little secret is out: people with more money get a better deal in our criminal justice system. . . . It is an abomination to divert our attention to pay-to-stay programs instead of finding the resources to improve our general jail facilities to make them tolerable for every inmate. Don’t get us wrong—if we suffered the misfortune of being arrested, we would dearly love the opportunity to pay for a private jail facility. However, the pay-to-stay initiative is unlikely to do anything other than mask the problems in our correctional facilities. Pay-to-stay programs should only be endorsed if a serious commitment is first made to improving the overall conditions in correctional facilities. |
Government Entrepreneurship: How COP, Direct Supervision, and a Business Plan Helped to Solve Santa Ana's Crime Problems [HTML] [PDF]
Police Chief Paul M. Walters & Russell Davis, City of Santa Police Department
Much has been written about Community Oriented Policing for police agencies and about the Direct Supervision concept for jail operations. Each strategy is at the cutting edge of its respective discipline. This Commentary describes how the progressive City of Santa Ana implemented both strategies—along with a visionary business plan to operate its jail at minimal cost—to combat crime successfully. The City’s business plan relies on entrepreneurship that is too often lacking in government programs. This approach has led to a number of innovations in law enforcement, corrections, and government service. Pay-to-Stay programs provide yet another example of how Santa Ana’s willingness to innovate helped it build ever more effective and efficient correctional facilities. |
Why the County Jail Is Often a Better Choice [HTML] [PDF]
Shawn Chapman Holley
Kinsella, Weitzman, Iser, Kump & Aldisert LLP
I have been a criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles for almost twenty years. I began my career in the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, representing defendants who were poor and often homeless. For the past twelve years, I have been in private practice, representing defendants who are wealthy and often famous. Having represented criminal defendants coming from such varied economic circumstances, I have witnessed firsthand the criminal justice system’s disparate treatment of those with money and those without. Pay-to-stay jails are yet another example of that disparity. Yet I believe that those without the money to pay for jail often find themselves in a better position than those who pay to stay. |
A Virtuous State Would Not Assign Correctional Housing Based on Ability to Pay [HTML] [PDF]
Bradley W. Moore, University of Michigan Law School
Pay-to-stay jails expose the moral tension between the dominant theories of punishment: retributivism and deterrence. A turn to a third major moral theory—virtue ethics—resolves this tension. According to virtue ethics, the moral worth of an action follows from both the character of the action and the disposition of the actor. Virtuous acts promote human flourishing—the central goal of life—when they are the right actions performed for the right reasons. The virtue ethics theory of punishment suggests that pay-to-stay jails conflict with the promotion of human flourishing. . . . Furthermore, the resolution of the pay-to-stay jails dilemma using virtue ethics highlights why retributivism and deterrence should be rejected as theories of punishment in favor of a virtue ethics-based approach.
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