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to be far more complex than that. We found a community that’s attempting a monumental transition — from a criminal justice system based on punishment and confinement to one based on intervention and rehabilitation (or at least the potential for rehabilitation). A community that tries to address the causes of criminal behavior rather than writing off its criminals and shipping them to prisons hundreds of miles away. Noble (or naïve) as that may sound, it’s a transition borne less of strategy than of desperation and necessity. And its implementation thus far has been frenzied. California didn’t have the luxury of careful planning; the Supreme Court’s deadline is rapidly approaching. One thing is clear: Fewer of the people who commit crimes in Humboldt County will be whisked away and locked in distant cells. More will remain here, among us. The question now is how we’re going to deal with them.
Realignment may have been a desperate reaction to California’s prison crisis, but the idea wasn’t pulled
Humboldt County chief Probation Officer Bill Damiano Photo by Ryan Burns
out of thin air. In 2009 the state passed the California Community Corrections Performance Incentives Act. This new law awarded funding to county probation departments that proved successful in supervising felony probationers. Specifically, probation departments used evidence-based practices — that is, techniques that had proven effective — to keep probationers on track, and the ones that saw positive results received state funding as an incentive to keep at it.
Humboldt County’s probation office, led by Chief Probation Officer Bill Damiano, was among the successful. “That’s what got the governor and Legislature thinking about realignment, was we [county probation departments] were having some successes with probation,” Damiano said in a recent interview. His office sits in a squat building at the back of a parking lot behind Eureka’s defunct General Hospital. Stern and analytical, with steely eyes and a thick crop of brown hair, Damiano is well-suited to this intervention approach. He worked in mental health before joining Humboldt County’s probation department in 1988. With a degree in psychology from San Diego State, he not only believes in his department’s ability to affect criminal behavior, that’s where he finds meaning in his job. “When the governor saw [our success] he said, ‘Let’s take that a step further. … Maybe the local guys can do a better job.’” Damiano is convinced of it. “I don’t think that we created better citizens by sending them off to prison,” he said. California’s prisons in particular are
notorious for being racially segregated, ruled by gangs and rife with violence, an environment that, according to Damiano, forces people to adopt antisocial values. “We just dip them in antisocial goo. I mean we train them to be antisocial.” The result has been the so-called “revolving door” of our criminal justice system. The department of state government that manages our prisons is called, somewhat redundantly, “Corrections and Rehabilitation,” but in practice it is lousy at both. Damiano, on the other hand, said that in the years since he started in probation, the county department has gotten progressively more sophisticated in identifying characteristics and behaviors that contribute statistically to criminal activity. These factors range from the obvious, like criminal history, substance abuse issues and employment status, to more subtle indicators like attitudes and beliefs. People placed on probation in Humboldt County are assessed using an interview tool called STRONG, which stands continued on next page
northcoastjournal.com • North Coast Journal • Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012
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