Victims not keen on long prison terms

A survey that a crime victims' group described as the first of its kind in California yielded some findings contrary to conventional wisdom Thursday: Most victims question the benefits of imprisoning more criminals and prefer rehabilitation, education and Gov. Jerry Brown's realignment program.

"This report turns on its head the notion that victims care only about tough-on-crime sentences," said Lenore Anderson, director of Californians for Safety and Justice, the nonprofit that commissioned the poll.

While the results were largely consistent with the views of Anderson's organization, she and veteran pollster David Binder insisted that the survey was objective and the participants were randomly selected.

Binder said his researchers contacted a representative sample of more than 2,600 Californians by phone in April and singled out for questioning 500 who said they had been victims of crimes in the past five years. Among the results:

-- Fifty percent of the victims said California should focus more on supervised probation and rehabilitation for convicted criminals, compared with 23 percent who wanted more focus on sending them to jail or prison.

-- Victims favored spending more on mental health and drug and alcohol treatment over spending more on imprisonment, by 74 percent to 10 percent.

-- Nearly 80 percent said the state should invest more money in education as opposed to spending more on prisons.

-- Thirty-six percent said California sends too many people to prison and 33 percent said it sends too few, a difference that was within the poll's margin of error, which was 4.4 percentage points. But on a related question, 38 percent of the victims said prison trains inmates to be better criminals and only 15 percent said prison rehabilitates inmates, with the rest saying it has no impact or expressing other views.

-- On realignment, Brown's legislatively approved program of reducing the state prison population by sentencing lower-level felons to county jails instead of prison, 65 percent of the victims were in support, compared with 69 percent of the general population in a statewide survey last November.

At odds with others

The findings appear to contradict the public positions of the most visible victims' groups, which have campaigned for longer sentences and opposed rollbacks of the state's "three strikes" law.

The leader of one such group disputed the survey.

"Simply because they have the money to bundle their report in a nice pretty package does not mean it is a true representation of how victims feel," said Harriet Salarno, chairwoman of Crime Victims United. She said her organization "remains firm on our stand that we need to put public safety first."

One member of Anderson's organization, Dionne Wilson of Morgan Hill, said she was a committed believer in the lock-'em-up approach until one night in July 2005, when friends came to her door and said her husband, Dan Niemi, a San Leandro police officer, had been shot and killed. Irving Ramirez was later convicted of the murder and sentenced to death.

"I thought the trial and conviction would bring me peace. It didn't," Wilson said during Thursday's conference call. "I came to see the criminal justice system in a new light. It spends most of its resources on punishment ... (and) isn't making us any safer."

Binder's survey also concluded that 1 in 5 Californians has been a victim of crime in the past five years. Half of those have been violent crimes, whose victims are more likely to be young, low-income and African American or Latino, the report said.

A reporting problem

The survey found wide disparities in victims' willingness to report crimes to police: 84 percent said they reported burglaries, 65 percent reported vandalism and 65 percent reported assaults, but only 50 percent reported rapes and 39 percent reported stalking.

The main reasons for not reporting crimes were the time and effort required and the "lack of faith that anything will happen," Anderson said.

Another finding was that a majority of victims were unaware of most of the state-funded services available to them, such as assistance in applying for compensation from a victims' fund, in seeking counseling and in navigating the criminal justice system.