The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: November 2004 Archives

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November 30, 2004

Putting More Women In Jail Is A Bad Idea

"At first glance, the statistics might indicate that women's behavior is becoming more criminal, but a deeper look suggests that changes in the criminal justice system have caused the increase."

Nov. 29, 2004, Philadelphia Enquirer

Putting more women in jail is a bad idea
Changes in justice system are to blame.

By William DiMascio

Across the nation, women are going to jail in record numbers - including right here in Pennsylvania.

At first glance, the statistics might indicate that women's behavior is becoming more criminal, but a deeper look suggests that changes in the criminal justice system have caused the increase. The distinction is important because the escalation of women in prisons portends greater disruptions in our communities and an upward spiral in the cycle of criminality.

Females born in 2001 are six times more likely to wind up in prison at some point in their lives than are women born in 1974. That estimate comes from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, which also has noted that of all the women released from prisons in 1994, 57.6 percent were rearrested and 39.9 percent were reconvicted.

These numbers figure into an alarming trend in increased imprisonment of women that has been developing over the last decade. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics recently reported that state and federal prison populations in the United States increased by 2.1 percent in 2003. Of that, the number of women in prisons jumped by 3.6 percent, while the male population rose just 2 percent.

Since 1995, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported, the annual rate of growth of female inmates averaged 5 percent, compared with 3.3 percent for men. Cumulatively, the number of male prisoners has grown 29 percent since 1995 and the number of females has gone up 48 percent.

The increase in women prisoners in Pennsylvania has been steady through the decade, although at a somewhat slower rate than nationally. In 1995, the state had 1,502 women in its prisons, and by 2003 the number climbed to 1,816, a hike of 20.9 percent.

The subtext in all these statistics is rooted in changes in the criminal justice system, not that women are committing more crimes. The adoption of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum sentences have curtailed the discretion judges once had to avoid imprisonment and provide community-based sentences for nonviolent crimes such as drug possession. Drug offenses are the largest category of crimes committed by women, accounting for more than twice the number of the second-highest crime - aggravated assault. In fact, drug crimes constitute half of all the nonviolent offenses in Pennsylvania.

Another factor that is not readily apparent in the numbers is mental health. Since the closing of mental hospitals in the early 1960s, prisons have become the largest providers of mental-health services in the country. The Bureau of Justice Statistics says one in five female inmates receive medication for psychological or emotional problems. In Pennsylvania, the Department of Corrections provides psychiatric drugs to one in three women prisoners. Inmates with mental illnesses tend to have behavioral problems that result in their being confined longer than others who win recommendations for parole.

The impact of these trends on communities cannot be ignored. When men go to prison, families are disrupted and children lose role models. When women go to prison, families are destroyed and children's lives are devastated. Two out of three women in prison are mothers, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports. Almost half of all female prisoners lived with their children in single-parent households before their incarceration, according to the Women's Prison Association.

While women clearly have a closer connection with their children before and after going to prison, they tend to have fewer visits while they are incarcerated. This occurs, in part, because the relatively small number of female prisoners, compared with males, means there are far fewer prisons and they tend to be much farther from women's homes. One Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that 54 percent of women reported that they never had a personal visit from their children during their incarceration.

Having children complicates women's attempts to reenter society in numerous ways. For instance, women need to find jobs that will enable them to support not just themselves but also their children. They also need to arrange day care for the kids. Racial prejudices and lack of education can figure into the difficulties of women returning from prisons: 63 percent of incarcerated women are African American or Hispanic and 64 percent failed to complete high school.

Additional obstacles to reentry have been created by legislation that denies housing assistance and other government benefits to individuals convicted of drug crimes.

Public safety is jeopardized by the fallacy of longer sentences and curtailed social-support services. This is camouflage used to mask a political system that is unwilling to commit the time and resources needed to solve deeply rooted social problems.

William DiMascio is executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society.

Posted by lois at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2004

Free Clarence Aaron

"Oh, and did I mention that Aaron is black?"

Debra Saunders is a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
************************
Free Clarence Aaron
-Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, November 28, 2004

THE SMALL JOYS of life when you live freely: Walking into your kitchen for that first cup of coffee, driving down a curvy back road with no other cars in sight, choosing what you'll fix yourself for dinner. These are the small freedoms we take for granted -- yet freedoms we should value and recognize. A just society, therefore, does not yank these rights from a young man for a petty crime for the rest of his life.

The United States of America did just that when a federal court in Alabama sentenced Clarence Aaron to life without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug conviction. He was 22 when he hooked two dealers up for two drug deals; they paid him $1,500. He has been in prison for 11 years, and he will die behind bars unless President Bush commutes his sentence.

This is the fourth Christmas season that I've written about Clarence Aaron. I've never met him. We spoke on the phone once. Aaron then told me that he simply cannot believe he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

I can't believe that my America would consider that justice.

What happened?

Aaron was a college student who was experiencing family and financial problems. I mention that he was a student not to put a halo on his head, but to point out that Aaron was not a professional drug dealer. Yet somehow, all but one of the six dealers involved in his saga were released from prison years ago, even though they had criminal records or were known as big players in the drug trade. They knew enough to cut a deal, and they knew people they could turn on. Aaron didn't.

The local U.S. attorney charged Aaron with dealing in crack, because one dealer converted the cocaine to crack. The court also convicted Aaron for drugs that never traded hands as one of the dealers robbed the other. Hence, while nine kilograms of cocaine were traded hands, Aaron is serving time for 24 kilograms of crack.

Aaron also made the mistake of pleading not guilty and perjuring himself in court, which enhanced his sentence.

Oh, and did I mention that Aaron is black?

Aaron now admits his guilt. He has a clean prison record. In 2000, the Atlanta warden petitioned to move Aaron to a less secure facility. He has no prior record, no history of violence. Yet he is serving the same sentence that FBI-agent-turned spy Robert Hanssen is serving.

Attorney Mary Price of Families Against Mandatory Minimums noted: "He got a longer sentence than he would have got had he hijacked an airplane, had he detonated a bomb in a public place, had he committed second degree murder or had he raped a 10-year-old child."

A recent ruling by a federal court -- now before the U.S. Supreme Court
-- would make Aaron's sentence far less likely to occur if the same case were before a court today. If the Supreme Court justices uphold the Blakely decision, jurors would have to rule on the amount of drugs and kind of drugs for which a defendant is convicted. As Price pointed out, if the court had sentenced Aaron for cocaine instead of crack, his sentence would be under 16 years -- even if you include the 15 kilograms from the second deal that didn't happen.

A Department of Justice spokesman had no comment on the case, as it is pending. Over the years and off the record, others in law enforcement have told me they think this is an insane sentence -- a fluke, if you will.

And it says something that the Bush administration has not denied Aaron's petition -- after denying some 3,446 commutation requests and approving two, according to Margaret C. Love, who served as pardon attorney for the first President Bush.

Since I started writing on Aaron, the system has shown mercy -- for other people. The judge who sentenced Aaron to life without parole sentenced a white lawyer turned drug dealer to four months in a work-release facility. When the George Washington University Medical Center learned that Vice President Dick Cheney's (now former) physican was illegally prescribing himself drugs, the doctor was allowed to enter a program that allowed him to continue prescribing drugs.

If the concept of equal justice means anything, President Bush will grant Clarence Aaron what any white professional who screws up would get -- a second chance.

E-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com .

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/28/EDG
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©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by lois at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2004

NY Times: Brent Staples: The Federal Government Gets Real About Sex Behind Bars

By BRENT STAPLES
Thirteen million Americans have been convicted of felonies
and spent time in prison. The prison system now releases an astonishing 650,000 people each year - more than the population of Boston or Washington. In city after city, newly released felons return to a handful of neighborhoods where many households have some prison connection.

November 27, 2004

The so-called prison ZIP codes have more in common than
large populations of felons or children who grow up
visiting their mothers and fathers in jail. These
neighborhoods are also public health disaster areas and epicenters of blood borne diseases like hepatitis C and AIDS. Infection rates in these areas are many times higher than in neighborhoods short distances away.

No one can say how many infections begin in prison. But the proportion could be high given the enormous concentrations of disease behind bars and the risky behaviors that inmates commonly practice. They carve tattoos in themselves using contaminated tools borrowed from other inmates.

They inject themselves with drugs using dirty syringes.

The most common source of infection could easily be risky, unprotected sex, which, despite denials by prison officials, is clearly a regular occurrence behind bars. A recent study of male inmates in several prisons, for example, found that more than 40 percent had participated in sexual encounters with another man. Most of these inmates, by the way, viewed themselves as heterosexual and planned to resume sex with women once they got out of prison.

Prison systems in Canada and Europe have tried to cut down infection by making condoms available to inmates. Prompted by research showing that sterile syringes slow the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users, several countries have actually moved programs that supply clean needles right into the prisons.

Public health officials who favor needle exchanges in the United States are fully aware that this country has just emerged from a presidential election that witnessed heightened activism by conservative Christians. Indeed, even nonreligious Americans would prefer to see prisons shut off the flow of illegal drugs and provide addicts with treatment instead of syringes.

The condom issue, however, seems somehow less explosive.
But as of now, condoms are banned or unavailable in 48 of
50 state prison systems, on the theory that distributing
them would condone illicit sex. When confronted with public health data from abroad, American prison officials have blithely suggested that all the fuss is overblown - because there is little sex to speak of in jail.

Congress seemed comfortable with this fiction until 2001,
when the Human Rights Watch organization issued a grisly
report titled "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons." The
study suggested that rape accompanied by horrific violence
was a regular aspect of American prison life. Based partly
on the accounts of more than 200 prisoners in nearly 40
states, the report told of prison officials who stood by
while sexual predators raped fellow inmates and sometimes
sold them - as sex slaves - to gangs and other inmates.

The study led directly to the Prison Rape Elimination Act
of 2003, which sailed through Congress and was signed into
law by President Bush. The law, which requires the Justice Department to collect data on prison rape and develop a national strategy for combating it, provided a much needed mechanism for weeding out sexual predators behind bars.

But this law is, at its heart, a public health law. It
provides for grants that could be used to underwrite public health initiatives - including sorely needed studies of disease transmission in the criminal justice system. The law has already resulted in fruitful discussions about expanding disease testing and prevention behind bars.

Lawmakers find it easy to discuss prison sex in the context
of rape because everyone agrees that sexual assault is
horrible and needs to be rooted out. The conversation about consensual sex among inmates will be trickier to handle. Even so, the law will inevitably force prison officials to confront all the varieties of sexual contact that public health researchers have known about for a long time.

The commission created by Congress to oversee the new law
is just getting started. But it has already brought some honesty to the historically dishonest conversation about sexual behavior in prison. Commission members who have spent time in the public health world, for example, are well aware that people who participate in sex behind bars do so for a variety of reasons. Some barter their bodies - and risk disease - in exchange for protection from marauding gangs. Others perform sex acts in exchange for necessities like soap, food and access to telephone calls.

Not all sex in prison, however, can be attributed to rape
or bartering. Recent research suggests that some of it is consensual among lonely inmates who experience same-sex encounters for the first time - and for many of them, the only time - while in prison.

The new law is pushing some states to create new strategies
for dealing with sexual assault in prison. But common sense tells us that sex among inmates will not disappear even if rape and coercion are taken out of the equation. That said, prison officials need to revisit rules that outlaw condoms behind bars. These rules aid the spread of diseases that flourish in prison - and then make the leap to the world outside.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/opinion/27sat4a.html

Posted by lois at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)

New Approach Needed to Deal with Prisons

The Jackson Sun
New approach needed to deal with our prisons
Nov 16 2004

Tennessee Department of Corrections Commissioner Quentin White is right. Something must be done about Tennessee's booming prison population and the mushrooming cost of running those prisons. And he's right about what needs to be done - rehabilitation programs and sentencing reform. Now comes the big challenge - convincing skeptical lawmakers, and an even more skeptical public, of that need.

The Jackson Sun
New approach needed to deal with our prisons
Nov 16 2004

The figures don't lie. Currently, Tennessee has 19,000 inmates incarcerated in 15 prisons. This year alone, $480 million will be spent to house them. Since 1998, the prison population has grown by 22 percent, while the cost of running the prisons has mushroomed 40 percent.

Clearly, a new approach is needed to dealing with this state's prisons, because what we're doing obviously isn't working.

One option that should be tried is investing more in drug rehabilitation programs. Law enforcement officials estimate that 80 percent of all crime is somehow linked to drugs, so treating an inmate's addiction could have a very positive effect on lowering the prison population. As an added bonus, drug rehab programs give addicts an opportunity to reclaim their lives and become productive citizens again. So do job training and other rehabilitation programs.

Another option which should be given a serious look is sentencing reform. Instead of focusing so much on "getting tough" with criminals, a more realistic approach is needed. A minor drug offender shouldn't face the same penalty as a drug kingpin. Nor should a first offender be treated the same as a career criminal. Instead of "throwing the book" at them, why not try diversion programs, or even community service for first-time offenders? Not only could communities benefit from the free labor, but such a move would free up space for dangerous criminals who do need to be incarcerated.

Finally, reducing the prison population means focusing more on education at all levels. If lawmakers ever needed a good reason for investing in education, this is it. Put simply, education equals opportunity. That means an opportunity to pull yourself up out of a bad situation, an opportunity at jobs and an opportunity to succeed and realize the American dream. People with more education rarely commit violent crimes.

White has the right idea about crime and punishment in Tennessee. We hope he succeeds in helping others buy into that vision.

Posted by lois at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2004

UCLA Study Demonstrates Prop 36 Isn't a Cure for Everything

"Since the law was passed, more than 30,000 people have been exposed to drug treatment, about half for the first time, according to a state-funded UCLA report released this year. About 24 percent of the people who entered treatment completed it."

Prop. 36 clients applaud UCLA report
It proves more sanctions for drug offenders are needed, they say.

By Christina Jewett -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Friday, November 26, 2004
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/11571450p-12469479c.html

Critics of Prop. 36, a 2000 ballot measure that gave drug offenders a choice of treatment instead of jail, have said it is all carrot and no stick.

A UCLA report released today may bolster their claim. It shows that Prop. 36 treatment clients were 48 percent more likely to commit another drug violation within a year, compared to rehab clients who signed up for treatment under supervision of probation or parole.

"Any treatment model has to have sanctions," said Mike Kennedy, president of the California Narcotic Officers' Association. "The problem with Prop. 36 is there are none. That's the big deal."

Results of each study looking at the law have been scrutinized by supporters and detractors of the ballot measure that 61 percent of California voters backed, and the law is watched nationally as a social experiment in drug policy.

Since the law was passed, more than 30,000 people have been exposed to drug treatment, about half for the first time, according to a state-funded UCLA report released this year. About 24 percent of the people who entered treatment completed it.

Today's report published in the journal of Criminology & Public Policy proves what law enforcement has said all along: that Prop. 36 is not tough enough, said John Lovell, lobbyist for the Chief Probation Officers of California.

He said drug courts across the nation give judges the discretion to fine or send people to jail for a weekend if they are not succeeding in treatment.

"We need treatment with oversight ... so we're not enabling people in the program, instead giving them the tools to succeed," he said.

Other close watchers of the law say this study does not make a sweeping indictment of the program.

"It's not surprising, but it doesn't damn it, either," said Martin Iguchi, director of the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corporation. "No one ever said treatment would always work for those not interested in it."

Iguchi said the long-term benefits of turning a drug user into a contributing member of society far outweigh the short-term cost of sending one straight to jail.

The study also shows that compared to people who went to treatment voluntarily, Prop. 36 clients are 65 percent more likely to be arrested on suspicion of another drug charge within a year.

But despite the initial outcry from the law-enforcement community, the study also shows that Prop. 36 clients are not more likely to commit a violent or property crime one year after starting treatment than the comparison groups, said Glenn Backes of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supported Prop. 36.

"The fact that they are arrested at somewhat higher rates is a cause for concern, but we believe 36 can be refined and improved," he said. "It's far better than jail."

The study tracks the early months of Prop. 36, which gave non-violent drug offenders the choice to enter treatment rather than go to jail.

Del Sayles-Owen, deputy director of the state Office of Criminal Justice Collaboration, said the study takes too quick of a snapshot of the program as it was still being fine-tuned in each county. Based on the law passed by voters, counties were free to tailor their own treatment systems.

The study does highlight the problem some counties are facing of too few beds in residential treatment centers for people who need intense treatment, she said. Most Prop. 36 clients go to support groups and classes several times each week.

"We continue to deal with that issue, the shortage of residential treatment statewide," she said.

And Sayles-Owen said the study does nothing to prove that Prop. 36 is not doling out enough punishment to people who are not succeeding in recovery. While the report shows Prop. 36 clients re-offending at higher rates than others, she said it does not explain why.

"We are very pleased with client progress in treatment, given that overcoming addiction is so difficult," she said. "Even those who are just exposed learn more about addiction and how to seek help."

Bee's Christina Jewett can be reached at (916) 321-1201 or cjewett@sacbee.com.

Posted by lois at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)

Sentencing Guideline Study Finds Continuing Disparities

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 (AP) - The number of minority inmates in federal penitentiaries, as a percentage of all federal prisoners, has increased sharply since sentencing guidelines took effect in 1987 and now accounts for a majority of the prison population, a study reviewing 15 years of data has concluded.

Sentencing-Guideline Study Finds Continuing Disparities

Published: November 27, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/national/27sentencing.html?oref=login&th

The study was conducted by the United States Sentencing Commission, which sets the guidelines for federal judges. The panel examined how well the guidelines had brought uniformity to punishments, and found that while sentencing had become "more certain and predictable," disparities still existed among races and regions of the country, with blacks generally receiving harsher punishment than whites.

The findings come as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the guidelines, which advocates say are crucial to achieving fairness in punishment. The justices could decide as early as next week whether to throw out the system because it allows judges, rather than juries, to consider factors that can add years to sentences.

Yet before the guidelines were created in 1987, judges had wide discretion in issuing sentences. The guidelines, in contrast, give them a range of possible punishments for a given crime and make it difficult for them to go outside those boundaries.

The study found that the average prison sentence today is about 50 months, twice what it was in 1984, when lawmakers began calling for a uniform sentencing system. The difference, the study determined, is due mostly to the guidelines' elimination of parole for offenses like drug trafficking.

"The big unanswered question is, Do we need to have sentences growing this way?" said one sentencing expert, Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. "Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of complete unguided judicial discretion."

Whites made up 35 percent of the prison population in 2002, a sharp decline from nearly 60 percent in 1984, according to the report. It attributed the decrease to a striking growth in Hispanics imprisoned on immigration charges - to 40 percent of federal prisoners, from about 15 percent.

In addition, the gap in punishment between blacks and whites widened. While blacks and whites received an average sentence of slightly more than two years in 1984, blacks now stay in prison for about six years, compared with about four years for whites. The report attributed this disparity in part to harsher mandatory minimum sentences that Congress imposed for drug-related crimes like cocaine possession. In 2002, 81 percent of offenders in such cases were black.

The study found harsher punishments generally in the South than in the Northeast and the West, though it concluded that legal differences in individual cases "explain the vast majority of variation among judges and regions."

A bigger problem causing sentencing disparities, it said, is plea bargaining. The study said that as an incentive for getting guilty pleas, prosecutors offered more lenient punishments than those mandated in the guidelines in as many as one-third of cases.

Find the report entitled “Fifteen Years of Guidelines Sentencing” can be found at http://www.ussc.gov/15_year/15year.htm

Posted by lois at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2004

No Second Chance- New Report from Human Rights Watch

No Second Chance - People with Criminal Records Denied Access to Public Housing
http://hrw.org/reports/2004/usa1104

"This 101-page report is the first examination of “one strike” policies in public housing. Established to protect housing developments from potentially dangerous tenants, these policies automatically exclude applicants with certain criminal records. Unfortunately, the criteria for exclusion are needlessly overbroad and can exclude certain offenders for life—regardless of evidence of their rehabilitation." Corinne Carey, is the author of this report.
The report can be down loaded or purchsed from HRW for $15.00.

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2004

Hundreds of children held in Juvenile Detention Centers

"...17 county detention facilities that together house more than 10,000 adolescents a year."

November 23, 2004, New York Times
Child Detention Centers Criticized in New Jersey
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Hundreds of children and teenagers held in juvenile detention facilities in New Jersey are there illegally, kept for months without basic medical care in locked quarters that are severely overcrowded and leave them vulnerable to episodes of violence, according to a report by the independent monitor of the state's child welfare system.

The report, issued by the Office of the Child Advocate, which was created last year after the state's child welfare system scandal, is based on a yearlong investigation that had access to confidential government records.

It amounts to a damning portrait of the 17 county detention facilities that together house more than 10,000 adolescents a year.

The report found that fully a quarter of the youths held in detention facilities, many of them suffering from mental health problems, were there simply because the state could not find a more appropriate setting, such as a hospital or foster home. And in what the report called a "cruel irony,'' scores of them stayed four months longer on average than the sentences served by the adolescents who had been sent there for committing crimes.

The counties, according to the report, often failed to provide the most troubled youths in the facilities with rudimentary mental health care. Evaluations often were not done in some county juvenile jails; in others, mental health care was provided by drug and alcohol counselors, not doctors.

State officials acknowledged the problems yesterday and said significant reforms were being introduced and had already reduced the population in detention.

Nevertheless, the report offered recent chilling examples of cases that underscored the chaos and damage suffered by some of the adolescents in the detention centers.

One boy, over eight weeks in one of the centers, attempted suicide five times, often showered with his clothes on and threatened workers, but was taken off suicide watch by a social worker. That night, he was found trying to hang himself from a light fixture, using a piece of elastic from his underwear. A 16-year-old attempted suicide 14 times before being hospitalized.

"Thousands of kids are being inappropriately waylaid into detention when they need community-based mental health services,'' said Kevin M. Ryan, the child advocate. "The vast majority of the mentally ill kids are in detention for some minor offense like stealing a bike or getting into a fight. During the course of doing this report, we saw scores of them slowly and painfully come apart as they failed to receive treatment.''

Mr. Ryan said he had been particularly struck by the case of one teenager at the detention center in Union County. The youth had tried to kill himself four times in one month, once by slicing his wrists with a broken plastic cup, once by swallowing a screw, and yet again by drinking the chemicals from an ice pack.

"Putting kids like this in detention is akin to placing an asthmatic child in a closet with pollen and asbestos,'' he said. "It is a given they are going to get sicker.''

The inappropriate but frequent placement of mentally ill adolescents in detention facilities is a national problem. According to a 1999 report by the surgeon general, one in five youngsters in detention centers across the country have serious emotional problems, just as in New Jersey. Still, the child advocate's report points to long-term systemic failures within the state that have exacerbated the impact of such incarceration on adolescents.

In one measure, the report found that juveniles are often placed in detention centers that have already reached maximum capacity, a practice Mr. Ryan called a flagrant violation of state law. In 2003 in Camden County, the juvenile detention center had more than twice as many youths as legally allowed inside its walls on a daily basis.

Over the years, the administrator of the Camden County center, Mary T. Previte, has repeatedly protested the overcrowding, calling the conditions a "tinderbox'' that could lead to violence and sexual assault.

One of the reasons the detention centers in New Jersey remain overcrowded, according to the report, is an insufficient number of state-sponsored places to send the adolescents for care or safekeeping, such as boarding homes for emotionally disturbed children.

"The primary reason many of these youth are in detention is because the county detention center, unlike the schoolhouse, is the only place that cannot say no,'' the report said.

Finding appropriate placement for such youngsters is the responsibility of the state's Division of Youth and Family Services, which has been deeply troubled for years.

Last year, citing the agency's systematic failure to provide services and safe foster homes to children, a federal court in Trenton ordered sweeping reforms and called for monitoring by an independent panel of child welfare experts.

Yesterday, Andy Williams, a spokesman for the Department of Human Services, which is responsible for the child welfare agency, said those reforms have already resulted in improvements that address the problems at the detention centers highlighted in the report.

"We certainly couldn't argue that kids who need behavior health services shouldn't be in detention,'' said Mr. Williams, "but it is already a priority of the child welfare reform plan.'' He said his agency was working to expand the availability of health care and other services that might reduce the number of adolescents inappropriately placed in secure detention.

"Right now we can provide services to 1,500 kids while they remain in their communities,'' he said, in discussing the allocation of resources, "and when we have completed the expansion by June of next year, we will service 4,000.''

In addition, he said, since the spring the division has been placing case managers at the worst detention centers, where they have been doing mental health assessments and shortening the time it takes to get them into a more appropriate setting. "In March the census in Camden was 100, and now it is 60,'' he said.

Still, Camden is designed to hold only 37 youths, which may be an indication of how far the state still has to go.

"Look there have definitely been improvements,'' said Howard L. Beyer, the executive director of the Juvenile Justice Commission, "but one night in detention for a kid who doesn't belong there will have an adverse affect on them for the rest of their life.''

Indeed, Mr. Ryan, the state's child advocate, listed a raft of proposed reforms in his report, including requirements that every detention center have a licensed mental health worker and that the Department of Human Services put case managers in all the detention centers.

The report also called on state officials to make better use of available federal money to improve the conditions of the detention centers. For years, it found, the state had failed to apply for assistance for eligible youths at the detention centers. In the last year alone, it asserted, that could have amounted to $600,000 in federal help.

Posted by lois at 09:16 AM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2004

Jailhouse Blues

This editorial in the November 22, 2004 New York Times is based on the pioneering work of Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Inititative. To see his websites go to: www.PrisonersoftheCensus.org and www.prisonsucks.com

New York Times: November 22, 2004
EDITORIAL
Jailhouse Blues

The founding fathers envisioned a simple head count when they decreed that the country would conduct a census once every 10 years for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. Over the centuries, the question of who lives where has become more complicated. The census already has to determine where retirees with two homes live or how to count people who live in one city and work in another. It should be simpler counting prisoners.

A quirk in the residency rules counts inmates as "residents'' of the prisons even though most are held only for brief periods before returning to their actual homes, which are often hundreds of miles away. The current system clashes with the principle of one person, one vote - by artificially inflating the populations of rural electoral districts and leaving the urban areas to which the prisoners will return underrepresented, particularly in state legislatures.

This prison census was less significant 30 years ago, when the prison population was less than 200,000. But mandatory sentencing policies for drug offenses have driven the prison population across the nation to a staggering 1.4 million. These new offenders are overwhelming black and Hispanic people from inner cities. The prison construction boom, however, has taken place mainly in white, rural counties that have since turned prison inmates into a kind of cash crop.

The citizens of large cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have helped to pay the cost of building and maintaining state prisons, which provide much-needed jobs in many rural districts. They did not, however, count on also giving these generally underpopulated areas extra political influence as well.

The nonvoting inmates - sometimes called "imported constituents'' - are often counted in rural districts where legislators vote against the interest of their home cities. Their presence in the census count of prison neighborhoods distorts population statistics and creates legislative districts that fly in the face of federal laws requiring districts to be roughly the same size - plus or minus a variation of about 5 percent. A recent series of reports - from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, the Prison Policy Initiative in Massachusetts and the Urban Institute in Washington - shows that many states have achieved the appearance of parity by drawing the state legislative districts in rural areas so that they include the largest possible number of inmates. Among the 10 states that have experienced the most prison growth, there are more than a dozen counties where at least one in five "residents'' is an inmate.

The simplest and fairest solution would be to permit inmates to fill out census forms with their home addresses instead of automatically counting them as residents of the prison county. Most prisoners will have returned to their hometowns long before the next census rolls around. There, they will often be in need of both government services and political consideration.

Posted by lois at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2004

4 out of 5 juveniles who are arrested have substance abuse problems

STUDY: 80% OF JUVENILE DETAINEES HAVE SUBSTANCE-ABUSE PROBLEM

A five-year National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) study looked at juveniles aged 10 to 17 who were arrested for criminal activity. Four out of five had a problem with substance abuse. The researchers recommended a stronger focus on assessing juveniles' needs and offering substance abuse treatment and other services. To download this study, go to: http://www.casacolumbia.org/pdshopprov/shop/item.asp?itemid=73.

Posted by lois at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2004

To Close Budget Gap, Close Prisons

“If the governor was serious about blowing up boxes, he would begin closing prisons that this state does not need and can’t afford,” says CURB member Sitara Nieves.

To close budget gap, close prisons

by Sean South and Rose Braz

Sacramento - Facing news of a $109 million cost overrun for California’s embattled Department of Corrections, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) proposes that the state begin closing prisons, and not open Delano II, California’s 33rd prison, now under construction. This is not unprecedented: budget crises have derailed prison construction in Oregon and delayed prison openings in Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over the past two years.

“If the governor was serious about blowing up boxes, he would begin closing prisons that this state does not need and can’t afford,” says CURB member Sitara Nieves.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s own January 2004 budget proposal acknowledged that the only way to reduce prison spending is to reduce the number of people in prison. He said that, given an expected decline in the prison population by 2005, the state should examine prison closures.

States across the country facing similar budget crises have also taken steps to improve rehabilitation programs and reform their prison and parole systems. As a result, these states were able to reduce prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison while maintaining - and even improving - public safety.

“It’s not just the financial costs,” adds CURB member Barbara Oldershaw. “There is mounting evidence that over-incarceration leaves our communities less safe. Growing police, jail and prison budgets are taking money from health and human services, from public education, from housing and from other programs that make our neighborhoods more stable, hopeful and strong.” For the annual cost of operating one prison:

l 341,800 eligible children could get health care through the Healthy Families Program,

l 77,963 children not eligible for Medi-Cal or Healthy Families could enroll in California Children’s Services and

l 336,469 individuals could utilize state Vocational Rehabilitation’s employment services for people with disabilities.

Corrections estimated that parole reforms would bring down the state’s prison population by about 15,000 people by mid-2005. This reduction in the number of people in state prisons would mean that California could close:

l Pelican Bay State Prison ($115 million annual operating costs, according to CDC);

l Folsom State Prison ($72.7 million annual operating costs, according to CDC); and

l Valley State Prison for Women ($63 million annual operating costs, according to CDC).

“While the ‘action, action, action’ governor may claim he can’t do anything to rein in rising prison budgets, the solution is actually quite simple: reduce the number of people in prison,” said Nieves. “The governor had that opportunity with Proposition 66, the Three Strikes Amendment. Instead, he chose to star in commercials repeating lies about the initiative that a Superior Court judge barred from the ballot.”

CURB, a coalition of 40 organizations, is committed to reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California. More information about CURB is available at www.curbprisonspending.org.

Rose Braz is director of Critical Resistance, an organization founded by Angela Davis and others, 1904 Franklin St., Ste. 504, Oakland CA 94612, (510) 444-0484, rose@criticalresistance.org.

San Francisco Bay View, 11/17/04

Posted by lois at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2004

The Treatment Cure---Prop 36

"More than 66,000 people have accessed drug treatment in the first two years since Prop. 36 passed."

The Treatment Cure
By Judy Appel, AlterNet
Posted on November 18, 2004, Printed on November 18, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20541/

Jennifer Vasquez is a single mother of three. She was homeless, and her children had been placed in foster care when she was arrested for drug possession. Under California's landmark Proposition 36, she was offered the option of treatment instead of incarceration.

Vasquez (not her real name) is one of thousands of Californians who have begun putting their lives back together after receiving treatment through Prop. 36. After starting treatment, she moved off of the streets and was able to get her children back from foster care. The day that her case was dismissed, she rented her own apartment. She now holds a steady full-time job.

The cycle of addiction that destroys families and often leads to incarceration has a huge social cost beyond individual devastation: prison, foster care, hospital stays. That cycle can only be broken by giving people a chance at treatment, instead of pushing them through the revolving door of prison again and again.

Vasquez is not alone. Prop. 36 has helped reclaim the lives of tens of thousands of other Californians with substance-abuse problems – almost 50 percent of whom are receiving it for the first time, according to a major UCLA study of the impact of Prop. 36. That state-commissioned report also noted that this historic initiative has yielded excellent results during its first two years. Among the findings in the UCLA report:

More than 66,000 people have accessed drug treatment in the first two years since Prop. 36 passed.

Prop. 36 clients are succeeding in treatment at rates similar to those of clients in other diversion programs, such as drug courts.

Approximately half of all Prop. 36 participants in each of the first two years were entering drug treatment for the first time.

A majority of Prop. 36 outpatient clients received at least 90 days of treatment. (Treatment experts generally consider 90 days to be enough time to start seeing positive results.)

These numbers are significant. Getting access to treatment, as many Prop. 36 participants have done for the first time, is a huge first step in overcoming drug dependence.

Still, it's important to understand that this first step isn't always the final one. Like cigarette smokers, people who have long histories of addiction seldom kick the habit the first time they try. That is why Prop. 36's success rates are so impressive: They are comparable to those in other diversion programs, such as drug courts, even though the participants on average have longer histories of drug addiction, and half of them have never had access to treatment before.

The UCLA evaluation confirms the wisdom of passing Prop. 36 in 2000, when Californians recognized that imprisoning nonviolent drug users had both failed to deter drug use and was costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars. They passed one of the most significant pieces of sentencing reform anywhere in the country since the end of Prohibition – diverting first- and second-time nonviolent drug possession offenders into drug treatment instead of incarceration. Four states have already followed in California's footsteps by implementing similar measures, and several other states are considering such action.

Nevertheless, the UCLA study was not an unqualified endorsement of Prop. 36. It also highlighted several areas for improvement. The report found that many people are not being referred to the specific kind of treatment programs they need. For example, the authors predicted that treatment completion and duration would likely improve for heroin-using clients if methadone was available to all who desire it. Additionally, some who needed residential treatment were not placed in this high intensity treatment due to lack of availability.

While Prop. 36 has led to a significant 25.7 percent increase in the number of residential treatment beds in California, this report indicates a need for still more treatment programs. Additionally, criminal justice personnel need to be trained about addiction, relapse and a diversity of treatment options, so that they are not tempted to overrule the recommendations of drug treatment professionals who are best qualified to determine treatment needs.

But even though there is room for improvement, Prop. 36's results are encouraging. The initiative has created healthy alternatives to drug misuse and costly imprisonment for thousands of people, and Californians recognize a winning hand. According to a recent Field Poll sponsored by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 73 percent of California voters would now vote for Prop. 36, up from the 61 percent who passed the initiative in 2000.

The next year and a half will offer an opportunity not only to protect, but to expand on early successes. The original initiative allowed for $120 million per year for five years – funding that is due to run out in July 2006. It is imperative that we make clear to our policy-makers that Prop. 36 is not only saving money, it is saving lives.

Posted by lois at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

Judge Finds Evidence That Asylum Seekers Were Abused

NEWARK, N.J. -- Evidence shows political asylum seekers were abused and harassed while detained at a privately operated facility that lacked clean food, clothes and bedding, a federal judge found as he refused to dismiss a lawsuit by nine immigrants.

A lawyer for the immigrants said Wednesday that the groundbreaking ruling means that detainees "cannot be held in conditions where they are denied adequate conditions like food and clothes and warmth: the basic conditions of civilized life."

"You don't need to beat someone to a pulp until they're ready to die to violate human rights law," said the lawyer, Penny M. Venetis, associate director of the Constitutional Law Clinic at Rutgers School of Law-Newark.

Judge finds evidence that asylum seekers were abused

By JEFFREY GOLD
Associated Press Writer

November 17, 2004

The ruling, filed Nov. 10 by U.S. District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise in Newark, is the latest milestone in a lawsuit filed in 1997 against what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the company that ran its detention center in Elizabeth.

The judge dismissed charges against the INS and its officials, saying the government cannot be sued. He also dismissed some charges against the company's guards, finding that individual actions did not rise to the level of international human rights abuses, Venetis said.

But he refused to dismiss all charges against Correctional Services Corp. and its officials. The Sarasota, Fla.-based company was known as Esmor Corp. when it operated the INS detention center.

Venetis said her clients will seek a trial date. She also said the decision could affect detainees held after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Correctional Services is among the nation's largest prison contractors, with the ability to house about 7,400 people in 31 adult and juvenile facilities in 11 states, according to documents it filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company reported 2003 revenues of $135.8 million.

Company spokesman Bernard A. "Skip" Wagner referred inquiries to general counsel John Mentzer, who did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

The ruling came after the judge reviewed thousands of pages of documents and transcripts from depositions of 30 people, including company officials and seven of the nine asylum seekers. The other two have been deported, Venetis said.

The judge said the evidence showed that detention center administrator Willard Stovall was "fully aware" of abuses, and listed 21 examples, including the beatings of detainees and the sexual assault of one female detainee.

Other examples cited by the judge were sexual harassment that included guards watching women detainees take showers, broken toilets, defective heating, and lack of access to supplies such as toothbrushes and toothpaste.

In addition, guards interfered with detainees' efforts to practice their religions, whether they were Christian, Hindu or Muslim, the judge said.

Venetis said the ruling was the first on international human rights by a federal judge since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the topic in June. "This is a very major event because Judge Debevoise interpreted the Supreme Court's finding to mean that you don't need physical torture to violate international law, that it can occur in the United States by corporations doing business with the United States," she said.

Venetis said the ruling could also allow any of the 1,200 aliens detained on immigration violations in the post-Sept. 11 sweeps to sue, even though most have since been deported.

The Elizabeth center was operated by Esmor, then based in Melville, N.Y., until shortly after a June 1995 riot, when about 100 immigrants broke windows, destroyed furniture and overpowered guards, claiming they suffered physical abuse and other inhumane conditions.

The INS closed the center and fired Esmor after its investigation found that poorly trained guards abused the detainees physically and mentally, gave them spoiled food and deprived them of sleep. The detention center reopened in January 1997 after renovations were completed by its new operator, Corrections Corp. of America, of Nashville, Tenn.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-nj--immigrants-detent1117nov17,0,2110068,print.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire

Correctional Services Corp: http://www.correctionalservices.com

Posted by lois at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

Rehab Justice

"According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Web site (as of Sept. 4, 2004), the total federal inmate population is 180,318. About 54 percent of that population are drug felons. The total cost for each prisoner was $61 per day; for the entire population, almost $11 million a day or $4 billion a year. It is predicted that by 2010 there will be more than 216,000 individuals serving time in federal prisons. "

November 18, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR, New York Times
Rehab Justice
By DONALD P. LAY

St. Paul

Our federal justice system has a great deal to learn from our state court systems. Today, nearly every state has a "drug court" to deal with nonviolent drug offenders through a mix of treatment and sanctions, all as part of an effort to reduce recidivism, substance abuse and costs. Statistics show that drug courts are a success, yet Congress persists in mandating ever stiffer sentences for federal offenders who need treatment more than punishment.

While drug court programs vary from state to state, most try to address the cause of an offender's behavior: addiction. All offer community-based treatment in lieu of prison. Offenders who choose to participate in a drug court and complete their treatment typically can have the charges against them dropped, or can plead guilty without being sentenced to prison.

In 2003, there were more than 1,500 drug courts either in operation or in the planning stages. Drug court graduates have substantially lower rates of criminal recidivism than offenders who are imprisoned. In New York, for example, the re-arrest rate among 18,000 drug court graduates was 13 percent, compared with 47 percent for the same type of drug offenders who served prison time without treatment. Drug courts also cost less than incarceration and have high retention and completion rates. Even Congress recognizes their worth; since 1994, it has authorized the attorney general to make grants to states, state and local courts, and local and tribal governments to establish drug courts.

Years ago, Chief Judge James L. Oakes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and I, as chief judge of the Eighth Circuit, sponsored a sentencing institute. At that institute, I asked the chairman of the United States Sentencing Commission why an 18-year-old who had received some drugs by mail for a friend should face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, under the commission's federal sentencing guidelines set by the commission. The chairman responded that because this teenager would be in prison during his 20's, the age when the likelihood of recidivism is greatest, the sentence would cut down on re-arrests. The head of the Bureau of Prisons whispered to me, "Doesn't he realize when that young man gets out of prison, he will be nothing more than a hardened criminal?"

Mandatory minimum sentences, enacted by Congress, have contributed to the rising costs of imprisonment and crowding in federal prisons. In federal drug cases, defendants could face a minimum of 5 to 10 years in prison, while a similar offense in some state courts would allow a court, depending on the circumstances, to place the defendant on probation. Justice Anthony Kennedy and several other scholars, judges, professors and law reviews have openly criticized the use of mandatory minimum sentences in federal criminal cases. To make matters worse, a bill has been proposed in the Senate that would set a mandatory sentence of 10 years for a first drug conviction and mandatory life imprisonment for a second.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Web site (as of Sept. 4, 2004), the total federal inmate population is 180,318. About 54 percent of that population are drug felons. The total cost for each prisoner was $61 per day; for the entire population, almost $11 million a day or $4 billion a year. It is predicted that by 2010 there will be more than 216,000 individuals serving time in federal prisons.

Unlike the states, the federal criminal justice system offers no alternatives for nonviolent offenders charged with drug-related crimes. In the federal system, it is almost a certainty that a convicted drug offender will be incarcerated rather than going through a community-based treatment program. It is little wonder then that the federal prison system will continue to be overburdened. Given the success of drug courts in the states, the federal government should study how to modify its sentencing to incorporate elements of the drug court model and to assess the effectiveness of community-based alternatives to imprisonment for nonviolent federal drug felons.

Congress would need to authorize the mechanics of federal drug courts. One suggestion would be that magistrate judges could preside over the drug court, while federal probation officers could oversee the offenders' attendance at drug treatment programs as well as obtain employment and housing for them. A good start would be to develop sentencing policies that take drug dependency into account, and that place as much emphasis on preventing crime as on punishing misconduct. Sentences that combine treatment, monitoring and the threat of imprisonment hold the promise of long-term solutions to crime. They should be more readily available in the federal system.

The high cost of this incarceration policy falls on taxpayers. However, beyond all of this is the fact that the real damage is incurred by the individuals who must spend a large portion of their life in prison. The damage to young prisoners cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Cases are now pending before the Supreme Court that will affect sentences in all federal cases. This presents an opportunity for the executive and legislative branches to bring sanity to federal drug sentencing. Congress has nothing to lose and everything to gain by passing legislation to carry out a program for federal drug courts.

Donald P. Lay is the seniorjudge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Posted by lois at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)

The George W. Bush Heroin Delivery Service

Cartoon
The George W. Bush Heroin Delivery Service
http://www.blackcommentator.com/114/114_cartoon_bush_heroin.html

Posted by lois at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2004

55 Years for Dealing Marijuana

November 17, 2004
Judge Sentences Man to 55 Years for Dealing Marijuana
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York Times

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A judge who condemned federal sentencing laws as ``unjust, cruel and irrational'' said he had little choice Tuesday but to sentence a first-time drug offender caught with a handgun to 55 years and one day in prison.

U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell gave record producer Weldon Angelos the minimum 55 years for carrying the gun -- and one day for dealing marijuana and money laundering while in possession of the weapon.

Cassell said Angelos, 25, will serve more time than rapists, murderers or airline hijackers -- and won't be eligible for release until he's 70.

``I'm disappointed the judge didn't go the extra step'' of ignoring the sentencing guidelines, said Angelos' attorney, Jerry Mooney, who plans an appeal.

Cassell said he would call on President Bush to commute Angelos's sentence and Congress to change sentencing laws for drug offenders.

Before trial Angelos was offered a plea bargain with a 16-year sentence, but he strongly denied carrying a gun outside his home during alleged drug transactions. That testimony came from an informant ``of some disreputable background,'' Mooney said.

A jury exonerated Angelos of two other gun charges but convicted him of twice wearing a gun in an ankle holster and once carrying it in a briefcase.

Prosecutor Robert Lunt said Angelos has been suspected of drug trafficking and money laundering for years and got what he deserved.

Last year's trial made news when the witness list included Snoop Dogg and other artists who had worked with Angelos, but Bad Azz was the only big name artist who ended up testifying.

The defense argued Angelos made money legally through his work, while prosecutors claimed he used drug money to finance his music business, Extravagant Records.

Posted by lois at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

"Million Dollar Blocks"

The neighborhood costs of America's prison boom
Million-Dollar Blocks
by Jennifer Gonnerman
November 16th, 2004 1:55 PM, The Village Voice

The Remeeder Houses make up one of the poorest blocks in Brooklyn. Six-story buildings rise from the rectangular patch of land between Sutter and Blake avenues, and between Georgia and Alabama avenues in East New York. More than 50 percent of the project's residents live below the poverty line. Unemploymentis rampant. Run-down, overcrowded apartments are the norm.

By another measure, though, this block is one of the priciest in the city. Last year, five residents were sent to state prison, at an annual cost of about $30,000 a person. The total price tag for their incarceration will exceed $1 million.

Criminal-justice experts have a name for this phenomenon: "million-dollar blocks." In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this category—ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million.

In at least one case, the price tag will actually surpass $5 million. These blocks are largely concentrated in the poorest pockets of the borough's poorest neighborhoods, including East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville.

In recent years, as the U.S. prison population has soared, million-dollar blocks have popped up in cities across the country. Maps of prison spending (like the one on the left) suggest a new way of looking at this phenomenon, illustrating the oft ignored reality that most prisoners come from just a handfulof urban neighborhoods. These maps invite numerous questions: How is the community benefiting from all the money being spent? And might there be another, better way to spend those same criminal-justice dollars?

These maps have attracted attention nationwide from state legislators struggling to balance their budgets. In a few state capitols, prison-spending maps have begun to influence the dynamics of the political debate, suggesting new ways to think about crime and punishment, recidivism and reform. One state, Connecticut, has even gone so far as to change its spending priorities, taking dollars out of the prison budget and steering them toward the neighborhoods with the highest rates of incarceration.

Prison-spending maps highlight the fact that money spent on million-dollar blocks winds up in another part of the state—far from the scene of the crime. In New York State, about 60 percent of prisoners come from New York City, but virtually every prison is located upstate, in rural towns and villages, places like Attica, Dannemora, and Malone. As Todd Clear, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, puts it: "People who live on Park Avenue give a lot of money to people who live in Auburn, New York, in order to watch people who live in Brooklyn for a couple of years—and send them back damaged."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Most likely, nobody would now be mulling over the concept of million-dollar blocks if not for a 42-year-old Brooklynite named Eric Cadora. Back in 1998, Cadora was working at a nonprofit agency in Manhattan called the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, or CASES. He taught himself mapping software and studied the various ways mapping was used, including by the New York City Police Department to identify crime hot spots.

About crime mapping, Cadora says, "People weren't coming at it from a policy reform perspective—and the whole idea of [prisoner] re-entry and community wasn't part of the issue. Most of the issue was about getting tough." Cadora wanted to try a different approach. He decided to create a new set of maps, which he hoped "would help people envision solutions rather than just critiques."

With criminal-justice data he obtained from a state agency, he embarked on his first mapping project: Brooklyn. Colleague Charles Swartz helped, and together they made a series of maps illustrating where inmates come from and how much money is spent to imprison them.

"The reasons we did the money maps weren't to say, 'Gee, we spent too much money on criminal justice,' " Cadora explains. "Because what's too much? The question was to say, 'Look, you can now think of the money you're spending on incarceration and criminal justice as a pool of funds' "—that is, funds that could be spent in a different way. He adds, "What struck me, looking back at a year's worth of prison admissions, was that these were the results of a bunch of individual decisions, but it turns out to amount to enough financial investment to be thought of as an actual spending policy."

In 1999, Cadora began sharing his maps with criminal-justice agencies and nonprofit organizations. Word spread. Soon other states were calling. Five years later, Cadora's maps are well-known in criminal-justice circles. He now works at the After-Prison Initiative, a program of the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute, and demand for his maps continues to grow. By now, he and Swartz have made maps for agencies in Rhode Island, Florida, Arizona, Connecticut, Louisiana, Kentucky, and New Jersey.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The money that taxpayers spend on prisons pays for the incarceration of some very violent people—the sorts of criminals who neighbors are eager to see go away. These dollars are also used to lock up individuals who commit nonviolent crimes—possession of a few vials of crack, for example. Soon these individuals will be released from prison, and they'll go back to the same neighborhoods. Statistics show there is a strong likelihood they will be locked up again.

Professor Clear, who has worked closely with Cadora, says the maps suggest a different sort of solution: "Use some of that money to improve the places those people came from in the first place, so that they are not crime-production neighborhoods." This might sound like a fantasy scenario—and a few years ago, that's all it really was. Just a radical idea, to which Cadora and a colleague gave a wonkish name: "justice reinvestment."

But budget shortfalls have a way of encouraging politicians to re-evaluate even the most popular policies, and many states have concluded that they simply cannot afford to keep so many people in prison.

For the most part, states that have shrunk their inmate populations have then steered the savings into a general fund. One state, however, has reinvested in the neighborhoods that are home to the bulk of its prisoners.

Until recently, Connecticut had a $500 million budget deficit and more prisoners than it could house. State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat from East Haven, joined with fellow legislators in 2003 to introduce a bill that would scale down the inmate population and funnel the savings into social programs. To win over their colleagues, the legislators invited Cadora to present his maps.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," says Lawlor, a former prosecutor who chairs the Judiciary Committee. "I think Eric is able to graphically depict the insanity of our current system for preventing crimes in certain neighborhoods. We're spending all of this money and not getting very good results. I think when you look at it the way Eric is able to depict it in those neighborhood graphs, you can see how crazy this all is."

Connecticut legislators passed the bill this spring. To shrink the prison population, they adopted several strategies, including reducing the number of people sent to prison for violating probation rules. And they steered the savings into services designed to curb recidivism, including mental-health care and drug treatment. Programs in New Haven—which has many high-incarceration neighborhoods—will receive $2.5 million.

"It's a huge precedent, even though it's a small state," says Michael Jacobson, former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, who worked as a consultant for the Connecticut legislature and wrote about the experience in his forthcoming book, Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration. "It's the first state that through legislation has simultaneously done a bunch of things that will intelligently lower its prison population, and then reinvest a significant portion of that savings in the kind of things that will keep lowering its prison population. No other state has done anything like that."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The idea may be starting to catch on. In Louisiana, three state senators introduced a bill earlier this year that proposed to trim the prison population, save more than $3 million a year, and then spend that savings on helping ex-prisoners find jobs. The bill did not pass, but the idea caught the attention of Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, whose state has the highest rate of incarceration in the country. She invited representatives of three foundations, including Cadora, to a luncheon at the governor's mansion. At the request of her office, Cadora will be creating many more detailed maps of Louisiana.

New York's situation is slightly different from those of Louisiana and Connecticut. While the national prison population continues to rise, New York's inmate population has actually been dropping, from a high of 71,538 inmates in December 1999 to fewer than 65,000 today. Without overcrowded prisons—and without a budget crisis like the one Connecticut was facing—there isn't the same sense of urgency in the state legislature.

This past spring, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, a Brooklyn Democrat, introduced a bill to establish the New York State Justice Reinvestment Fund, a $10 million pilot program to finance organizations that assist ex-prisoners. Though the bill has 10 co-sponsors, its prospects of passing in the Republican-controlled senate are slim. The state assembly included a provision in its drug-law reform bill this year to commission more prison-spending maps, but that bill didn't pass the senate either.

A map of million-dollar blocks, with stark concentrations of color, can quickly convey a sense of how self-defeating many criminal-justice policies have become—how, for example, spending exorbitant amounts of money locking people up means there's far less money available for programs that decrease crime, like education, drug treatment, mental-health care, and job training. But these maps don't tell the whole story, since they don't show what happens after inmates are set free.

New York's state prisons release around 28,000 people a year. Nearly two-thirds of them return to New York City. They arrive wearing state-issued clothes—a plain sweatshirt and stiff denim pants—and they come back to the same streets they left. They bring home all the memories and lessons of prison life, plus the system's parting gift, $40. Usually, they discover that the neighborhoods they left behind have not changed, and that life on the outside can be incredibly difficult. If the past is any predictor, 40 percent of them will be back upstate within three years.

To see the map go to:
http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0446/gonnerman2.php

The Making of the Map
by Jennifer Gonnerman
November 16th, 2004 1:55 PM

Million-Dollar Blocks
The neighborhood costs of America's prison boom
By Jennifer Gonnerman

How much does it cost to keep somebody locked up? This map, created by Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, illustrates the estimated cost per block for people who entered the state prison system in 2003. To make the map, Cadora and Swartz obtained home addresses and prison sentences—like three to six years—for everyone who was sent to prison in 2003. Then they took each person's minimum sentence (in the above example, that would be three years) and multiplied that number by $30,000 in order to figure out what the total expense will be for his or her incarceration.

The estimates shown on this map are conservative. Many inmates remain in prison longer than their minimum sentence. And the figure of $30,000 may be lower than the actual cost per year to hold an inmate in a New York State prison. (The state Department of Correctional Services puts this number at $26,933, but a recent report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics gives it as $36,835.)

In addition, this map features only prison costs—not jail costs. Prisons hold people who have been convicted of a crime; jails, like those on Rikers Island, are for people who have been accused of a crime and are not yet convicted, or for people who have received sentences of one year or less.

The darkest red areas on this map are "million-dollar blocks"—blocks where so many people were sent to prison in 2003 that the total cost of their incarceration will exceed a million dollars. There would have been many more "million-dollar blocks" if jail expenses were factored in. And the price tag per block would climb even higher if other criminal-justice costs—like those for probation and parole—were also added. As it is, in 2003, there were 35 million-dollar blocks in Brooklyn, out of a total of 9,589 blocks.

One Tenant Leader's Take
Ronald Ward has never heard of a "million-dollar block," but he's lived on one for years—in the Howard Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn. When he talks about crime, he doesn't talk about statistics or dollars or maps. He talks about what he's seen: young men selling drugs out of his lobby; parole officers who have become a regular presence in his project; men who have come home from long prison stays, only to end up selling drugs once again.

"Most of the crime is committed against the people who live here—the muggings, the burglaries," says Ward, 61, a tenant leader who has been living in the Howard Houses for 43 years. "Crime here is really so rampant." There is one particular crime that he is less eager to discuss. Fourteen years ago, his 20-year-old son was out driving a cab when two men got in, pointed a gun at him, then shot him in the head. His son died three weeks later. "Losing a child—I had never experienced that kind of trauma," he says.

When Ward learned that he lived on a million-dollar block, he wasn't surprised. Many of his project's residents go to work every day, he says, but "we've got people with problems." Empty refrigerators, crack addiction, illiteracy. If legislators asked him how to stop the cycle of imprisonment, he says he'd tell them: "Stop the racism." And he'd advise them to improve the schools. "If you don't educate people, you keep them powerless," he says. "They need to understand the system they're living in. When people become aware of that, then they can get out of it." J.G.

Posted by lois at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

MCI and Telephone Justice Campaign in NYC

Message from Dana Kaplan:
There has been a lot of press recently on the campaign here in New York to end the contract between MCI and DOCS – a lot of it driven by the billboard that was donated to us on the corner of 125th street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The billboard has generated some very interesting reactions, and is especially ironic located on the strip of 125th that represents the heart of the gentrification of Harlem, snadwiched in between starbucks, the body shop, staples, and the many other billboards using Black historical figures to hawk goods such as Adidas and Hennessey. We’re setting up on a soapbox this Saturday to speak out on the issue and have cell phones available for people to call the Governor.
To see the billboard go to:
http://www.telephonejustice.org

New York Daily News, Tuesday, November 16th, 2004

Innocent victims

On the southwest corner of 125th St. and Lenox Ave., cater-corner from a Starbuck's in the heart of a newly revitalized Harlem, a billboard recently went up that sounds a jarring note amid the prosperity. "Greed, Corruption & High A-- Rates," it says. "A joint venture of MCI and the New York State Department of Correctional Services. Robbing your communities of $25 million a year." Poetry, it's not. But the sign points to a grinding injustice inflicted on thousands of families across the state. MCI, the phone service giant, has an exclusive, sweetheart contract with the state correction department that forces anyone trying to communicate with prison inmates to pay punitively high phone rates.

Every collect call from a prisoner costs $3 plus 16 cents a minute - more than six times the cost of a regular phone call. A typical call from prison lasts 19 minutes and costs the recipient $6. It's not unheard of for families to pay $300 to $700 a month to talk with someone in prison, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. Cheaper alternatives, like phone cards or commissary accounts, are prohibited by the state. Why? More than 57% of the money from the MCI calls goes straight to the correction department. In fiscal year 2002, for instance, prisoners made 7 million calls lasting more than 124 million minutes. That generated $39 million in fees, more than $22 million of which got kicked back to the state. Since 1996, the department has raked in $175 million from these calls in what amounts to a forced tax on the mothers, children and spouses of inmates, people who have not committed any crime and are largely ill-equipped to handle such bills. The prison systems of 44 other states have similar monopoly deals with phone companies. It's a billion-dollar-a-year business, and New York and MCI charge the highest rates in the country.

A more humane alternative would be for New York to imitate the federal prison system, where inmates can use an 800 number for which their families pay 7 cents a minute. Gouging inmates' families is not only unfair, it's bad for public safety. Experts say a key to rehabilitating offenders is to have them maintain positive contacts with the outside world before they return. High rates cause many families to limit calls drastically.

The great irony, of course, is that MCI is the new incarnation of WorldCom, which in 2002 acknowledged shady accounting that amounted to the largest case of corporate fraud in American history, causing $11 billion in losses. The company later reconstituted itself as MCI, but former WorldCom executives still face the possibility of jail sentences for the ripoff. And the prison phone deals continue. The Center for Constitutional Rights has sued the state over the MCI deal and plans to hold a rally in front of the Harlem billboard on Saturday. Protesters will be phoning Gov. Pataki's office - (518) 474-8390 - to demand a complete, immediate rollback of the punitive rates. Here's hoping they call collect.

Posted by lois at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2004

Filling Our Prison System Isn't Likely to Unlock Justice

A policy that's criminal.
Why do we tolerate mass imprisonment?

BY DESIREE COOPER
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

November 16, 2004

Today, some of the nation's greatest minds have gathered at the Detroit Opera House to discuss "Restoration, Reformation and Rehabilitation in the U.S. Criminal Justice System." More than 2 million Americans are now behind bars -- the highest number in our history and the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It seems that as a society, we've decided that it's worth $50 billion a year -- nearly $30 billion more what's being proposed to combat AIDS in Africa and send a man to Mars combined -- to keep society safe from the nation's most dangerous elements.

We hold onto that belief despite the fact that crime has been plummeting for the past decade and 70 percent of the people behind bars are nonviolent offenders. And we continue to invest in harsh, mandatory sentences although they are completely ineffective in the war on drugs.

The convocation of experts, gathered by Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the Wayne County Community College District and local news media, will discuss how to put an end to the mass incarceration of Americans, a policy that has disproportionately affected poor and minority communities.

Key to this discussion, said Curtis Ivery, chancellor of WCCCD, is to start considering the broader effect that mass incarceration has on prisoners, but also on "their families and their children in particular, who are left behind."

Indeed, with such a wide swath of our citizenry behind bars, the effects of prison have spread beyond the offender. Society itself is now at risk.

The collateral damage
In April, Dorothy Roberts, a professor at Northwestern University's law school and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, published a shocking article in the Stanford Law Review detailing the broad social impact of mass incarceration. By focusing on one segment of society -- the African-American community -- she offers a cautionary tale for a society that believes it can imprison its way out of crime.

Of the 2 million Americans behind bars in 2002, about 587,000 of them were African-American men. Since poor and black communities tend to bear the brunt of the staggering incarceration rates, Roberts likens the devastation to communities to those that have been shattered by war, epidemics and natural disasters. We'd never ignore the needs of communities burned out by wildfires, but we ignore the needs of communities leveled by mass imprisonment because we believe that they deserve it.

Roberts addresses how inequities in law enforcement -- crack carries stiffer penalties than cocaine, the drug of choice for many middle and upper-class users -- poor access to legal representation, education and employment create a pipeline from poor, black communities to prison.

But whether or not you find those arguments compelling, the fact remains that mass imprisonment has its own set of consequences that must be borne by the rest of us, like it or not.

First, said Roberts, the incarceration of people from concentrated areas, like the inner city, destroys the community's ability to withstand economic and social hardships. Think of the grandmother with two sons in prison who, on a fixed income, has to help raise the grandchildren. Think of the child who has only seen her mother through prison glass. Or of a child sent away to a juvenile camp where his parents cannot travel to see him.

Such drastic separations, said Roberts, have "serious psychological consequences for children, including depression, anxiety, feelings of rejection, shame, anger, and guilt and problems in school." Poor school performance equals a future prison population: The Justice Policy Institute said that its examination of recent U.S. Justice Department statistics shows that 13 percent of white school dropouts had prison records by the time they were in their early 30s, and an astonishing 52 percent of black male dropouts in the same age bracket had records.

Mass imprisonment also distorts what that community views as normal.

"When a sizable portion of a community has been in prison, prison loses its stigma," said Roberts. But most troubling, she said, is that prison becomes a key institution, like schools and churches, in shaping the values of that community.

Studies show that the mass imprisonment of men also skews gender relations, said Roberts. The scarcity of male partners encourages men to enter relationships with multiple women, and gives women less leverage within relationships. Women become more vulnerable to male exploitation.

Finally, Roberts points to the destruction of social citizenship. Even first-time, nonviolent offenders can suffer wide-ranging, sometimes permanent consequences of incarceration: ineligibility for food stamps, public housing, or educational assistance; and denial of a driver's license, professional licenses, military service and even the right to vote.

At least 1.4 million of the 4.6 million disenfranchised felons in the United States are black , according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice reform organization.

When you aggregate this collateral damage -- the destruction of family kinships, the perversion of gender relations, the tainting of community values and the removal of young people from constructive participation in the economic and civil life of the community -- it's clear that mass imprisonment does more than segregate wrongdoers: it creates a hopeless subculture.

And if you think that your community is immune from the effects of mass imprisonment -- aside from higher taxes -- think again. It's no secret that rap culture has long reflected prison culture with its baggy pants -- worn because prisoners are not allowed to wear belts --and glorified thug life. But now, rap culture is popular American culture. In fact, the hip-hop term "bling-bling" is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.

A policy that's criminal
Why do we tolerate mass imprisonment? Because we'd rather pay to contain people we don't like than invest in more permanent solutions like equal education, better employment opportunities, access to health care and transportation. If the conference today does nothing else, I hope it convinces public policymakers that when you address crime by filling prisons, you get exactly what you pay for.

Contact DESIREE COOPER at 313-222-6625 or cooper@freepress.com.

Posted by lois at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)

New Bill Would Incarcerate Women for Using Drugs While Pregnant

"Frank Sullivan, a juvenile hearing master for Clark County District Court, hears about 1,000 cases of child abuse and neglect a year. About 75 percent of those cases stem from parental drug abuse, he said.
"They come in as one thing, but you soon find out the real problem, and most of the time it's meth, almost every case," Sullivan said.
He sees cases daily that involve babies who were born addicted or exposed to the drug.
Still, Sullivan said he doesn't think the proposed law would have much of an impact, because the prison system has done little to help drug addicts overcome their problem."

Casualties of addiction
Bill would change law to hold mothers accountable for harming unborn babies
By JULIET V. CASEY
REVIEW-JOURNAL, November 16, 2004

Law enforcement officials are pushing for tougher laws to incarcerate pregnant women who take illegal drugs that hurt their unborn babies.
But drug-addicted mothers and other officials say prison probably won't protect the unborn and won't result in treatment for the mothers.

A bill draft request being crafted by the Nevada Sheriffs' and Police Chiefs' Association would change child abuse and endangerment laws, if approved in the 2005 legislative session, to include women who know they are pregnant and whose drug use results in the death, physical or mental harm of their fetus.
"My big concern is that we have an alarming rate of pregnant women ingesting meth, and their babies are being born dead or addicted to the drug," said Mark Jackson, the Douglas County assistant district attorney who authored the proposal. "If we had a law in place to criminalize prenatal substance abuse, we could get those women off the street. We could keep them from ingesting the drugs that would harm or kill their baby."
Candice Kidd, director of the West Care campus for women and children, said 90 percent of the pregnant or parenting women at the substance abuse treatment center are addicted to methamphetamine, a stimulant that increases energy and decreases appetite.
To Michelle Mitchell, a 31-year-old mother of six who is in the West Care program, incarcerating a drug-addicted pregnant woman makes little sense.
"I've been to the pen twice because of drug-related charges," she said. "I could still get high in prison. Prison is not going to solve the problem. The babies aren't going to get well until the mothers get well."
Mitchell said her drug of choice was crack cocaine, and several of her children were born with the drug in their system. She said child protection services took five of her children, who now are with relatives in Ohio. Her youngest, 6-week-old Miracle, is staying with her at West Care.
But Tracy Fabry, a 19-year-old recovering addict, said having such a law on the books might have stopped her from injecting methamphetamine throughout her two pregnancies.
"It sounds selfish, but in my addiction, I wouldn't have cared about my children. But I would have cared about my freedom," she said.
Fabry, who is in her second month of treatment at West Care, said both her children, ages 3 and 4 months, have been affected by her drug abuse.
"My son is very hyper," she said. "And my daughter, she's slow. It takes her a while to catch onto things, like eating from a spoon. I see other babies, and I can tell it's harder for her."
The state doesn't track the number of babies born addicted or exposed to drugs, because it is difficult to determine whether women continued to use drugs into their last stage of pregnancy and because not all babies are screened, said Annie Ucceli, a spokeswoman for the state Health Division.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates 750,000 substance-exposed babies are born each year nationwide.
Jackson said the law allows child welfare officials to take a newborn from its mother if it is born addicted or has drugs in its system. Beyond that, the state has no law that allows prosecution.
Jackson tells the story of a young meth addict who in May admitted herself into Carson-Tahoe Hospital complaining of contractions.
"The doctor delivered a fully developed baby, which was decomposed and nearly breaking apart in the doctor's hands," he said. "The autopsy showed the baby died as a result of high levels of methamphetamine toxicity. But what happened to the mother? Nothing."
Jackson said the legislation would allow different levels of punishment and opportunity for treatment, or referral to drug court where it's available. Ultimately, the proposal calls for one to 10 years imprisonment if the mother's drug use results in the death of the fetus, or one to five years if it results in physical or mental harm. If no harm results, the charge would be a gross misdemeanor.
Bob Neri, the Florida-based chief clinical officer for West Care, said Nevada wouldn't be the first state to criminalize drug abuse by pregnant women. But, he said, states that have penalties are moving away from incarceration and toward treatment.
He said that in Florida, where laws against illegal substance abuse in the 1980s and 1990s were strengthened to include harsher punishments for pregnant women, authorities found "a boom of abandoned babies and dead babies found in Dumpsters."
"Now they're using those laws as an intervention, basically telling women they could be sent to jail but they have the option of treatment," he said.
Clark County Sheriff Bill Young said he would prefer treatment as the first option, but state officials have consistently underfunded such programs.
"I believe jail time can be a deterrence, even though I know jail is not going to be the answer to this social problem," he said. "My first choice is counseling. There's just not enough, and it's something I've been frustrated with."
Court officials say they also have been frustrated, but don't believe more criminal laws are the answer.
Kandis Stake, manager of the Clark County Drug Court, said her program was designed to route drug abusers from prisons to treatment.
"We have enough people with felonies," she said. "Why would we add more or make these mothers into felons so that later they can't get a job and be a good parent?"
Frank Sullivan, a juvenile hearing master for Clark County District Court, hears about 1,000 cases of child abuse and neglect a year. About 75 percent of those cases stem from parental drug abuse, he said.
"They come in as one thing, but you soon find out the real problem, and most of the time it's meth, almost every case," Sullivan said.
He sees cases daily that involve babies who were born addicted or exposed to the drug.
Still, Sullivan said he doesn't think the proposed law would have much of an impact, because the prison system has done little to help drug addicts overcome their problem.
Susan Klein-Rothschild, director of Clark County Family Services Department, said she agrees with the intent of the proposed legislation but wonders if it will achieve the desired effect. She worries more pregnant addicts will "go underground" and avoid treatment or prenatal care for fear of going to prison.
But Jackson counters with national statistics that indicate 44 percent of women who use illegal drugs already are underground and don't seek prenatal care.
Klein-Rothschild said if the intent of the proposal is to protect children from the lifelong effects of their mothers' substance abuse, it should include alcohol.
"It shouldn't focus on one substance that harms the baby but ignore another," she said.
Dr. Colleen Morris, a geneticist and researcher on mental retardation who teaches at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, said the effects of alcohol on a fetus are worse than those of any illegal drug.
"Alcohol is actually the worst in terms of the effects it has on the central nervous system and abnormalities it can cause to brain development throughout the entire pregnancy," she said.
Morris said alcohol also can cause babies to be born with small brains and other birth defects, such as cleft lips, club feet and underdeveloped organs.
She said the use of meth appears to result in fewer birth defects but can affect the baby's ability to learn.
"There is a high number of individuals using meth in pregnancy, but many people who use meth actually use alcohol to modulate the effects of the drug, and obviously the combination is more dangerous to the fetus," she said.
Jackson agrees alcohol is a problem, but said including it in the legislation would be difficult because alcohol is a legal substance.

Posted by lois at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)

MA Judge Denounces School Zone Sentencing Laws

"Robert A. Mulligan, who became the chief justice for administration and management in October 2003, said that 90 percent of the people who receive the mandatory sentences for possessing drugs within 1,000 feet of the school are minorities."

Daily Hampshire Gazette, November 16, 2004

State judge assails drug sentence law
Rule near schools said discriminatory

BOSTON (AP) - One of Massachusetts' top judges denounced the state's sentencing laws Monday, saying that the mandatory two-year sentence for drug possession near schools discriminates against minorities, does not deter crime and decreases faith in the judicial system.

Robert A. Mulligan, who became the chief justice for administration and management in October 2003, said that 90 percent of the people who receive the mandatory sentences for possessing drugs within 1,000 feet of the school are minorities.

''I'm not saying that minorities are being targeted, and I'm not saying that the arresting officers are unfair, but I'm saying that the policy itself is not wise,'' Mulligan told the Associated Press. ''The policy has a discriminatory effect.''

The 1989 law, passed at the urging of then-Gov. Michael Dukakis, has had the greatest impact in urban settings, Mulligan said, because there are few areas in any Massachusetts cities that are not within 1,000 feet of a school.

In Boston, Mulligan said, ''unless you're on the tarmac of Logan Airport, you're within 1,000 feet of a school.''

''The purpose behind school zones is to keep drugs away from schools and that's a legitimate purpose,'' Mulligan said. ''But school doesn't have to be in session, it can be at night, it can be during the summer. So it doesn't really achieve its goals.''

The cumulative effect, Mulligan said, is that ''it really increases skepticism in the fairness of the system.''

Gerry Stewart, of the Suffolk District Attorney's office, said the law is written the way it is for a reason.

''The law has a wide scope in its intent to protect children of all ages,'' said Stewart, who is Suffolk's second assistant district attorney. ''The police are certainly targeting drug-dealers where they find them, regardless of ethnicity.''

Mulligan, a former assistant U.S. Attorney and assistant Attorney General for Massachusetts, has been a judge since 1980 and was longtime chairman of the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission.

The commission proposed eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, but favored establishing longer sentences for 48 crimes, including assault and battery.

Mulligan said Monday that mandatory minimums, in general, were ''too harsh'' and were implemented differently in different counties, depending on the willingness of the local district attorney to decrease the penalty for a particular charge.

This leads, Mulligan said, to two people serving vastly different sentences for the same crime, depending on where the live.

Leslie Walker, executive director of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which represents prisoners, said she fully supports Mulligan's assessment of mandatory minimums for drug crimes.

''It places nonviolent offenders in prison, causing further overcrowding,'' Walker said. ''Those prisoners are ineligible for parole. They complete their entire sentence behind the wall, then they're released to the street without any support or supervision, causing a public safety crisis.''

Posted by lois at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2004

Big Mystery? I doubt it.

"William Bosworth, a retired professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, made an odd discovery a few years ago while studying the latest census data. Much to his surprise, he determined that from 1995 to 2000 about 4,000 people moved to the Bronx from rural Allegany County, in the southwest corner of New York State."

November 15, 2004, NY Times
Exodus Lacks Explanation on Trail of Bronx Mystery
By ALAN FEUER,

ANDOVER, N.Y., Nov. 10 - William Bosworth, a retired professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, made an odd discovery a few years ago while studying the latest census data. Much to his surprise, he determined that from 1995 to 2000 about 4,000 people moved to the Bronx from rural Allegany County, in the southwest corner of New York State.

This was strange. Allegany County, nestled in the woodlands along the Pennsylvania border, is as country as the country gets and has as much in common with the Bronx as a barnyard has with Billy's Sports Bar outside Yankee Stadium. The county covers more than three times the area of New York City, but with a population of only 49,950. In Allegany, people fish, drive pickup trucks and hunt deer come fall.

It is sometimes said that folks in Allegany County would not move next door to Cattaraugus County. So why would 4,000 of them suddenly pick up and migrate to the Bronx?

Dr. Bosworth, who used to teach political science and now runs the Bronx Data Center at Lehman, did not have a clue.

"I got the data and looked at it three times to make sure I wasn't misreading it," he said. "But there it was. You understand, I'm not making this up. It's in the census."

Still, he included a disclaimer in his findings, which he put on a page of his Web site, called "Discovering the Bronx," (www.lehman.cuny.edu/deannss/bronxdatactr

/discover/bxtext.htm).

"The large migration to the Bronx from little Allegany County is a mystery not yet explained," he wrote.

Unexplained mysteries can be the bread and butter of the news business, so a call was placed to John E. Margeson, the Allegany County administrator, in the hope that he could clear the air. But Mr. Margeson was utterly confused.

"Four thousand people?" he asked. "I don't know. That's news to me."

Mr. Margeson wondered aloud if the county's Hispanic population might account for the trend. However, he said, those of Hispanic origin made up fewer than 1 percent.

He wondered next if people might have fled the county to the Bronx in search of work.

"When natives graduate from high school or college," Mr. Margeson explained, "they often move for employment opportunities. There is a decline in family farms, but still. ..."

Were farmers really moving to the Bronx? Robert Heineman, a professor of political science at Alfred University in Allegany County and a county legislator, had a slightly different thought.

"The only thing that might explain it is that we have college students who come from the Bronx and register and become residents in the county," he said. "Maybe they return to the New York City area when they graduate and decide to leave."

At this point, however, Dr. Heineman began to laugh. It had occurred to him, he said, that, including Alfred, there were only a handful of institutions of higher learning in the county, with a total enrollment of 6,000 students.

"Four thousand people over five years - that's what?" he said. "Eight hundred a year? That's a pretty big chunk of people going from the colleges to the Bronx."

Joseph J. Salvo, the population director for the New York City Department of Planning, had yet another theory. The migrants, he surmised, might be prison inmates.

To that end, Mr. Salvo explained that, according to the census, 99 percent of these new Bronx residents were living in institutional group quarters, a category that includes prisons. Nearly 90 percent of them arrived in the Bronx, he said, to Community Districts 1 and 2, which includes Rikers Island. Furthermore, almost all of them were men.

It looks like a prison population transfer, he went on, but quickly added that there were not enough state prisons and holding facilities in Allegany County to account for more than 4,000 people. He mused aloud that it was conceivable that inmates from other upstate counties might have accidentally been counted in the mix, although he could not tell for sure.

It seemed the best way to understand this phenomenon for certain was to take a ride to Allegany County, following one possible route of the reported exodus in reverse. Depending on the presence of the State Police, the journey takes between five and six hours. One heads west on Interstates 95 and 80, north on Interstate 81 and then west again on Route 17, where the roadside clutter of motels and pancake houses is replaced by stubbly wheat fields and mournful, sagging barns.

Gorsuch's Tavern, on Main Street in the village of Andover, is the first place to grab a bite and a beer heading west into Allegany County on State Route 417. It is a dark and comfortable spot, fashioned as a mountain lodge and offering a tasty bowl of chili and a friendly clientele.

No one sitting in the tavern at the lunch hour had ever known of a soul from Allegany County who had moved to the Bronx. They seemed, in fact, to think the whole idea was some sort of joke.

"I know a few people who moved out here from there - they were New York City cops," said C. R. Jackson, a 75-year-old retired state trooper. "But I don't know anybody who moved down there from here. Sounds like hogwash to me."

Sitting next to Mr. Jackson at the bar was Mike Burdick, a slender fellow in a barn coat and a baseball cap. He was asked what image came to mind when he thought about the Bronx.

"Let's see," he said. "Uh, nothing."

John Lyday, a construction worker eating lunch, had passed through the Bronx on several occasions when he was a truck driver.

His friend, Dave Klink, turned to him and asked, "Yeah, but would you move there?"

Mr. Lyday shook his head. "No way,'' he said. "Too many people all together in one place."

It seemed the mystery was fated to remain unsolved until Mr. Jackson's son, Mike, entered the bar. Mike Jackson, a former state trooper like his father, had a theory. There were two Chinese restaurants in the nearby town of Wellsville. Maybe they accounted for the migration to the Bronx.

"They come and go," the younger Mr. Jackson said of the Chinese restaurateurs. "Not a lot of them, but it's a start."

Then his father said: "Wait, wait, wait. I think I do know one. What about Willie Monroe's daughter?"

It was recalled that she had indeed relocated to the Bronx, where she worked, in some capacity, for a professional soccer team, the MetroStars.

"All right, that's one," Mike Jackson said. "Now it's 3,999 to go."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

Posted by lois at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

Justice Dept. Reports a 30-Year "Low" in Death Sentences

"The number of people sentenced to death reached a 30-year low in 2003, when the death row population fell for the third year in a row, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

The department said that 144 inmates in 25 states were given the death penalty last year, 24 fewer than in 2002 and less than half the average of 297 from 1994 to 2000."

November 15, 2004
Justice Dept. Reports a 30-Year Low in Death Sentences and Fewer Inmates on Death Row
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 (AP) - The number of people sentenced to death reached a 30-year low in 2003, when the death row population fell for the third year in a row, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

The department said that 144 inmates in 25 states were given the death penalty last year, 24 fewer than in 2002 and less than half the average of 297 from 1994 to 2000.

Death penalty opponents say the report shows how wary the public is of executions, heightened by concerns about whether the punishment is administered fairly and publicity about those wrongly convicted. Illinois emptied its death row in 2003 after several inmates were found to be innocent.

"What we're seeing is hesitation on the death penalty, skepticism, reluctance," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "I do think there is some concern about the death penalty, and it's reflected in death sentences from juries."

Opponents also point to other possible reasons, including continuing fallout from Supreme Court decisions requiring that juries be told that life in prison without parole is an alternative to death.

Mr. Dieter said 47 states now offered a sentence of life without parole as an option for at least some convictions, compared with 30 in 1993.

Supporters say they doubt the decline signifies a major shift in public opinion about the death penalty, which is in effect in 38 states and the federal justice system.

"I don't think the numbers mean a lot, quite frankly," said Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, an advocacy group for crime victims. "I don't think it means a change in death penalty attitudes. I think it means the numbers change."

At the end of last year, 3,374 prisoners were awaiting execution, 188 fewer than in 2002, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Illinois accounted for 91 percent of the decline, the result of the decision by George Ryan, then the governor, to commute the death sentences of 167 inmates to life in prison and to pardon four others.

Nationally, 267 people were removed from death row last year. That was the largest drop since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, according to the report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Last year 65 people, all men, were executed. Texas again was the leader, with 24, followed by Oklahoma, with 14, and North Carolina, with 7. No other state had more than 3.

All but one were killed by lethal injection. The other was electrocuted.

From 1977 through 2003, 885 inmates were executed by 32 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Two-thirds were in five states: Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Florida.

The report also found that 56 percent of death row inmates were white and 42 percent were black. Hispanics, who can be of any race, accounted for 12 percent of inmates whose ethnicity was known.

The states with the largest numbers of death row inmates were California, with 629; Texas, 453; and Florida, 364.

Ten people died while awaiting execution in 2003, six from natural causes and four from suicide.

Posted by lois at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2004

New Website on Alternatives to Jail Building

SUFFOLKSUPERJAIL.COM is the official website of the Concerned Communities for Alternatives to Jail” a movement of citizens and organizations opposed to the construction of an 1130 bed jail facility in Yaphank, NY, also known as the Suffolk “super jail”.

We ask that every reform be exhausted before we commit to a plan that has been called wasteful, socially irresponsible, fiscally disastrous, and morally wrong.
Included on the website:
* Financial cost to Suffolk County and its taxpayers
* Environmental Impacts on the local community
* Social Cost to Suffolk County residents
* Why Not in Suffolk County? Cost-Effective Solutions to Jail Overcrowding

Posted by lois at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

Los Angeles:Wary Blacks Voted NO to More Police

"A pronounced ambivalence about the role of police in largely African American areas of Los Angeles helped sink last week's ballot measure that would have raised the county sales tax to hire more officers, and remains a formidable obstacle to rekindling the proposal solely as a citywide levy."
-------
"Outside the Miracle Market at Wilmington Avenue and Alondra Boulevard in Compton, Edward Lindsey said the police didn't deserve the extra tax money because they hadn't learned to respect residents.

Lindsey said he would have voted for the measure if police "were doing what they should do instead of messing with everybody.""

see the website for a graph of of how cities in the county voted (that includes their crime rate) and a map showing where Measure A got most votes.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-coptax10nov10,0,3595253.story?coll=la-home-local
Wary Blacks Voted No to More Police
By Jeffrey L. Rabin, Richard Fausset and Zeke Minaya
Times Staff Writers

November 10, 2004

A pronounced ambivalence about the role of police in largely African American areas of Los Angeles helped sink last week's ballot measure that would have raised the county sales tax to hire more officers, and remains a formidable obstacle to rekindling the proposal solely as a citywide levy.

A precinct-by-precinct analysis by The Times shows that a weakness in South Los Angeles, combined with the perennially anti-tax votes of the west San Fernando Valley, held support for Measure A well below the two-thirds majority needed to pass a tax measure.

This voting pattern, unusual among African Americans, is shaping up as the biggest challenge to Mayor James K. Hahn, who is pushing a divided City Council to put the measure on the citywide ballot next year.

The result also highlights the LAPD's continuing dilemma of trying to increase patrols in high-crime areas of South L.A. without increasing tensions there.

Measure A, which would have raised the sales tax from 8.25% to 8.75%, won two-thirds or more of the vote in many parts of the Mid-City area and the Westside, as backers expected.

But south of the Santa Monica Freeway, support faded enough to prevent passage of the proposal, which garnered 59.6% countywide and 64% in the city, according to preliminary returns. Final returns will not be available until all absentee and provisional ballots are counted.

"Since it was that close, it seems to me that's a mandate - when you get 64% of the people to agree on anything," Hahn said in a radio interview Monday. "People want us to put more police on the streets."

In addition, the Times analysis shows that heavily Latino neighborhoods on the Eastside with crime problems similar to those of South Los Angeles overwhelmingly supported the measure, as did many small cities in the southeastern area of the county whose streets are not patrolled by the LAPD.

The proposal's failure came despite an early strategy by proponents to register and persuade voters, particularly blacks, in South L.A. to support it.

Polls by Measure A backers before the election had shown a weakness in that area, where African Americans, while no longer a majority of residents, do constitute a majority of registered voters in many neighborhoods.

Even a last-minute purchase of airtime on radio stations with large black audiences failed to counter efforts by prominent leaders and grass-roots groups to stop the measure.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) urged a no vote on Measure A on a slate mailer she sent to 170,000 voters, while the Watts Community Labor Action Council and former state Sen. Tom Hayden added their voices of opposition to the tax increase.

Interviews with black voters revealed a desire for protection tempered by negative experiences with law enforcement.

Outside the Miracle Market at Wilmington Avenue and Alondra Boulevard in Compton, Edward Lindsey said the police didn't deserve the extra tax money because they hadn't learned to respect residents.

Lindsey said he would have voted for the measure if police "were doing what they should do instead of messing with everybody."

A few weeks ago, the former GM plant worker said, he was pulled over by police who told him he looked like a suspected gang member. "How the hell can I look like a gangbanger?" Lindsey said. "I'm 74 years old. I'm retired!"

At the Power of Love Christian Fellowship, a black church in South Los Angeles, Bishop Edward Turner, who supported the measure, said the police and sheriff's deputies had made big inroads with people of color.

"You can have the best guard dog in the world, but if you don't feed him, he's no good," Turner said. Many people in his community voted yes because they knew that they would be the first to suffer from any cutbacks in service, he added.

But with the exception of one precinct near the church, the neighborhood vote failed to reach the two-thirds required, though it exceeded a simple majority.

Political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, who has written extensively about race and politics in Los Angeles, said the lack of enthusiasm for the measure among African Americans was notable.

"For black residents, it doesn't matter if you make it in life; you can [still] get stopped by police," he said. The impact of such stops "has been tremendous on blacks, and that has generated a lot of that ambivalence."

Sonenshein said it would be difficult for Hahn or anyone else to reach a two-thirds yes vote citywide on such a measure without addressing opposition in South L.A.

"It's going to be much harder if the black community is not strongly supportive," Sonenshein said, adding that a March or May election also would draw fewer voters.

Historically, bond or tax measures pass in the city if there is strong support from African Americans and Latinos, as well as moderate to liberal whites, especially Jewish voters, he said.

Rick Taylor, a political consultant to the Measure A campaign, said last week's ballot, which included the presidential candidates, may have been the proposal's best shot until the June 2006 primary.

"I understand the need. I want it to win," Taylor said. But he cautioned against rushing to put the measure on the next city ballot.

Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, a big Measure A supporter, said a string of police abuse cases dating from before the 1991 Rodney King beating through this year's flashlight beating of Stanley Miller in Compton did not help the cause. The tax increase failed to pass in Compton and Inglewood, in addition to South Los Angeles.

"The most infamous cases of police misconduct in the area have had to do with African American victims," Ridley-Thomas said.

"An agenda that argues exclusively for more cops is not likely to get the response of something that calls for more prevention and more reform," he added. "I think the electorate would respond more favorably to a more holistic look at crime."

Some of the electorate, however, responded enthusiastically.

Jesus Ortiz, a 29-year resident of the Eastside, said not a week went by without the sound of gunshots.

"There are so many gangs, hiding in the corners, where we can't see them. There's just so many. Just on that corner over there, last weekend, a young man was shot three times," said Ortiz, 70. "Raising taxes is a problem, but police are more important."

Luis Sereseres, 18, a fast-food restaurant employee from Lincoln Heights, said he voted for Measure A despite misgivings about police. "I've been pulled over; I've been badgered, But we need cops to stop the violence."

The strong sentiment for the tax measure stretched beyond the Eastside to the small, predominantly Latino cities along the Long Beach Freeway.

At the Aztec Smoke Shop in Bell, a small storefront with pipes and a few hardcore rap CDs, employee Juan Carlos Gonzalez said he supported the measure, even though it took police half an hour to respond to the recent theft of his Chevy Tahoe.

If Measure A passed, the 34-year-old figured, "maybe next time they'll get to it sooner."

Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, which encourages Latino voting, said he was not surprised that Latinos turned out to support Measure A.

"The Latino community does not think it is an option to say, 'We don't want more police,' because there is too much need for public safety," he said.

In addition, there was no shortage of Latino public officials, including Sheriff Lee Baca and Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla, touting the measure. Fellow councilman and mayoral hopeful Antonio Villaraigosa paid for and appeared in pro-tax commercials on English- and Spanish-language television.

Los Angeles Councilman and former LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks, who supported the measure, said another commercial for the campaign failed to work with black voters. The spot featured a white woman frantically dialing 911 to report an intruder but failing to get a timely response.

Much like white voters, he said, African Americans are growing weary of tax increases to pay for basic services.

"We have overwhelmed the community with a myriad of bond issues that have added to the property tax," to pay for schools, community colleges, libraries, and fire and police stations, he said. "People are saying, 'Ouch!' "

Waters, whose slate urged a no vote, went further. Her constituents see too little return for their support, she said.

Two years ago, she noted, voters in her district helped pass a countywide property tax measure to maintain and expand trauma centers. This year, the county Board of Supervisors nonetheless proposed closing the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, which serves her area.

"Don't keep piecemealing and coming back asking people to tax themselves," Waters said. "I think it's time to say, 'No.' "

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.

Posted by lois at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

Tug of war over San Quentin's future creates unusual alliances

"We understand that conditions for prisoners have to be improved as quickly
as possible, but we think that time and time again the Department of
Corrections has shown that it is incapable of improving conditions for
prisoners," said Ari Wohlfeiler of Critical Resistance, a nonprofit group
that opposes the expansion of Death Row at San Quentin or elsewhere. "We
think this is a blatant move of trying to put 1,000 new beds in the system
under the cloak of improving conditions."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/12/NBG0E9MRU71.DTL

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Death row real estate
Tug of war over San Quentin's future creates unusual alliances

Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004

Developers, real estate agents and politicians dream of bulldozing San
Quentin State Prison because, they say, the 152-year-old relic has become
too costly to maintain and should be put to better use.

The bay front site would be ideal, they say, for mixed-income neighborhoods
with parks, playing fields, shops, restaurants and a transit center with a
rail link and a deep-water hub for ferries.

"We believe that San Quentin should be shut down and there should be a
comprehensive and spirited debate among all sectors of the community on how
that site should be used," said Edward Segal, executive vice president of
the Marin Association of Realtors.

But prison officials are moving ahead with plans to build a new, $220
million Death Row at San Quentin -- a project that would turn as many as 40
acres of prime waterfront property into pod-like cellblocks and other
facilities for the state's most notorious inmates.

These plans for a maximum security Death Row compound on the west side of
the 432-acre prison property have won a surprising degree of support from
death penalty opponents and prison volunteers. Both groups say they stand a
better chance of helping inmates if the prison remains open.

Some residents of San Quentin Village, who fear that outside developers want
to turn their quaint enclave into a small city with huge traffic problems,
also support the new Death Row project. Still others are fed up with having
a busy prison complex in their backyard.

San Quentin's future is a tug of war of strange alliances and political
power plays. In recent years, jawing about the prison's fate has become one
of Marin County's passions. But this time, the debate seems to be moving
past idle speculation. Big decisions are in the works that could affect the
prison property for decades.

Advocates and critics of competing plans for San Quentin voiced their
opinions in recent interviews and hearings. A public forum held Oct. 27 on
the Death Row project attracted about 80 people on all sides of the issue.
State planners held a hearing Nov. 4 to field public comments on its
environmental impact report for the site.

Prisoner advocates and volunteers who work in San Quentin's community
programs have mixed feelings about rebuilding Death Row, but many of them
want to keep the suburban prison open and accessible to inmates' families,
lawyers and volunteers.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, D-San Francisco, and other prison
advocates say that Death Row should be close to an urban area to provide
easy access to the state Supreme Court and defense lawyers who handle these
cases.

The prison's extensive programs, which include religious groups, college and
high school classes, counseling and sports activities such as the San
Quentin Giants baseball team, depend on hundreds of Bay Area volunteers.

"It's kind of like worlds colliding," said Jody Lewen, who heads a program
of college courses for San Quentin inmates. "I can perfectly understand the
people who want to develop the land. It's physically beautiful and
convenient.

"When I look at San Quentin, I see the opportunity to create a model for
criminal justice reform," said Lewen, who supports the plan to build a new
Death Row. "I want to create effective education and rehabilitation
programs, gather the data that's vital for any administrator or legislator
who wants to advocate for change, and demonstrate to the public how
effective these programs are -- how much money they save, and how they can
lower the prison population as a whole."

Others question why the state needs to house its condemned inmates at San
Quentin, rather than disperse them among California's maximum security
prisons. Only 10 inmates have been executed at San Quentin since the death
penalty was reinstated in 1976.

"In some parts of the country, prisons are viewed as economic bonanzas,"
Segal said. "Why can't we move the prison to where it would be received with
open arms? It would free up San Quentin for better, more productive uses.
Death penalty critics say that it is far better for inmates' executions to
occur at San Quentin, rather than at a prison in a rural area that would be
removed from media scrutiny and the public eye.

"It's very important that executions not become a total abstraction in the
minds of the public," Lewen said. "We're talking about living, breathing
people with nerve endings and families."

Others argue that state prison officials should invest in inmate-related
services, rather than in building or expanding prisons.

For decades, rumors have surfaced occasionally that San Quentin would soon
be closed. In recent years, state officials have considered moving its Death
Row inmates to other state prisons.

There have also been attempts to expand San Quentin. In the 1990s, state
officials proposed to double the prison's size, but local residents derailed
that proposal.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's endorsement of plans to build a new Death Row
has caught many locals by surprise. Construction is slated to begin next
September and take up to two years.

"There is no reason to be steam-rolling ahead without a thorough discussion
of alternatives," Segal said. "Unless the public stands up and says 'No,'
unless the public puts pressure on the governor, it's almost a done deal. "

"It's about providing adequate, secure and safe conditions for those
sentenced to death," said George Sifuentes, deputy director of facilities
management for the prison system. "The state Legislature approved it. The
governor signed it. Our job is to build it."

Some residents of San Quentin Village, a blue-collar enclave next to the
prison property, take comfort living in the prison's shadow.

"I see it as a place of healing," said village resident Jean Arnold, who
previously ran San Quentin's literacy program. "You will not find these
volunteers at (state prisons in) Blythe, Mule Creek or Chowchilla. I am for
a new Death Row being built at San Quentin, and never thought I would say
it."

Village resident Cynthia Shone, who also supports the new Death Row, said:
"I would rather see this place stay the way it is than developed into a
place like everywhere else. ... This is like the San Rafael where we grew
up. The powers that be know how valuable this property is. They want to take
over this site and sell $2 million homes and condos.''

The new Condemned Inmate Complex for 1,408 male prisoners would replace an
aging Death Row where 600 or so inmates are housed. Built in the 1930s, the
state's only Death Row is overcrowded and deteriorating, which presents
security and safety problems. The state plans to use the existing Death Row
to house general population inmates. The execution chamber would remain.

"What this boils down to is safety," said state prison official Terry
Thornton. "Safety for the inmates, safety for the staff, and safety for the
community."

Hundreds of new employees would work at the new Death Row, which would be
encircled by a lethal, electrified fence. As many as 600 construction
workers at a time would build the new facility.

State assembly member Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, has questioned the fiscal
wisdom of building a new Death Row. He has lobbied Schwarzenegger's staff to
consider shutting down San Quentin.

A state audit requested by Nation found that San Quentin's annual operating
and maintenance costs are exceptionally high, with extra overtime charges,
housing stipends and recruitment bonuses for the prison's 1,100 employees.

"There's no question that San Quentin is costing the state an arm and a
leg," Nation said. "It may be that it's cheaper over a short period to keep
San Quentin there, but over a longer period it will end up costing the state
a whole lot more ...

"The key is what the governor does. It's really in the governor's hands
right now. If the governor chooses to move forward and ignore the audit,
that's his prerogative. But the last time I looked at the state budget, we
were broke."

The state audit concluded that the cost of transferring condemned inmates to
another prison would far surpass the state's expected profit from selling
the land at San Quentin, but it criticized prison officials for not
assessing the costs and benefits of relocating Death Row to another prison.

San Quentin is "the most expensive prison in the system to maintain," said
Marin Supervisor Steve Kinsey, who recommends that Death Row inmates be
transferred to Folsom State Prison. One option, he said, would be to retain
at San Quentin a portion of the prison's general population, but not those
sentenced to death.

"No meaningful alternatives have been analyzed. The homework hasn't been
done," Kinsey said. "It's a quarter-billion-dollar investment over the next
25 years. It's going to impact the site for a century or more."

A key player behind efforts to redevelop San Quentin is Bill White, a North
Bay real estate developer. White served on the San Quentin Reuse Committee,
a panel chaired by Kinsey, which last year explored different options for
developing the 432-acre site.

Among other things, planners envision a historic park including San
Quentin's oldest cellblock, its Death Row and sally port. One quarter of an
estimated 2,100 to 3,585 new residential units, they say, would be
classified as "affordable" to households earning up to 60 percent of the
local median income.

Some locals worry about the traffic impacts of a new transit center, shops
and housing. Others fear that San Quentin, which lights the night sky like a
refinery, will become more of an eyesore if a new Death Row is built there.

At a public forum, Kinsey warned that the prison's plans are "butt ugly...
The new buildings will not resemble the medieval, Romanesque architecture we
associate with San Quentin today.

"The plans are too big for the site," Kinsey said, stressing that 60-foot
security lighting towers at the new Death Row will be seen by residents who
live miles away.

Others insist that San Quentin has a historic legacy at the site.

"I want people to see the prison from where they live," Lewen said. "I don't
see it as an aesthetic issue. I see it as a political issue. With all due
respect, if you don't want to look at a prison, start looking for
alternatives to incarceration."

Realtors stress that building affordable housing should be a top priority.
They point out that many nurses, firefighters and others cannot afford to
own a house in Marin County. About half of San Quentin's guards live in
Solano and Contra Costa counties. Some guards commute to the prison from
Sacramento and beyond.

But some people question the motives of the politicians who want to tear
down the prison.

"San Quentin is leading the state in progressive rehabilitation programs, "
said Beth Waitkus, a consultant who manages an inmate garden project at the
prison. "If you get rid of this prison ... you'd be doing a horrible
disservice to the state. And I'm appalled that you're doing this for money."

Kinsey and his loose-knit alliance of realt estate agents and business execs
insist that their only consideration is how the prison acreage can best
serve the county and the Bay Area.

"We are not salivating for that property," said Elissa Giambastiani,
president of the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce. "Our organization has been
working passionately for years to create affordable housing in our
community."

Jeanne Woodford, the director of the California Department of Corrections,
served previously as the warden of San Quentin, where she took pride in
fostering innovative rehabilitation programs.

"I think the prison is located right where it should be. It's in a
metropolitan area," Woodford told The Chronicle in a 2002 interview. "It's
important that society knows what goes on in our prisons. ... Prisons are a
community problem -- because inmates are going to parole to these
communities, and they are going to impact these communities, positively or
negatively."

Still others question the costs and benefits of building a new Death Row on
San Francisco Bay.

"The state of California does not have a lot of money to throw around. That
money can certainly be used to help address more pressing concerns, whether
it's transportation, education, or the environment," Segal said. "It will be
a tremendous opportunity wasted if we let this chance slip through our
fingers. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

E-mail Jim Doyle at jdoyle@sfchronicle.com.

Posted by craig at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2004

Sentencing: Legal Efforts Hint of Change

"The country is flirting with criminal justice reforms. People haven't taken a real dive [into this] because prison populations went up in the last year, but 25 to 30 states have passed laws to modify mandatories, get people to treatment, shorten sentences. There's a lot of people experimenting," said Vincent Schiraldi, Executive Director of the Justice Policy Institute, a non-profit research group that follows criminal justice trends.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court in the case Blakely v. Washington may help move sentencing reform along even further."

Sentencing: Legal Efforts Hint of Change
By Michelle Gaseau, Managing Editor
Corrections.com
November 10, 2004

In California, voters last week nearly toppled the state's three strikes law and in the Supreme Court this fall, justices are poised to make some lasting changes to federal and, possibly, state sentencing. The era of locking up non-violent criminals for lengthy sentences seems to be coming to a close.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court in the case Blakely v. Washington may help move sentencing reform along even further.

The case involved a Washington man who pleaded guilty to kidnapping his estranged wife. The facts admitted in his plea supported a maximum sentence of 53 months, but the judge imposed a sentence of 90 months after finding that he had acted with deliberate cruelty. The petitioner claimed that the sentencing procedure violated his right to have a jury determine the facts essential to his sentence.

The court, which ruled in June, stated that when a law establishes a maximum sentence for a crime, an offender's constitutional right to a jury prohibits a judge from imposing a longer sentence if that decision is based on the judge's determination of additional aggravating facts.

If that sentence is to be lengthened, then the jury must make that determination of facts beyond a reasonable doubt.

What that will mean for the states depends on the kind of sentencing process they utilize. If a state uses indeterminate sentencing, then it will not be affected at all. If however, a state uses a structured sentencing system or other sentencing guidelines, then the rules may have to change to accommodate the Blakely ruling.

Observers like Schiraldi believe that because of the current reform atmosphere in the criminal justice system, the Blakely decision will likely lead to even more reform, not less.

"If the Supreme Court upholds [Blakely] it will force states to deal with their sentencing laws in ways they didn't have to before and they may get creative and do some good things. It's an excellent environment for Blakely to happen in," he said. "If this had happened in 1994, we could have seen a ton of mandatory sentences. Now people will look at prison populations and make a more sparing use of prisons."

Even states that aren't impacted by Blakely may start to tinker with sentencing reform, which many think is good news.

State Response

Sentencing experts believe that ultimately the Blakely decision will have a moderate impact on states with sentencing guidelines.

States with structured sentencing, which give guidelines or ranges for sentences based on the crime and other related factors, will likely modify those rules to accommodate Blakely's fact finding requirement. But in the end, many say, it will only be a handful of cases that will be touched by the Blakely ruling.

"The jury must be unanimous only when it goes beyond the maximum. If the internal threshold is not superceded, then Blakely has no effect," said Jon Wool of the Vera Institute of Justice.

At first blush, it may seem that those states with sentencing guidelines bear the brunt of the changes that need to be made in response to Blakely. So, will that mean that states turn away from the idea of sentencing guidelines to avoid the hassle?

Wool says No.

"The states are generally happy with these systems and don't seem to want to return to the days of unstructured or indeterminate systems. They are concerned that, once again, sentences will vary for irrational reasons or cultural reasons and see the loss of predictability in corrections systems. That's an important tool [to them]," Wool said.

Wool said that Kansas officials have the only existing sentencing model that is Blakely-proof because of a similar case decided before the Kansas Supreme Court in 2001. States that decide to alter their sentencing guidelines in light of Blakely may do well to consider Kansas' approach.

"You can comply with Blakely and keep a structured system," he said.

According to Wool, the Kansas court recognized and understood that its ruling meant sentencing guidelines were creating new areas in which the jury had to make fact findings. [So] the state legislature altered the system from judges making the fact finding that led to enhanced sentences to requiring juries to make the finding beyond a reasonable doubt.

In Kansas, if the prosecution decides to seek an enhanced sentence, then the prosecutors must file a motion 30 days before trial. Then, the judge decides whether the related evidence must be presented at post-trial sentencing rather than at the trial. Only evidence that is disclosed to the defense is admissible in a determination about the enhanced sentence. In Kansas, the jury must be unanimous in such a finding and, if the jury finds a reason for an enhanced sentence, the judge still retains the discretion to sentence within or beyond the guidelines.

"For systems that are similar to Kansas, most feel that there is very little disruption. The number of cases that lead to a contested, enhanced sentence is tiny - most believe. It's a couple of percent of cases at most," said Wool.

There are other ways for states to come into compliance with the Blakely ruling.

States, for example, could institute a voluntary set of guidelines, rather than specific sentence ranges.

On the federal sentencing side, however, things will likely change more dramatically.

Federal Changes

Two new cases before the Supreme Court, U.S. v. Booker and U.S. v. Fanfan, present questions about federal sentencing guidelines. Both cases involve sentences for drug crimes with one decision handed down before and one after Blakely. In both cases, the high court must determine whether Blakely applies to federal sentencing guidelines.

Most observers believe that the court will uphold Blakely and that federal sentencing will change.

According to Marc Mauer, Assistant Director for The Sentencing Project, a non-profit organization that advocates for sentencing reform, said that currently judges in the federal court system have taken a mixed approach to Blakely. Some have continued to follow sentencing guidelines without change and others have stated that the federal guidelines are unconstitutional and thus, have interpreted their own sentencing.

If the Supreme Court makes the decision to uphold Blakely in reference to federal guidelines, then, Mauer predicts, Congress will be brought into the picture to alter the federal guidelines to fit the court's ruling.

"There are two directions: they are going to set up a system where judges can have more discretion or, will they make sentencing more mandatory than it currently is," he said.

Wool said that if Congress goes toward more mandatory minimums, then correctional systems could see longer prison sentences.

"In the federal system, a far greater number (even those that are appeal cases) involve judicial decision making. It will likely affect more than half of the federal cases," Wool said.

The Sentencing Project has issued statements of concern about how Congress will come down on the sentencing guidelines.

"If one judges by recent bills and amendments proposed by Congress, it seems that some members are inclined toward laws that ensure harsher, more punitive sentences, in part by stripping federal judges of their already much-reduced discretion to tailor sentences to the individual offender," said Mauer in a recent editorial.

State guidelines will not have to change in this way. Because the percentage of cases affected by Blakely is so small, any sentence changes that result would also not be statistically significant for state prison systems.

"There's not that sense of panic you hear from the federal system," said Mauer.

On the state level, some seem poised to make legislative changes that loosen mandatory minimums. None of these measures has seen more attention recently than the recent effort in California to do away with three strikes.

Amending Three Strikes

A ballot initiative to alter California's three strikes law failed last week, but only by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, highlighting the public's desire to make some changes to the state law.

Although many other states have adopted three strikes laws, California is the only state that allows judges to impose 25-years-to-life prison terms for a non-violent third strike. Proposition 66 would have required the third strike to be a violent or serious felony in order to require a life sentence.

Proposition 66 was crafted by Citizens Against Violent Crimes and would have allowed prisoners serving third strike sentenced for non-violent offenses to apply for re-trial. This was the cornerstone of the opposition's message to voters. The current and former California governors and the state's district attorneys all opposed the law change stating that it would have released thousands of offenders from prison.

"The opposition got the message out and the proponents maybe tried to bite off too much. Maybe a more modest version would have passed and one sees that generally, making changes retroactively is tricky because it means the immediate release of people from the system and it raises fear," said Wool.

Jim Benson, Vice Chairman of Citizens Against Violent Crime, said that the number of voters who did support the proposal shows that reform has momentum.

"It may provide the impetus for people to support something and indications are that it may be the case," he said.

Benson said that despite the vote, people do not support life sentences for non-violent crimes.

"I think especially in regard to rules pertaining to simple drug possession there's a general sense that those types of things should have a different kind of treatment," said Benson.

Those who have done violent crimes for the first two strikes, Benson said, maybe should not be let out of prison in the first place and have the chance to obtain a third strike.

Benson added that the activity around Proposition 66 has already caused serious discussion among state lawmakers, which may mean action from the legislature on this issue long before the next election cycle.

"There's some [activity] going on that the legislature might be able to act with some support from the governor and district attorneys' support. We hope that continues. I think 4.5 million people [voting for the proposition] sends a very large message that it is not the most effective policy," Benson said.

Other sentencing observers also predict that three strikes and other sentencing reforms are on the horizon.

"I think that there has been a sizable shift in fear of crime and with that shift has come a change in the public's attitude about how we should respond to crime -- with more treatment and more prevention," said Schiraldi.

But will this only be one end of a pendulum swing in terms of public opinion towards crime and criminals, or something more lasting?

Schiraldi thinks sentencing reform this time around will have more life than that.

"I feel fairly certain that my kids or grand kids will come to me and ask 'How was it that you had the highest incarceration rate in the world?' the way I ask about the internment of the Japanese or Jim Crow laws," said Schiraldi. "We live our little lives and assume this span [of history] is THE span, but there will be a time where the standards will progress so we don't rely as heavily on the incarceration of human beings as we do now."

Resources:

Justice Policy Institute - www.justicepolicy.org

The Sentencing Project - www.sentencingproject.org

Vera Institute of Justice - www.vera.org

Posted by lois at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)

More Women Prisoners Are Black

"With an incarceration rate of 185 per 100,000 women, black females were more than twice as likely as Hispanic females and nearly five times more likely than white females to be in prison in 2003.

Ironically, the largest share of these black women are imprisoned in “red states” – those states in which a majority of voters backed George W. Bush in last week’s presidential election."

Most Female Prisoners are Black
Date: Tuesday, November 09, 2004
By: MONICA M. LEWIS, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Black women are three-fourths of the record-setting number of females in state and local prisons, according to a criminal justice expert.

“The penetration of the prison system into the black family is extraordinary,” Vincent Schiraldi, of the Justice Policy Center, told BlackAmericaWeb.com Monday.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 101,179 women were in state or federal prisons by the end of 2003, the first time the number of females behind bars exceeded 100,000. In 1990, there were just 44,000 women in state or federal prisons.

Black women are being imprisoned at rates far outweighing women of other races, said Paige M. Harrison, a Bureau of Justice statistician who co-authored the report.

With an incarceration rate of 185 per 100,000 women, black females were more than twice as likely as Hispanic females and nearly five times more likely than white females to be in prison in 2003.

Ironically, the largest share of these black women are imprisoned in “red states” – those states in which a majority of voters backed George W. Bush in last week’s presidential election.

According to exit polls, Bush’s pledge to defend their values and traditional family structure resonated with many people in these “red states,” which include of the South and many Western states.

Three of these states – Mississippi, Oklahoma and Louisiana – imprisoned more than 100 of every 100,000 female residents, Harrison said. Rhode Island, considered a traditionally liberal Northern state, had the lowest female incarceration rate: with 10 per 100,000.

“The Southern region has had higher rates of arrests, convictions, and incarcerations,” Harrison said. “This isn’t anything new. Tougher sentencing ultimately affects who and how many people go to prison.

Schiraldi, the Justice Policy Center’s executive director, said the high number of black women in state and federal prisons is “having a profound impact through the black community in a way that’s just not so within the white community.”

The Bureau of Justice Statistics said that while the incarceration rate of men has grown at a slower rate in recent years, the growth of female inmates has increased over the last decade. From 1990 to 2000, the average annual growth rate for women was 7.6 percent and just 5.9 percent for men, said Harrison.

A majority of women of all races, Harrison said, were imprisoned for illegal drug offenses, with smaller percentages having been convicted of violent offenses such as murder, manslaughter and assault or fraud.

Harrison believes the growing number of female inmates has more to do with tougher sentencing than individual behavior. That could be a leading reason why the states with the highest rate of female inmates are in the South, which has a reputation for being tough on crime.

“Democrats, in some respect, have punted on this issue, while it’s been the Republicans who’ve been tough on crime and more willing to experiment with solutions,” Schiraldi said.

“Part of it is just being tough on crime,” he continued. “But in some respect, it’s part of the legacy of Jim Crow laws. African-Americans have gone from being enslaved to being imprisoned.”

Posted by lois at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

Useful New Statisitics on the Number of Women Incarcerated

November 8, 2004, From Associated Press

THE NATION
Women's Prisons Filling Fast
* Population surpassed 101,000 in 2003, Justice Department says. Rate of growth outdid men.

WASHINGTON — The number of women in state and federal prisons is at an all-time high and growing fast, with the rate of increase nearly twice that of men, the government reported Sunday.

There were 101,179 women in prisons last year, 3.6% more than in 2002, the Justice Department said. That marks the first time the women's prison population has topped 100,000, and continues a trend of rapid growth.

Overall, men are far more likely than women to be in jail or prison, and black men are more likely than any other group to be locked up.

At the close of 2003, U.S. prisons held 1,368,866 men, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. The total was 2% more than in 2002.

Expressed in terms of the population at large, it means that in 2003, 1 in every 109 U.S. men was in prison. For women, the figure was 1 in every 1,613.

At the close of 2003, U.S. prisons held 1,368,866 men, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. The total was 2% more than in 2002.

Expressed in terms of the population at large, it means that in 2003, 1 in every 109 U.S. men was in prison. For women, the figure was 1 in every 1,613.

Longer sentences, especially for drug crimes, and fewer prisoners being granted parole or probation are major reasons for the expanding population, said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to long prison terms for many kinds of crimes.

The increase began three decades ago and continues. The new report compared 2003 figures with those from 1995.

The number of women in prison has grown 48% since 1995, when the figure was 68,468, the report said. The male prison population has grown 29% over that time, from 1,057,406.

Year by year, the number of women incarcerated grew an average of 5%, compared to an average annual increase of 3.3% for men.

"It coincides exactly with the inception of the war on drugs" in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s, Mauer said. "It represents a sort of vicious cycle of women engaged in drug abuse and often connected with financial or psychological dependence with a boyfriend" or other man involved in drug crime, he said.

The prison figures do not fully reflect the number of people behind bars. About 80,000 women were in local jails last year, along with more than 600,000 men.

Federal prisons held a large share of women, with a population of 11,635 at the close of 2003. One state — Texas — held even more, 13,487. California, which has the nation's largest prison system, had 10,656 women. North Dakota held fewer women in prison than any other state — 113.

Among other findings:

• More than 44% of all sentenced male inmates were black, and many of them were young.

• Among the more than 1.4 million sentenced inmates at the end of 2003, an estimated 403,165 were black men 20 to 39.

• At the end of 2003, 9.3% of black men 25 to 29 were in prison, compared with 2.6% of Latino men and 1.1% of white men in the same age group.

• In 11 states there were increases in the prison population of at least 5% from the year before, led by North Dakota, with an 11.4% rise.

• Eleven states saw decreases. Connecticut had the biggest drop, 4.2%.

Posted by lois at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

Methamphetimines:Epidemic on Ailse 6

"In the mid-1990s, methamphetamine morphed from the pastime of biker gangs into a major West Coast industry. Mexican rings took over the trade, building so-called superlabs in California. Using tubs of ephedrine smuggled north from Mexico, and vats of legal chemicals like red phosphorus, these factories could churn out 10 pounds of methamphetamine – also known as meth, crank, crystal, or speed – every two days. In 1999, 2,100 labs were busted in California, a third of the national total for busts."
-------------------------------

"As of 2002, Missouri and the eight states that touch its borders accounted for more than half the lab busts in the nation. In 2003, accounting for 15 percent of the nation's total, Missouri alone had 2,860 labs – compared to fewer than half that number in California. The state had become the front line in the newest theater of the drug war. The problem was at its worst in Jefferson and Franklin counties, two rural jurisdictions on the edge of St. Louis."

Epidemic on Aisle Six
By Mark Schone, Legal Affairs
Posted on November 10, 2004, Printed on November 12, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20473/
At 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in July, it was 96 degrees in the shade and there was no shade in a parking lot an hour south of St. Louis. A half-dozen SUVs and pickup trucks formed a semicircle on the asphalt. The air conditioners were on full blast, but the pairs of burly, goateed men inside each vehicle had the windows down and the doors open.

When a white van with two more whiskered men pulled up to the huddle, Sgt. Tommy Wright stepped out of his gold Ford Explorer. He took 1,200 cold pills from a lockbox, laid them on the tailgate of one of the pickups, and counted them. Then he handed the pills to the men in the white van, former drug offenders turned confidential informants. In the biggest, blackest truck, Corporal Eric Burgard shoved Metallica into his CD player. To the crunching chords of "Enter Sandman," the members of the Jefferson County Drug Task Force put on their Kevlar vests and got ready to roll.

White van in the lead, the vehicles rumbled out of the lot and turned onto Missouri State Highway 21. The day's first stop was a small, shabby white home on Castle Ranch Road, a country lane that starts winding through the limestone and sycamore foothills of the Ozarks a mile south of the tiny town of Hillsboro. The task force had been up Castle Ranch many times, and they'd been to this address three months before. In April they busted 43-year-old Jeff Collins for cooking methamphetamine. They confiscated glassware and pseudoephedrine-based cold and allergy pills, the over-the-counter medicine from which meth is made. But getting busted hadn't fazed Collins. Out on bond awaiting trial, he'd agreed to take delivery of 1,200 more pills from the informants in return for cash and finished product.

The informants were supposed to meet Collins around 2 p.m. The posse of unmarked vehicles hid up and down Castle Ranch to block the suspect's escape. But after an hour of waiting for Collins to show, it was clear that he was on what Wright has dubbed "tweaker time," and the posse headed back to the parking lot.

The task force killed another hour by searching a suspected meth lab five miles to the north. The vehicles blocked the gravel drive of another tired wooden house. The inhabitants spilled out, rail thin, bug-eyed, and dressed in as little as possible. A frightened girl in a swimsuit hugged the legs of a middle-aged woman, also in a swimsuit, while a shirtless male answered Wright's questions. As they all stood and sweated in the driveway, a cop handed the woman a printed consent form for a search. She signed.

Then Wright took a cell phone call. It was one of the informants. Collins was home. The pack raced back to Castle Ranch and got there just as the informants, having made their trade, were driving away. "Two guys in a white van!" barked Wright. "Get a car to stop them!" While some of Wright's men launched an imaginary pursuit of the supposed runaways, one officer held Collins down in the dirt and cuffed him.

At 5'6" and 110 pounds, Collins had graying hair that was stiff and unwashed. He had no teeth and a dirty white bandage covered half his right hand. Dust fell from his chest and into his beltless jeans as he was yanked to his feet and began protesting his innocence. "I just got home 20 minutes ago!" he insisted. "I'm just out here working on my van!" Wright smiled. "The first part of that is true," he said. Collins kept denying the existence of the pills and pleading his car repair excuse to one of Wright's deputies as the cop insisted otherwise. After Collins had sputtered on for a few minutes, Wright turned to another of his cops and deadpanned, "Do you want to play the 'Yes, you are!' 'No, I'm not!' game? Go ahead. Say, 'Yes, you are.' It's fun."

The suspect's elderly parents watched from the porch. A black mutt ambled over, and a teenager with a hearing aid yanked it back toward the house. Two members of Wright's task force started pulling pieces of a meth lab from a derelict vehicle in the driveway – punctured cans of starter fluid, crusty plastic funnels. "You're looking at 17 years," Wright told Collins. "You need to help yourself." Wright wanted Collins to agree to become an informant. "I know," Collins said. "I'm thinking."

Biker Gangs to Industry

In the mid-1990s, methamphetamine morphed from the pastime of biker gangs into a major West Coast industry. Mexican rings took over the trade, building so-called superlabs in California. Using tubs of ephedrine smuggled north from Mexico, and vats of legal chemicals like red phosphorus, these factories could churn out 10 pounds of methamphetamine – also known as meth, crank, crystal, or speed – every two days. In 1999, 2,100 labs were busted in California, a third of the national total for busts.

As of 2002, Missouri and the eight states that touch its borders accounted for more than half the lab busts in the nation. In 2003, accounting for 15 percent of the nation's total, Missouri alone had 2,860 labs – compared to fewer than half that number in California. The state had become the front line in the newest theater of the drug war. The problem was at its worst in Jefferson and Franklin counties, two rural jurisdictions on the edge of St. Louis.

Tommy Wright's Jefferson County is a case study in aggressive, efficient enforcement. Lab busts have soared since last fall when Wright, a former narc, took over the county's 13-man drug task force. The young and gung-ho unit has increased undercover buys and deliveries like the one that stung Jeff Collins. Jefferson is on pace for more than 300 busts this year, double its total from last year, when it had already surged to first in the state which is first in busts in the nation.

But as Missouri's prisons have filled and as the state budget has begun to bleed red like many others across the country its strict new meth laws have become empty threats. The state doesn't have the beds or the money to lock up cooks for long, no matter what the statutes say. As a result, many convicted meth cooks get probation, not 10 years. As a result, Wright and other law enforcers have looked for help from the federal government. The police sergeant's power to threaten Jeff Collins with 17 years in prison came from the tough federal sentencing guidelines. Still, while cops like Wright are thankful for federal drug laws because they put meth cooks away, and for federal drug policy because of the funding it rains down, so far there hasn't been a decline in the supply or the demand for meth in Missouri.

The head of the drug task force in next-door Franklin County, Detective Corporal Jason Grellner, also believes in arresting bad guys, and like Wright he's happy to have the feds help him do it. In July, for example, he and a loaner team of young DEA agents burst in on a biker-cook in mid-manufacture. When the ammonia fog cleared, they found meth, guns, stolen property, and a huge cache of pseudoephedrine pills.

But most days, necessity forces Grellner to concentrate on stopping meth crimes before they happen. There are fewer cops, less money, and many more square miles to cover in Franklin, so Grellner has had to approach meth from a different angle. In the long run his way may be cheaper, and more effective than taking down labs. Grellner wants to stop the local cooks before they get to the kitchen. His dream is to shut off the supply of pseudoephedrine on which they rely – if only the drug industry, one of the most powerful in America, would let him.

White Refugees

Franklin and Jefferson counties trace their meth problems to white refugees from Southern California, truckers as well as bikers, who moved to Eastern Missouri in the mid-1990s and brought their taste for speed with them. In his office in Union, Mo., an hour west of downtown St. Louis, Grellner, whom everyone calls Jake, pinpointed when and how the problem became local. "We know who our patient zero is," he said. In 1997, a California cook named John Bushdiecker set up a local shop. Before he was sent to state prison, he shared his recipe with friends in both Jefferson and Franklin counties. Said Grellner, "We estimate that every cook teaches seven other people how to cook."

At first, the Missouri meth trade operated in a style that would be familiar to veterans of the crack wars on the coasts in the 1980s and early 1990s. Crack was a highly profitable business. In Franklin, a man named Larry Lashley sat atop a pyramid, controlling the manufacture of meth and the cash from it. Twenty-three people worked for him. "With crack," said Grellner, "somebody's making money. That was true at first here too."

Within two years, however, the pyramid crumbled and became what Grellner calls an "amoeba." The cops rarely found more than two ounces of finished product at any one lab. So many locals had learned to make meth, and so many had become addicts, that the area was suddenly awash in small-time cooks. They still sold dope, but their first priority was feeding their own habits with their homemade, pseudoephedrine-based dope – purer than the Mexican brand and soon more reliably available.

The outbreak of Beavis and Butt-head labs, as they're often called, has proved a disaster for Missouri's rural counties. To the costs of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration, authorities must add the costs of treatment, foster care, and environmental protection. Whether they snort, smoke, or inject their drugs, meth addicts degenerate into jittery miniatures of themselves – skinny, toothless, paranoid, and extremely resistant to rehab. They can burn out up to half of the dopamine-producing cells in their brains, making it hard for them to feel pleasure without getting high. Those who cook often do so in the presence of children, and cooking produces toxins that burn the skin, scar the lungs, and even kill. In the name of public safety, the county has to take the kids and then mop up the mess. The cleaning bill for a single penny-ante lab starts at $3,500.

As late as 1997, Franklin and Jefferson counties together notched fewer than a dozen lab busts. When Roy (not his real name), a user from the San Fernando Valley, first arrived in Franklin County in the mid-'90s he had to import his meth from back home. When the connection dried up, he started cooking himself, and the risk of getting caught was minimal. "People weren't aware of it," he said. Law enforcement then, he sighed nostalgically, "wasn't nothing like it is now." In July, while on parole, Roy was arrested for his third meth-related offense, possession of 700 pills and the equipment to cook them.

Beyond scalps, Wright believes notching a lab a day brings tangible results. He has taken down some players he considers major, and other repeat offenders have relocated. Wright encourages cooks to flee. After he busts them, he gets county agencies to cite them for code violations – sanitation, housing, anything. "We call anybody we can to make their lives miserable," he said. "Either they'll comply with the laws or they'll have to move."

Wright's blitzkrieg might only move meth across a line on a map, but from the perspective of local law enforcement, that's still a victory. Wright's sworn duty isn't to solve the nation's drug problem. It's to clean up a clearly defined piece of real estate, using the tools at hand. Still, in an era when state coffers across the country are tapped out, cracking down is simply too expensive. Money woes have sapped the strength of Missouri's strict new meth laws. "I call it feel-good legislation," said Bob Parks, the prosecuting attorney for Franklin County. "It's almost done with a wink."

Because of prison overcrowding, Missouri built five new prisons in the late 1990s – and then neglected to fund their operation. By the time the prisons were fully staffed in 2004, the system was already at capacity. Missouri was forced to adopt a "one-in/one-out" prison policy. For every felon who goes in another must come out, and nonviolent offenders, including meth cooks, come out first. In another effort to free up bunks, the state legislature also began rolling back the stiff penalties that it had mandated in the late1990s. Over the objections of the state's attorney general, last year the legislature lessened penalties for nonviolent felonies, including meth possession. Judges were given leeway to offer probation even to repeat drug offenders.

The upshot is that it's increasingly difficult for cops and prosecutors to send convicted meth cooks to prison. "I can take [a cook] before a judge for the third time and the law says 15 years, and they're out on probation," Parks said. Cooks are especially unlikely to do time if they come from the rural corners where meth is most prevalent. In counties like Franklin, where drug cases are now 60 percent of the docket, double the pre-meth, mid-'90s share, cooks are sentenced at the low end of the spectrum because each county has a population-based quota of state prison beds. No agency in Missouri keeps statewide statistics on meth offenders. Stats for all drug offenders, however, show that they're three times more likely to be on probation or parole than behind bars.

Throughout the heartland, the strain on budgets has forced states to adopt a version of Tommy Wright's strategy – trying to make meth somebody else's problem by pushing it out of their counties, and by shifting the burden of paying for their battle to the rest of the country's taxpayers.

In Missouri and the rest of the Midwestern meth belt, the drug warriors are on the federal dole. Next door to Missouri, a Kansas auditor estimated that 40 percent of his state's anti-meth efforts were funded by the federal government. No one has done the math in Missouri, but officials say that the fed's share may be even higher. "I know we couldn't run our programs without it," confirmed Captain Ron Replogle of the State Highway Patrol, who administers some of the federal money. Jake Grellner is less diplomatic. "Without the feds," he said, "we'd be hosed."

In Jefferson County, Wright pays for two task force cops and a meth prosecutor with federal dollars. At its July meeting, his task force was trying to figure out how to spend $169,000 from a special one-time federal grant. (The county's most pressing need, the group decided, was a safe building in which to store the mountain of poisonous, flammable evidence seized in daily lab busts.)

The federal government's biggest gift to Missouri is its prisons. A meth cook who becomes a federal defendant and then a federal prisoner does not clog the county docket or drain local coffers. In federal court, Congress's sentencing guidelines kick in, and they redefine tough. "They will actually do the time," said Bob Parks of Franklin County. "I have a hard time explaining that to them. They say, 'You mean I'm not going to be home next week?'"

Cops in both Jefferson and Franklin counties are now steering as many as 40 percent of their meth cases to the U.S. District Court in St. Louis. According to Wright and Grellner, both counties now funnel suspects to a federal prosecutor, one of 16 special assistant U.S. attorneys in six Midwestern meth-belt states funded by the president's Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Enter the Feds

The federalization of drug crime is not news. In the past two decades, the federal prison population has doubled, mostly due to drug offenders. By 1994, inmates sentenced for meth crimes were still only 6 percent of the annual federal drug tally, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. But as of 2002, the last year for which figures are available, the representation of meth convicts among federal drug inmates had climbed to more than 15 percent. Their actual number increased fourfold, from 1,000 to 3,969, far outpacing both the growth in the number of prisoners in the federal system as a whole and the federal drug inmate population. Among federal drug inmates from Missouri, the figure jumped to more than 32 percent.

In Missouri, half of the meth defendants prosecuted in federal court are Mexican couriers caught with two- and five-pound packages of meth. The rest of the defendants are white guys who cook with cold pills. The biker that Jake Grellner busted with DEA help will be doing 25 years for getting caught with more than 10,000 cold pills and a lab that held three ounces of meth, enough to keep only a half dozen tweakers high for a week. Yet Grellner said the biker is among his top five all-time busts.

Overall, drug prosecutions have darkened the population of federal prisons. At least in this respect, methamphetamine is different. In 1994, nearly 73 percent of the year's 1,000 new federal meth inmates were white. When the Mexicans took over the meth business, the white percentage dropped to about 60 percent. Then it stabilized, reflecting the trade's swing to the Midwest. As the total number of meth inmates rises, the whites among them have actually halted the shrinking representation of white convicts in the federal prison population, which bottomed out at about 30 percent in 2000. The odds that a white federal inmate is behind bars for meth were 1 in 15 in 1994; they're now 1 in 8.

Perhaps it's a crude form of racial justice that a new drug epidemic has begun to restore the prisons' demographic balance. And a bill introduced last May by Sen. Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, would accelerate this trend. At present meth cooks do more time than heroin, powder cocaine, and pot dealers, but they still don't do as much time as crack dealers. Schumer wants federal penalties for meth to be the same as those for crack. His proposal would increase the average meth sentence by 30 percent, from 88.5 months to 115. That would further whiten the federal inmate population.

The nation is on the verge of creating another class of drug offenders who measure their sentences in decades. But do we want to foot the bill, at more than $20,000 per inmate per year, for Beavis and Butt-Head meth cooks?

With buckets of federal money, smart cops like Grellner and Wright have been able to arrest more people. The problem is that those arrests haven't reduced America's abuse of meth. In 2003, treatment centers in Missouri reported a rise in the number of patients seeking detox for meth for the 13th straight year. And the street price of meth is stable, meaning that despite soaring lab busts, there's a steady supply of product. The crackdown isn't working, and it may be time to try something else.

"If you want to stop throwing money at the problem," said Jake Grellner, "get rid of the pseudoephedrine."

Raw Ingredients

The adrenaline rush and camaraderie of a drug cop's job promote a sort of frat-boy machismo, and narcs sometimes walk, talk and dress a little like the coke dealers and bikers they chase.

Jake Grellner is a different kind of narc. He has no goatee, no tattoos, and more sarcasm than bluster. He was a full-scholarship chemical engineering student at the University of Missouri before he felt the pull of law enforcement. He can draw a meth molecule on a chalkboard, he can describe its effect on the brain, and in crime-fighting he prefers to think long-term.

Grellner has become Missouri's leading proponent of taking away access to the drug's raw ingredients – especially the one that's common to all the popular Missouri recipes, pseudoephedrine. A cheap and effective decongestant, pseudoephedrine is also a close cousin of speed, easily converted to meth with the help of a few household chemicals. In 2002, Grellner launched a program called Operation Chem. He teaches retailers what tweakers are likely to buy or steal, from cold pills to iodine, and asks them to call in the license plate number of any suspicious shopper. Once the manager and the clerks have been trained, he puts a poster in the store window that reads "Operation Chem" as a warning to cooks.

Grellner is still aggressive about finding and busting labs. But he's proud of the fact that Franklin's annual lab bust total actually dropped by a third between 2002 and last year, a sign that educating the retailers has nudged some of the cooks out of the county. Another statistic seems to support this conclusion: Grellner is now finding fewer "dump labs," or abandoned piles of refuse from old cooking sites.

To date, 15 other counties have signed on to Operation Chem. (In Jefferson County, Wright also pushes retailer education, but on an ad hoc basis.) With a $300,000 grant from the federal government, Grellner is about to take the project to the rest of the state by taping a training video that he'll distribute to stores. Thanks also in large part to his activism, Missouri has restricted purchases of pseudoephedrine-based products to two boxes per customer. (Nine other Midwestern states have enacted similar laws.) Box limits have made cooking harder, adding many hours and highway miles to tweakers' shopping trips.

But what Grellner would really like to do is reclassify pseudoephedrine as a narcotic. Designating the drug as Schedule 5, a term used by both the federal government and most state drug control boards, would mean that only licensed pharmacists could sell it. Customers wouldn't need a prescription, but they would have to show photo identification and sign a register.

A few Missouri retailers already do something similar on their own. Shelly, a Dollar General store manager in Franklin who did not give her last name, asks for ID and a signature whenever she feels suspicious, figuring that a legitimate shopper won't mind. "Some of them cuss at me," she said of the not-so-legitimate ones. "But they don't come around here anymore."

In theory, reclassifying pseudoephedrine as a Schedule 5 drug would lift the plague of Beavis and Butt-head. The labs would shut down. The shoulder of I-44, the interstate that runs from St. Louis to Oklahoma, wouldn't be littered with empty Sudafed blister packs. The woods of Franklin and Jefferson counties wouldn't be filled with toxic trash. The foster care system could catch its breath. The drain on money and manpower would end.

"Let the Mexicans have the meth trade," snapped Sam Bertolet, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri. "We'll have done a great thing if we take pseudoephedrine out of the game."

So far, Oklahoma is the only state that has passed a bill requiring pharmacy shoppers to show photo ID and sign a registry when they buy cold pills. The law went into effect in stages starting last April. By mid-July, with the law fully in effect for one month, the state was already claiming a 25 percent decrease in lab busts for the year to date, and a 70 percent drop since the new law's enactment.

Before then, retailers and drug makers had mounted a full-court press against the bill. Pfizer, the world's largest drug company and the maker of Sudafed, has 27 "governmental relations managers" in state capitals and more than 80 lobbyists in Washington, D.C. The leader of the attack on Bill 2176, however, was Nancy Bukar, director of government relations at the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a lobbying group for companies that make over-the-counter drugs. She started working the Oklahoma Legislature as soon as Governor Brad Henry endorsed the bill.

Green's death forced Bukar and the other lobbyists to change tactics. "They didn't stop. They just weren't as public after it," said Mark Woodward, legislative liaison for the state Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control. Green had put a name on the problem. Bill 2176 passed both houses of the Legislature with one dissenting vote.

Drug Company Greed

Jake Grellner has faced off against Bukar and her allies in Missouri each year since 2001, and each time has come away with nothing but box limits. He understands the drug companies' opposition as a matter of self-interested economics.

"It has to be greed," he said. He based his argument on DEA statistics that show consumption of raw pseudoephedrine by U.S. drug firms climbing 178 percent between 1990 and 2003. The amount sold rose from 9 to 14 tons between 1998 and 1999 alone. Grellner assumes the retail sales of cold pills made with pseudoephedrine have shown similar growth. "Do you remember the great cold outbreak of 1999?" he asked sarcastically. "Neither do I. But we do remember the great meth lab outbreak."

Nancy Bukar disputes Grellner's numbers. She insists there has not been any spike in consumption of over-the-counter cold medicine. "Sales are flat," she claims, and there's no way to challenge her. Though anecdotal evidence suggests, for example, that sales of cold pills have exploded at convenience stores, all the hard data is collected by the drug companies and, as Bukar says, it shows retail sales to be flat or declining.

The Consumer Healthcare Products Association has proved a tenacious force against restricting pseudoephedrine sales, including box limits, throughout the Midwest. State Senator Julie Rosen of Minnesota, sponsor of a bill similar to Oklahoma's, exhaled at the mention of Bukar's name. "She was here at least three times," Rosen said. Before her bill died in committee earlier this year, pressure from CHPA had forced her to strip a Schedule 5 provision from the legislation.

CHPA is fighting a Schedule 5 designation for pseudoephedrine, Bukar said, for the convenience of cold remedy customers. "What we don't want to do is criminalize legitimate behavior," she argued.

Instead, CHPA prefers retailer education and sponsors a program not unlike Operation Chem, called Meth Watch. She points out that in many rural counties, where pharmacies are scarce, residents buy their cold remedies at convenience stores, which aren't allowed to sell pseudoephedrine under Oklahoma's law. "Let's say someone has a cold and drives all the way to a drugstore and then realizes she's forgotten her ID," Bukar said. "Should she have to drive home and get it?"

"I remember very, very well that when they made codeine Schedule 5, the problem ended instantly," Van Haaften said. "In my last 15 years as sheriff, I don't think I arrested one person addicted to cough syrup."

Van Haaften convinced Iowa governor Tom Vilsack to back his effort. But by the time a bill was proposed last winter there was nothing about reclassifying pseudoephedrine in it. CHPA-sponsored ads on local talk radio touted the benefits of pseudoephedrine for colds and allergies, without mentioning any brand names. The version of the bill that passed in July was so watered down that its only sales restriction was a box limit on a small class of products in which pseudoephedrine was the only active ingredient – in other words, 2 percent of all 800 or so pseudoephedrine-based brands. Tweakers could buy only three boxes of Sudafed, but they could still buy Actifed in bulk because Actifed has multiple ingredients.

Still, Van Haaften and Grellner continue to crusade, and Oklahoma's big drop in meth busts is giving them renewed hope. Mark Woodward of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said he's been fielding phone calls from lawmakers throughout the Midwest, asking for stats on lab busts. The legislators have told him they're interested in reclassifying pseudoephedrine, and they need proof of the new law's success to fend off the lobbyists.

"They're driving into Fort Smith, Arkansas, to do their shopping" (15 minutes from the Oklahoma state line), and then coming home to cook, he said. Iowa's Van Haaften said that Arkansas officials have told him that pseudoephedrine sales in the state's western counties have "skyrocketed" since Oklahoma changed its laws. "It's really important that all the states be on the same page," said Julie Rosen, the Minnesota legislator.

The shortcut to making the law uniform is to go to Washington, D.C. But a federal bill proposed by Representative Marion Berry, an Arkansas Democrat who is a pharmacist, died in committee in 2002. This year, in the wake of his state's success, Oklahoma congressman Brad Carson, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate this fall, introduced a new version. He thinks CHPA and Pfizer will have to endorse such a measure eventually for the sake of their image. "It's a public relations disaster for them if they don't," he said. "When the heat is on, I'm confident they will be constructively engaged."

It's possible that he'll be proven right. Until recently, the Bush Administration's position on Schedule 5 was equivocal. Drug czar John Walters said that pseudoephedrine offered "an enormous, legitimate benefit" and made it clear that the White House had no plans to push for federal reclassification of the drug. Then in August, Walters's deputy, Scott Burns, announced a change in policy, without calling it that, at an appearance in Oklahoma.

"President Bush sent me here ... to find out what they are doing in Oklahoma that has made such a dramatic difference," Burns said, and he went on to express the White House's newfound interest in a federal Schedule 5. Burns spent the next week taking commercial flights around the Midwest to give the same speech. In Iowa, he pledged to help Marvin Van Haaften pass his statewide measure.

Grellner and his fellow cops aren't home free yet, however. Burns also told Van Haaften that during his junket, he'd noticed a woman who rode with him on every plane. When he introduced himself, she said that she worked for Pfizer and was following him, and then pointed out other drug company reps in other seats who were doing the same.

Posted by lois at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

Alberto Gonzales: A Record of Injustice

"As chief legal counsel for then Gov. Bush in Texas, Gonzales was responsible for writing a memo on the facts of each death penalty case – Bush decided whether a defendant should live or die based on the memos. An examination of the Gonzales memoranda by the Atlantic Monthly concluded, "Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." His memos caused Bush frequently to approve executions based on "only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute." "

A Record of Injustice
By Christy Harvey and Judd Legum and Jonathan Baskin, The Progress Report
Posted on November 11, 2004, Printed on November 12, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20475/
An August 2002 Justice Department memo "was vetted by a larger number of officials, including...the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office." According to Newsweek, the memo "was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and [Cheney counsel] David Addington." The memo included the opinion that laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." Further, the memo puts forth the opinion that the pain caused by an interrogation must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions – in order to constitute torture." The methods outlined in the memo "provoked concerns within the CIA about possible violation of the federal torture law [and] also raised concerns at the FBI, where some agents knew of the techniques being used" overseas on high-level al Qaeda officials. [8/1/02 memo [PDF]; WP, 6/27/04; Newsweek, 6/21/04; NYT, 6/27/04]

A 1/25/02 memo written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" and "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." The memo pushes to make al Qaeda and Taliban detainees exempt from the Geneva Conventions' provisions on the proper, legal treatment of prisoners. The administration has been adamant that prisoners at Guantanamo are not protected by the Geneva Conventions. [1/25/02 memo [PDF]; Newsweek, 5/24/04]

The 1/25/02 memo shows Alberto Gonzales was aware of the risk that ignoring the Geneva Conventions could create for the military. One concern expressed is that failing to apply the Geneva Conventions "could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries," which is what happened at Abu Ghraib. Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly warned against taking this decision, as did lawyers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG. This week, a federal judge ruled that "President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions" when he established military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to try detainees as war criminals. [1/25/02 memo [PDF]; Bloomberg, 6/14/04; New York Times, 11/9/04]

As chief legal counsel for then Gov. Bush in Texas, Gonzales was responsible for writing a memo on the facts of each death penalty case – Bush decided whether a defendant should live or die based on the memos. An examination of the Gonzales memoranda by the Atlantic Monthly concluded, "Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." His memos caused Bush frequently to approve executions based on "only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute." Rather than informing the governor of the conflicting circumstances in a case, "The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration – one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions." [Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003]

In his briefing on death-row defendant Terry Washington – a mentally retarded 33-year-old man with the communication skills of a 7-year-old – Gonzales devoted nearly a third of his 3-page report to the gruesome details of the crime, but referred "only fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal – his limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas – and present[ed] it as part of a discussion of 'conflicting information' about the condemned man's childhood." In addition, Gonzales "failed to mention that Washington's mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence." Nor did he mention that Washington's lawyer had "failed to enlist a mental-health expert" to testify on Washington's behalf, even though "ineffective counsel and mental retardation were in fact the central issues raised in the thirty-page clemency petition" it was Gonzales's job to review. This all came at a time when "demand was growing nationwide to ban executions of the retarded." [Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003]

As Texas Supreme Court Justice, in the weeks between hearing oral arguments and making a decision in Henson v. Texas Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance, Justice Alberto Gonzales collected a $2,000 contribution premium from the Texas Farm Bureau (which runs the defendant insurance company in this case). In another case, Gonzales pocketed a $2,500 contribution from a law firm defending the Royal Insurance company just before hearing oral arguments in Embrey v. Royal Insurance. [Texas for Public Justice]

Posted by lois at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2004

Dubious Distinction

"...foodservice officials in prisons pursue food costs per-inmate-day of $2 and lower aggressively, and, when they achieve that goal, proudly wear it as a badge of honor."

The business of feeding inmates in U.S. prisons gives new meaning to the phrase "opposites attract." For once again, the inmate population increased in 2003, while total food expenditures at 50 state departments of correction fell 2%. In fact, foodservice officials in prisons pursue food costs per-inmate-day of $2 and lower aggressively, and, when they achieve that goal, proudly wear it as a badge of honor.

Mark of distinction: Food costs per-inmate-day at the 50 states rose 22% last year, from $2.26 to $2.75. But "because of good management practices of the foodservice managers in our 30 kitchens," states Barbara Holly, foodservice administrator for the Alabama Dept. of Corrections and current president of the American Correctional Foodservice Association, "we have managed to keep the lowest raw-food cost of any other DOC."

Census figures support that claim: In 2003, Alabama's daily expenditure was $1.12, besting every other state. In fact, eight states report daily food costs of under $2 for 2003.

But what Holly says about conditions in her state arguably apply to the rest of the market. "Due to the poor economy, most of our state agencies had to reduce their operating expense by 18%. We need updated facilities and additional staff. Much of our foodservice equipment is in dire need of being replaced but monies are not available. We replace equipment when it dies."

Federal growth: Activity within the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) tells a somewhat different story, coinciding with the government's efforts to increase "homeland security" and the substantial increase in operations at the U.S. federal prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That system of 102 facilities increased spending on food and other foodservice supplies on an inmate population that rose 7% last year.

Food costs per-inmate-day stayed fixed at $2.66 in the federal system, but because the population rose, total food expenditures increased 14% while the total foodservice budget rose almost 2%.

November 9, 2004 Copyright 2004 VNU Business Media, Inc.
Food Service Director October 15, 2004

ABOUT THE CENSUS: Findings in the 2003 Correctional Foodservice Census and Performance Report are based on a survey of all 50 state departments of correction and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. VNU Foodservice Network's Research Department commissioned this study, which took place last summer. Respondents provided budget breakdowns for food, equipment and construction costs, plus facility and inmate counts.

Posted by lois at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

November 09, 2004

Californians Know They Can't Afford More Failed Prisons

"Nearly 4.5 million Californians voted for sentencing reform through Proposition 66. A Field Poll in May showed that more than half of Californians think the crime problem would be reduced through rehabilitation and education instead of prison time."

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/11365552p-12280139c.html

Other views: Prison reform must be a priority

By Jeff Adachi and Ruth Wilson Gilmore --
Special To The Sacramento Bee
Published 2:15 am PST Tuesday, November 9, 2004

Despite the narrow loss of Proposition 66 (the initiative to amend "three strikes"), Californians know they can't afford more failed prison policies and crumbling communities.

Nearly 4.5 million Californians voted for sentencing reform through Proposition 66. A Field Poll in May showed that more than half of Californians think the crime problem would be reduced through rehabilitation and education instead of prison time. A Public Policy Institute of California survey reported in June 2003 that 55 percent of Californians favored cuts to the prison budget. Nevertheless, this year's budget raises prison spending in the state to a historic high of $6 billion. Is anybody listening?

While the new budget delays operation of the $700 million Delano II prison until May 2005, the administration still plans to open the 5,160-bed prison. This, even though the Department of Corrections has projected a decline of approximately 15,000 prisoners in the 2004-05 fiscal year. A group of experienced California prison wardens told Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Performance Review panel this year that a better inmate environment would be 50,000 fewer prisoners, down from 162,000 today.

Why not mothball Delano II, use the opportunity of 15,000 fewer prisoners to close three more prisons and reallocate those funds to build communities, reduce crime and climb out of this fiscal hole? Why doesn't California implement changes we know will reduce prison populations and build safer communities?

While Schwarzenegger has called for "action action action" on budget restraint, even the specter of a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall has not compelled the administration to act aggressively on nonpartisan recommendations from the Little Hoover Commission, the Legislative Analyst's Office or from various bipartisan legislative committees that offer road maps to juvenile and adult Department of Corrections reform.

With the Little Hoover Commission reporting in 2003 that California sends people back to prison at nearly twice the national rate, we have to look at failed policies and a union of guards and parole agents who benefit from failure. Why not a system in which all benefit from success?

We don't need any more studies. Other states close prisons, invest in communities and enhance public safety. By asking, and answering, the right questions, this administration can work toward reducing prison spending and reinvest those funds in urban and rural communities to keep us all healthy and safe.

--------------------

About the writers:

Jeff Adachi is the public defender of the city and county of San Francisco. Reach him at jeff.adachi@sfgov.org. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Ph.D., is an associate professor of geography and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Reach her at rwgilmor@usc.edu. Both authors are part of a 17-member commission of experts established by Californians United for a Responsible Budget. Web site: www.curbprisonspending.org

Posted by lois at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2004

How Prop. 66 Fell So Far, So Fast

For those of you trying to get some analysis of state races, here's the
best thing yet on the defeat of Prop 66, that would have amended
California's 3-Strikes law.

One crucial question that Mathews doesn't deal with is this: At the time
Schwarzenegger signed on to the campaign, 66 was far ahead in the polls.
Our governor is treated here by media, other politicians & many 'special
interests' as if he were one of his movie role heros, that is, as someone
who cannot be defeated. While I presume that some in his circle believe
that and perhaps he does as well, there must be cooler heads who calculate
when he should throw himself fully into a campaign and when maintain a
lower profile. Because the first time he loses, a lot of that political
magic will disappear. So what I'd like to know is what the Schwarzenegger
camp saw in the polls that made them certain that he and $3-4Million extra
cash would carry the day.

How Prospects for Prop. 66 Fell So Far, So Fast
Three-strikes revamp looked likely till Pete Wilson, the governor and a
billionaire joined to defeat it.
By Joe Mathews
Times Staff Writer

November 7, 2004

The phone rang at midnight.

Jeff Randle, one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political consultants, was
working in a hotel room near LAX on the night of Oct. 21 as he grabbed his
cellphone. Who, Randle wondered, could be calling him at such an hour?

Pete Wilson was on the line. The former California governor had just
clinched an agreement that, only 12 days before the election, would mean
the collapse of Proposition 66, a measure to limit the state's
three-strikes law.

Henry T. Nicholas III, an Orange County billionaire whose sister was slain
in 1984, had just promised Wilson a donation of $1.5 million for the
campaign to defeat the initiative. That money would allow its opponents to
broadcast TV commercials for the first time.

"My message on that call was: OK, you've got the money, so let's go,"
Wilson recalled last week. "This was the cavalry coming over the ridge."

The day before Wilson's midnight call, Californians appeared ready to pass
Proposition 66. A Times poll showed it leading 62%-21% among registered
voters. Less than two weeks later, after a media blitz financed by
Nicholas, Proposition 66 lost, with 53.2% of voters against it. A final
tally will not be available until all absentee and provisional ballots are
counted.

"We've seen steep declines before," says Mark DiCamillo, director of the
Field Poll, which recorded a 65%-18% lead for Proposition 66 in early
October. "The very late-breaking nature of this decline, I think, is
unprecedented."

The story of that turnaround highlights not only the power of money and the
volatility of initiative politics, but also the continuing political
partnership between the state's two most recent Republican governors.

On Oct. 22, the day after Wilson's call, Schwarzenegger made "No on 66" the
top priority of his ballot measure campaigning. On Oct. 23, the governor
spent the afternoon making TV advertisements opposing the initiative in a
Los Angeles studio. Schwarzenegger also converted TV time he had bought to
fight two gambling measures into time for "No on 66" ads.

"What I basically did was brought everyone together and said, 'Look, guys
we've got to go and communicate to the people,' " Schwarzenegger said last
week.

Schwarzenegger also said he had asked Wilson to get involved. Wilson
campaigned for the original three-strikes initiative in 1994 and maintains
long-standing relationships with law enforcement and crime victims groups.
Those involved in the No on 66 campaign say he provided a crucial bridge to
Nicholas, law enforcement groups and Schwarzenegger's political advisors,
among them several one-time Wilson aides.

"We couldn't generate momentum until Gov. Wilson and Gov. Schwarzenegger
became involved," said Ventura County Dist. Atty. Greg Totten, who has
known Wilson for years.

"I was a nag," said Wilson, who downplays his work and credits Nicholas and
Schwarzenegger with the No on 66 comeback. The anti-66 campaign had been
kept alive since the spring by the California District Attorneys Assn. and
the state prison guards union, which hired the campaign's political
consultants and paid for focus groups.

Schwarzenegger agreed to oppose 66 and sign the official ballot argument
against it in early summer. But until mid-October, the governor had focused
his attention and political money on defeating two gambling measures,
Propositions 68 and 70. No other major donors had stepped up to help the No
on 66 campaign.

In early October, campaign manager Richard Temple told a meeting of
district attorneys: "If we don't get up on TV, we'll lose." Solano County
Dist. Atty. Dave Paulson and California District Attorneys Assn. executive
director Dave LaBahn went to Randle's office shortly thereafter, the two
men say, to plead for Schwarzenegger's help.

With 68 and 70 badly trailing, the governor's team debated whether to make
the defeat of 66 its next priority, or focus more on two other ballot
measures - Propositions 64 and 72 - of concern to the business community.

Schwarzenegger answered that question after attending a No on 66 news
conference in Ontario on Oct. 20. The day did not begin auspiciously. Some
local TV reporters who had been expected to attend the event were
reassigned to cover a large Southern California rainstorm. No on 66
campaign aides gave the news media a DVD with a TV advertisement they had
not found the money to air.

But the governor was visibly moved when he met victims of criminals who
might have been released if 66 had passed. At the end of the event, he
asked the victims to attend other public events for No on 66, according to
one victim and an aide. He told political advisors he wanted to do more to
help the campaign.

"It hit him in the heart," said Don Sipple, a strategist who makes the
governor's ads.

The next night, Wilson got Nicholas on the phone. The No on 66 campaign had
been asking Nicholas for money since September, but the founder of the
semiconductor company Broadcom had been distracted by his search for a new
chief executive.

Wilson had worked with Nicholas on Proposition 21 - a juvenile crime
measure passed in March 2000 - and knew Nicholas' mother, Marcella Leach,
who had started a victims' rights group. Nicholas was shocked to learn from
Wilson that polls showed Proposition 66 would pass. He was impressed that
Schwarzenegger opposed the measure.

"I said, 'I trust your judgment, Pete,' " said Nicholas. "If you think
Arnold is willing to go all out, I'll put $1.5 million in."

The next day, Schwarzenegger agreed to jump in. Sipple wrote scripts for
ads juxtaposing the governor against blown-up mug shots of three-strikes
criminals; the ads were just 15 seconds, so air time could be bought on
short notice and the ads could be repeated often.

The governor's political advisors have sought to emphasize that
Schwarzenegger, criticized for being too cautious in picking fights, was
challenging a ballot measure that had majority support in polls. "I think
it shows the governor was willing to take a risk," said Randle.

The Schwarzenegger ads were on the air by the morning of Oct. 27. That same
week, the prison guards union contributed $500,000 more to the campaign.
The governor contributed more than $2 million through the California
Recovery Team, a fund he established last year to pay for his ballot
initiative campaigns. Nicholas made additional donations throughout the
week - in the end, he gave a total of $3.5 million to fight 66.

On Oct. 28, Schwarzenegger and Wilson appeared together at a Los Angeles
news conference, along with former governors Jerry Brown and Gray Davis, to
denounce 66. The governor made a No on 66 message a central part of his bus
tour around the state that Saturday and declared all his last-minute
appearances with Republican legislative candidates Monday to be No on 66
events.

Nicholas, who stayed in close touch with Wilson, spent the weekend making
and buying his own radio ads - at times with his personal credit card.

On Saturday night, he sent his private plane to Oakland to pick up the
city's mayor, former Gov. Brown, and fly him to Long Beach. Brown was taken
to a studio at the home of Ryan Shuck, guitarist of the group Orgy. Joined
by musicians that included Korn drummer David Silvera, he recorded radio
ads from 11:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m.

"It was a very loose, cool mood," said Shuck. "I had Korn, Orgy, Jerry
Brown and Dr. Nicholas in my house all at once. Pretty bizarre."

Proposition 66 supporters dogged the governor's public appearances
throughout the weekend, seeking out reporters to give them instant
responses to Schwarzenegger's statements. But Yes on 66 campaign officials
said they were overwhelmed by the size and scope of the No on 66 media
campaign.

"The suddenness of it all was just stunning," said Sandy Harrison, a
spokesman for Yes on 66. Harrison called attacks on the measure "flat-out
false."

But he added: "Everything changed in the last few days. They basically
bought up every inch of unused air time that was available. And the
governor was just an awesome messenger for them."

On election night, early returns showed the measure passing. But the Yes
tally lost ground as the night went on. At 11:30 p.m., Schwarzenegger took
the stage at his Beverly Hilton celebration and declared victory - even
though 66 still held a slight majority.

After his speech, results began to show the number of No votes surpassing
the Yes votes. A cheer went up from the district attorneys in one of the
ballrooms. The clock read midnight.

Wilson stayed past 1 a.m., shaking hands and chatting with former aides now
working for Schwarzenegger. "Our guys have been thanking both governors,"
said LaBahn, the executive director of the district attorneys group.
"Wilson and Schwarzenegger - that's a tough team to beat."

Times staff writer Jenifer Warren contributed to this report.

Posted by craig at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

CT: New 'Criminal" Tracking System

New system allows police to find fingerprints in minutes.

Police Announce New Criminal Tracking System

POSTED: 4:19 pm EST November 5, 2004
UPDATED: 5:42 pm EST November 5, 2004

MIDDLETOWN, Conn. -- Gov. M. Jodi Rell calls it a criminal's worst
nightmare -- a new fingerprint scanning system that allows police to pull up an offender's file within minutes.

Connecticut State Police

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System replaces the old setup of mailing fingerprint cards to the state or FBI for history checks. That process took two to five months to complete.

Now, with just a touch of a button, a local police officer will have an offender's complete criminal history at his or her disposal. Electronic fingerprint scanners, called Life Scans, immediately pull up information from both state and FBI records.

"The system now allows Connecticut law enforcement officials to use
fingerprints lifted from local crime scenes to identify perpetrators
from across the nation," Rell said. "Think about it this way; state
boundaries will no longer provide anonymity to these criminals."

Rell was on hand Friday, along with local and state police, to
introduce the new tracking system. Connecticut partnered with neighbor Rhode Island in using the program. There are 55 Life Scans located in agencies across Connecticut that will have tracking capabilities, and officials say that's just a start.

"We hope to roll it out so every department that makes arrests will be ableto do this," said Rep. Robert Farr, R-West Hartford, who estimates that 70percent of arrests will be online within months.

The project began about five years ago and included scanning in 2.4
million fingerprint cards to build the new system. Each Life Scan unit costs about$30,000, said Capt. Scott Martin, commander of the Criminal Justice Information Services Section.

Martin hopes the new system will also help the state catch up on the
numberof background checks it performs each year for non-criminal agencies.

State police frequently field requests for information on teachers and
school bus drivers. Connecticut's two casinos ask for about 20,000 background checks for new employees each year, Martin said.

Officials expect to eventually use the system to take digital
photographs of offenders that can be stored in the database, as well as photographs oftattoos or scars that can help identify wanted criminals.

"It's the concept of, 'You can run, but you can't hide,"' Farr said.
"With this system, people are not going to be able to hide.
If we catch them and we book them for anything, we will know who they
are."

Submitted by Kym Clark --- KClark@FIFTHAVE.ORG

Posted by lois at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

Mandatory Sentences in Meth Cases Proposed

The "most comprehensive methamphetamine legislation ever" to be introduced in Congress in January, sure to impact poor white women in the South and the center of the country most.

From drug sense weekly

Methamphetamine cooks and dealers in Missouri could face mandatory minimum sentencing for the first time ever, under proposals discussed Tuesday by U.S. Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., and Peter Kinder, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Speaking to reporters at Rosecrans Memorial Airport, Mr. Talent said he would file the "most comprehensive methamphetamine legislation ever introduced into Congress" in January.

The bill would provide $47 million toward the fight against meth, including $5 million for a two-state pilot program that would require those states to enact mandatory minimum sentences for the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine.

Current federal guidelines call for five years in prison for possession of 5 grams of the drug. Although it is consistently ranked as one of the top meth-producing states in the country, Missouri has no minimum sentences for meth production or distribution.

Mr. Talent said his bill has not been finalized but would require "at least a couple of years" in prison upon conviction.

Pubdate: Wed, 20 Oct 2004
Source: St. Joseph News-Press (MO)
Copyright: 2004 The News-Press, St. Joseph, Missouri
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1510
Author: Scott Lauck
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

Posted by lois at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

Incarceration continues to rise despite drop in crime rate

"At the end of 2003, there were 1,470,045 men and women in state and federal prisons in the United States, the report found. In addition, counting those inmates in city and county jails and incarcerated juvenile offenders, the total number of Americans behind bars was 2,212,475 on Dec. 31 last year, the report said."
"Statistically, the number of women in prison is growing fast, rising 3.6 percent in 2003. But at a total of 101,179, they are just 6.9 percent of the prison population."

Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Published: November 8, 2004, NY Times

The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday.

The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of laws passed in the 1990's that led to more prison sentences and longer terms, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the report.

At the end of 2003, there were 1,470,045 men and women in state and federal prisons in the United States, the report found. In addition, counting those inmates in city and county jails and incarcerated juvenile offenders, the total number of Americans behind bars was 2,212,475 on Dec. 31 last year, the report said.

The report estimated that 44 percent of state and federal prisoners in 2003 were black, compared with 35 percent who were white, 19 percent who were Hispanic and 2 percent who were of other races. The numbers have changed little in the last decade.

Statistically, the number of women in prison is growing fast, rising 3.6 percent in 2003. But at a total of 101,179, they are just 6.9 percent of the prison population.

Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, said one of the most striking findings in the report was that almost 10 percent of all American black men ages 25 to 29 were in prison.

Such a high proportion of young black men behind bars not only has a strong impact on black families, Professor Blumstein said, but "in many ways is self-defeating." The criminal justice system is built on deterrence, with being sent to prison supposedly a stigma, he said. "But it's tough to convey a sense of stigma when so many of your friends and neighbors are similarly stigmatized."

In seeking to explain the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population, Mr. Beck pointed out that F.B.I. statistics showed that from 1994 to 2003 there was a 16 percent drop in arrests for violent crime, including a 36 percent decrease in arrests for murder and a 25 percent decrease in arrests for robbery.

But the tough new sentencing laws led to a growth in inmates being sent to prison, from 522,000 in 1995 to 615,400 in 2002, the report said.

Similarly, the report found that the average time served by prison inmates rose from 23 months in 1995 to 30 months in 2001.

Among the new measures were mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which required inmates to serve a specified proportion of their time behind bars; truth-in-sentencing laws, which required an inmate to actually serve the time he was sentenced to; and a variety of three-strikes laws increasing the penalties for repeat offenders.

In the three states with the biggest prison systems, California, Texas and Florida, the number of newly admitted inmates grew last year, but the number of those released either fell or remained stable, Mr. Beck said.

Several states with small prison systems had particularly large increases in new inmates, led by North Dakota, up 11.4 percent, and Minnesota, up 10.3 percent.

New York had a 2.8 percent decrease in new inmates, reflecting the continued sharp fall in crime in New York City, Mr. Beck said.

Over all, Mr. Beck said, the prison population is aging. Traditionally the great majority of inmates are men in their 20's and early 30's, but middle-aged inmates, those 40 to 54, account for about half of the increase in the prison population since 1995, he said.

This is a result both of the aging of the general American population and of the longer sentences, Mr. Beck said.

But the number of elderly inmates is still small, despite longer sentences and more life sentences. Those inmates 65 and older were still only 1 percent of the prison population in 2003.

Posted by lois at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2004

Train the Trainers Photos

Hi everyone,

I am sure you have all seen Lois' message about the photos from our Train-The-Trainers session, but I wanted to also post a message to the blog about them (for the record books :). You can view them online at:

http://www.realcostofprisons.org/photos/

If you are interested in getting copies you can order them online from Kodak, at:

http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=la7p65m.gwz0wcy&x=0&y=-2br4xj

Peace,

- Mark

Posted by mdbrenner at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

Los Angeles: Sales Tax Hike for 5000 more police fails

"Measure A, which would have raised $500 million a year in new sales taxes for more police & jails, went down, but the fight is far from over."

"As the votes were counted, [Sheriff] Baca and [Police Chief] Bratton, dining together at a French restaurant in Echo Park, had already begun to discuss other ways to raise money for law enforcement."
Next steps for us include drawing together groups who participated in the Oct. 26 'Alternative Visions of Public Safety' public hearing to discuss strategies to head off Baca & Bratton's next attempts to raise spending on police & jails.
---Craig Gilmore

Meeting to discuss next steps:
Monday Nov. 22
6-8 pm
253 W. Martin Luther King @ Broadway, Los Angeles
323-238-0596

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-me-coptax3nov03,1,6498562.story?coll=la-home-headlines

LOS ANGELES COUNTY ELECTIONS
Sales Tax Hike to Add Law Officers Comes Up Short
But a $500-million bond issue to control storm runoff heads for passage in L.A. Both required two-thirds approval from voters. By Jeffrey L. Rabin and Noam N. Levey Times Staff Writers

November 3, 2004

A ballot measure to raise the sales tax in Los Angeles County to put 5,000 more police officers and sheriff's deputies on the streets fell short Tuesday of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass.

The county's top law enforcement officers, Sheriff Lee Baca and LAPD Chief William J. Bratton, acknowledged late Tuesday night that Measure A appeared headed for defeat.

"I'm sad for the people and I'm sad for the men and women who work in law enforcement," Baca said. "We haven't fixed anything when it comes to the crime-fighting needs of Los Angeles County."

Baca and Bratton knew from the beginning of their campaign that they would have a tough fight persuading voters to boost the sales tax from 8.25% to 8.75%.

As the votes were counted, Baca and Bratton, dining together at a French restaurant in Echo Park, had already begun to discuss other ways to raise money for law enforcement.

Although county voters rejected the sales tax, those in the city of Los Angeles were approving Proposition O, a $500-million bond issue to keep trash and bacteria in the city's storm-water system from polluting the Pacific Ocean.

The bond measure, which also required a two-thirds vote, appeared headed toward a comfortable victory.

"This represents a real turning point for environmental issues on a local level," said Councilman Eric Garcetti, who has spearheaded the campaign. "I think this is an issue that cuts across political, partisan and geographical lines."

In their campaign for the sales tax increase, Baca and Bratton sought to persuade voters that, although the crime rate had fallen sharply from its peak in 1991, there was still too much crime in Los Angeles County and still too few police officers to combat it.

They boldly promised to cut crime in half if Measure A passed.

"Measure A is a measured response to the issue of crime," Bratton had said on the campaign trail. "It's not a panacea, but it is the beginning of a significant reduction in the crime."

Los Angeles has long been one of the most under-policed major U.S. cities, with 9,099 officers to serve 3.8 million residents. The ratio of officers to residents is much greater in most other cities, including New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Chicago, for example, has 13,500 officers for 2.9 million residents.

Baca and Bratton had raised more than $2.8 million for the campaign, with major contributions coming from the union that represents Los Angeles police officers, companies that contract with the sheriff's or police departments and wealthy local businessmen.

To reach voters, they relied on speeches, media interviews and a television ad that played to the public's fear of crime.

The dramatic 30-second commercial, which began running in early October, featured an intruder breaking into a suburban home. A desperate woman calls 911 and pleads for police to come quickly as the intruder climbs the stairs and heads toward her.

The campaign for Proposition O, the storm-water bond measure for the city of Los Angeles, was low-key by comparison.

The bond proposal faced no organized opposition, but with it appearing last on a crowded ballot, backers spent more than $481,000 on television ads to reach voters.

The bond issue, estimated to cost the owner of a $350,000 home about $56 a year, was seen as the most ambitious effort in the region to clean up the storm runoff that floods the coastline with everything from Styrofoam to bacteria that can sicken swimmers.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously this summer to put Proposition O on the ballot. Every elected city official backed the measure.

"They are turning over a new leaf in how they deal with this problem," said Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, an environmental organization based in Santa Monica.

City officials proposed to use the $500 million from the bond sale to install grates and catch basins to keep pollutants from reaching rivers and streams and eventually the ocean.

The campaign for Measure A began two years ago, when Baca first proposed the idea.

In January, Baca launched an initiative drive to raise the sales tax but failed to collect enough signatures to make the ballot.

When the Los Angeles City Council began moving to put its own sales tax proposal before voters, a majority of the five supervisors - led by Zev Yaroslavsky - had a change of heart.

On the campaign trail, the county's top law enforcement officers insisted the sales tax increase was an investment, not a cost.

"How much is too much to pay for security, for safety, and for peace of mind?" Baca asked.

There was no organized campaign against the measure. Instead of putting a tax increase on the ballot, Supervisor Mike Antonovich said supervisors should make public safety their highest budget priority.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. complained that higher taxes would wind up as pay raises and pensions for officers.

Times staff writer Sue Fox contributed to this report.

Posted by lois at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)

CA: 3-strikes reform initiative is defeated

Very bad news from California. Henry Nicholas, the CCPOA and Schwarzenegger staged a massive late media campaign using figures that no media in the state believed were accurate -- 26,000 murders and rapists will be released, etc. Between those statewide ads & LA ads for Measure A, political ads that help create fear of crime are alive and well. Our efforts to convince some lawmakers that they need not be so fearful of the 'soft on crime' label have probably been set back substantially by this vote.---Craig Gilmore

Prop. 66 -- "three strikes" initiative -- is defeated
Prop. 69, to require DNA from felons and some suspects, wins passage

By Andy Furillo -- Sacramento Bee Staff Writer

November 3, 2004 An expensive campaign to change the state's "three strikes" failed to sway voters.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Proposition 66 was opposed by 53.4 percent of the state's voters.

Proposition 69, meanwhile, which would require the collection of DNA samples from all felons and from adults and juveniles arrested on specific crimes, was victorious.

Voters backed the initiative, 61.8 percent to 38.2 percent.

Proposition 66 would have substantially weakened the tough three-strikes sentencing law that 72 percent of California voters approved in 1994.

It would have required that the third felony needed to qualify an offender for a 25-years-to-life term be classified by statute as either serious or violent. Under the 1994 law, any felony could result in the indeterminate life term if the offender had two prior serious or violent felony convictions.

Proposition 66 also would have eliminated burglary of an unoccupied residence as a strike. Five other categories of crimes also would have been no longer be strikes.

The chief financier of the Proposition 66 campaign was Sacramento car insurance executive Jerry Keenan, who contributed nearly $2 million, according to the secretary of state's office.

Keenan's son, imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter, would have gotten 32 months early under the provisions of Proposition 66.

Billionaire financier George Soros and two other wealthy out-of-state political contributors, Peter Lewis and John Sperling, also contributed $500,000 on behalf of Proposition 66.

Opponents of the measure received a huge boost in the last week of the campaign when Henry T. Nicholas III, a self-described "engineering nerd" who co-founded Broadcom and has an estimated worth of more than $1 billion, contributed $3.5 million to the campaign. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association added $700,000.

Nicholas, an Orange County billionaire, decided to make the contribution after his mother attended Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's rally Oct. 20 in Ontario.

Sparked by Schwarzenegger's involvement in the campaign, opponents of Proposition 66, in a survey released four days before the election, chopped 25 points off what had been the proponents' huge lead in a Field Poll taken in early October.

The two sides battled in the campaign over how many offenders would be affected and whether they would be released if the measure passes.

Proponents said Proposition 66 would have affected no more than 4,200 current three-strike prisoners and that none of them would be guaranteed a release, only a resentencing hearing.

Opponents said all 4,200 three-strikers now in prison on 25-years-to-life terms would have been virtually assured of release, and that another 22,000 two-strike prisoners, whose terms were doubled under provisions of the 1994 law, also could get early outs.

Proposition 69 received more than $1.8 million from Newport Beach lawyer Bruce Harrington, whose brother and sister-in-law were murdered in 1980.

Opponents of Proposition 69, which included the American Civil Liberties Union, argued the measure threatened the privacy rights of people arrested but not charged or convicted of felonies.

Posted by lois at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)

The Epidemic on Aile 6: Busting meth labs in the Midwest

"Methamphetamine brought to the Midwest by drug mules had created a new market for the drug, and a different style of production. In Missouri especially, local users began cooking their own. Instead of a handful of factory labs, authorities suddenly had to track down thousands of tiny Mom-and-Pop operations, supplied by chemicals available in strip malls and convenience stores. As of 2002, Missouri and the eight states that touch its borders accounted for more than half the lab busts in the nation. In 2003, accounting for 15 percent of the nation's total, Missouri alone had 2,860 labs‹compared to fewer than half that number in California. The state had become the front line in the newest theater of the drug war. The problem was at its worst in Jefferson and Franklin counties, two rural jurisdictions on the edge of St. Louis.

http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/LegalAffairs/2004/11/01/636322?page=4

The Epidemic on Aisle 6
Busting a record number of methamphetamine labs hasn't rid the Midwest of its latest drug scourge. Now cops want to make it harder to buy cold pills that contain a key meth ingredient. Will the drug lobby let them? by Mark Schone | Nov 01 '04

ON A TUESDAY IN JULY, it was 96 degrees in the shade and there was no shade in a parking lot an hour south of St. Louis. A half-dozen SUVs and pickup trucks formed a semicircle on the asphalt. The air conditioners were on full blast, but the pairs of burly, goateed men inside each vehicle had the windows down and the doors open.

When a white van with two more whiskered men pulled up to the huddle, Sergeant Tommy Wright stepped out of his gold Ford Explorer. He took 1,200 cold pills from a lockbox, laid them on the tailgate of one of the pickups, and counted them. Then he handed the pills to the men in the white van, former drug offenders turned confidential informants. In the biggest, blackest truck, Corporal Eric Burgard shoved Metallica into his CD player. To the crunching chords of "Enter Sandman," the members of the Jefferson County Drug Task Force put on their Kevlar vests and got ready to roll.

Then Wright took a cellphone call. It was one of the informants. Collins was home. The pack raced back to Castle Ranch and got there just as the informants, having made their trade, were driving away. "Two guys in a white van!" barked Wright. "Get a car to stop them!" While some of Wright's men launched an imaginary pursuit of the supposed runaways, one officer held Collins down in the dirt and cuffed him.

The suspect's elderly parents watched from the porch. A black mutt ambled over, and a teenager with a hearing aid yanked it back toward the house. Two members of Wright's task force started pulling pieces of a meth lab from a derelict vehicle in the driveway‹punctured cans of starter fluid, crusty plastic funnels. "You're looking at 17 years," Wright told Collins. "You need to help yourself." Wright wanted Collins to agree to become an informant. "I know," Collins said. "I'm thinking."

IN THE MID-1990S, METHAMPHETAMINE MORPHED from the pastime of biker gangs into a major West Coast industry. Mexican rings took over the trade, building so-called superlabs in California. Using tubs of ephedrine smuggled north from Mexico, and vats of legal chemicals like red phosphorus, these factories could churn out 10 pounds of methamphetamine‹also known as meth, crank, crystal, or speed‹every two days. In 1999, 2,100 labs were busted in California, a third of the national total for busts.

But by then, much of the cooking had already moved east. Methamphetamine brought to the Midwest by drug mules had created a new market for the drug, and a different style of production. In Missouri especially, local users began cooking their own. Instead of a handful of factory labs, authorities suddenly had to track down thousands of tiny Mom-and-Pop operations, supplied by chemicals available in strip malls and convenience stores. As of 2002, Missouri and the eight states that touch its borders accounted for more than half the lab busts in the nation. In 2003, accounting for 15 percent of the nation's total, Missouri alone had 2,860 labs‹compared to fewer than half that number in California. The state had become the front line in the newest theater of the drug war. The problem was at its worst in Jefferson and Franklin counties, two rural jurisdictions on the edge of St. Louis.

The first reaction to any criminal epidemic is a crackdown. Politicians stiffen penalties, and the police increase man-hours and arrests. Missouri followed the pattern. It was among the first Midwestern states to tackle meth with a raft of new laws and longer sentences. Its 1998 law making distribution of meth a Class A felony, with penalties ranging from 10 to 30 years, was the toughest in the nation. Tommy Wright's Jefferson County is a case study in aggressive, efficient enforcement. Lab busts have soared since last fall when Wright, a former narc, took over the county's 13-man drug task force. The young and gung-ho unit has increased undercover buys and deliveries like the one that stung Jeff Collins. Jefferson is on pace for more than 300 busts this year, double its total from last year, when it had already surged to first in the state which is first in busts in the nation.

But most days, necessity forces Grellner to concentrate on stopping meth crimes before they happen. There are fewer cops, less money, and many more square miles to cover in Franklin, so Grellner has had to approach meth from a different angle. In the long run his way may be cheaper, and more effective than taking down labs. Grellner wants to stop the local cooks before they get to the kitchen. His dream is to shut off the supply of pseudoephedrine on which they rely‹if only the drug industry, one of the most powerful in America, would let him.

FRANKLIN AND JEFFERSON COUNTIES TRACE THEIR METH PROBLEMS to white refugees from Southern California, truckers as well as bikers, who moved to Eastern Missouri in the mid-'90s and brought their taste for speed with them. In his office in Union, Mo., an hour west of downtown St. Louis, Grellner, whom everyone calls Jake, pinpointed when and how the problem became local. "We know who our patient zero is," he said. In 1997, a California cook named John Bushdiecker set up a local shop. Before he was sent to state prison, he shared his recipe with friends in both Jefferson and Franklin counties. Said Grellner, "We estimate that every cook teaches seven other people how to cook."

At first, the Missouri meth trade operated in a style that would be familiar to veterans of the crack wars on the coasts in the '80s and early '90s. Crack was a highly profitable business. In Franklin, a man named Larry Lashley sat atop a pyramid, controlling the manufacture of meth and the cash from it. Twenty-three people worked for him. "With crack," said Grellner, "somebody's making money. That was true at first here too."

Within two years, however, the pyramid crumbled and became what Grellner calls an "amoeba." The cops rarely found more than two ounces of finished product at any one lab. So many locals had learned to make meth, and so many had become addicts, that the area was suddenly awash in small-time cooks. They still sold dope, but their first priority was feeding their own habits with their homemade, pseudoephedrine-based dope‹purer than the Mexican brand and soon more reliably available.

The outbreak of Beavis and Butt-Head labs, as they're often called, has proved a disaster for Missouri's rural counties. To the costs of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration, authorities must add the costs of treatment, foster care, and environmental protection. Whether they snort, smoke, or inject their drugs, meth addicts degenerate into jittery miniatures of themselves‹skinny, toothless, paranoid, and extremely resistant to rehab. They can burn out up to half of the dopamine-producing cells in their brains, making it hard for them to feel pleasure without getting high. Those who cook often do so in the presence of children, and cooking produces toxins that burn the skin, scar the lungs, and even kill. In the name of public safety, the county has to take the kids and then mop up the mess. The cleaning bill for a single penny-ante lab starts at $3,500.

Beyond scalps, Wright believes notching a lab a day brings tangible results. He has taken down some players he considers major, and other repeat offenders have relocated. Wright encourages cooks to flee. After he busts them, he gets county agencies to cite them for code violations‹sanitation, housing, anything. "We call anybody we can to make their lives miserable," he said. "Either they'll comply with the laws or they'll have to move."

Because of prison overcrowding, Missouri built five new prisons in the late '90s‹and then neglected to fund their operation. By the time the prisons were fully staffed in 2004, the system was already at capacity. Missouri was forced to adopt a "one-in/one-out" prison policy. For every felon who goes in another must come out, and nonviolent offenders, including meth cooks, come out first. In another effort to free up bunks, the state legislature also began rolling back the stiff penalties that it had mandated in the late '90s. Over the objections of the state's attorney general, last year the legislature lessened penalties for nonviolent felonies, including meth possession. Judges were given leeway to offer probation even to repeat drug offenders.

Throughout the heartland, the strain on budgets has forced states to adopt a version of Tommy Wright's strategy‹trying to make meth somebody else's problem by pushing it out of their counties, and by shifting the burden of paying for their battle to the rest of the country's taxpayers. In Missouri and the rest of the Midwestern meth belt, the drug warriors are on the federal dole. Next door to Missouri, a Kansas auditor estimated that 40 percent of his state's anti-meth efforts were funded by the federal government. No one has done the math in Missouri, but officials say that the fed's share may be even higher. "I know we couldn't run our programs without it," confirmed Captain Ron Replogle of the State Highway Patrol, who administers some of the federal money. Jake Grellner is less diplomatic. "Without the feds," he said, "we'd be hosed."

In Missouri, $100 million in federal funds pays for everything from enforcement to prosecution. If you scratch a state program, you'll probably find federal money underneath. An EPA grant helps defray the expense of lab cleanup. Federal cash pays for $51 million in substance abuse treatment. It underwrites an anti-meth police training program in the state capital. It pays the salaries of two extra chemists in the state crime lab, and of special county prosecutors who do nothing but meth cases. In Jefferson County, Wright pays for two taskforce cops and a meth prosecutor with federal dollars. At its July meeting, his task force was trying to figure out how to spend $169,000 from a special one-time federal grant. (The county's most pressing need, the group decided, was a safe building in which to store the mountain of poisonous, flammable evidence seized in daily lab
busts.)

Critics charge that fighting the federal drug war is like smashing ants with a sledgehammer. Prosecutors "devote most of their time to low-level, easily captured drug offenders," said Eric Sterling, who, as counsel to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, helped write the mandatory-minimum sentences of the '80s‹and now lobbies against them as president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. In Missouri, half of the meth defendants prosecuted in federal court are Mexican couriers caught with two- and five-pound packages of meth. The rest of the defendants are white guys who cook with cold pills. The biker that Jake Grellner busted with DEA help will be doing 25 years for getting caught with more than 10,000 cold pills and a lab that held three ounces of meth, enough to keep only a half dozen tweakers high for a week. Yet Grellner said the biker is among his top five all-time busts.

Perhaps it's a crude form of racial justice that a new drug epidemic has begun to restore the prisons' demographic balance. And a bill introduced last May by Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, would accelerate this trend. At present meth cooks do more time than heroin, powder cocaine, and pot dealers, but they still don't do as much time as crack dealers. Schumer wants federal penalties for meth to be the same as those for crack. His proposal would increase the average meth sentence by 30 percent, from 88.5 months to 115. That would further whiten the federal inmate population.

THE ADRENALINE RUSH AND CAMARADERIE OF A DRUG COP'S JOB promote a sort of frat-boy machismo, and narcs sometimes walk, talk, and dress a little like the coke dealers and bikers they chase. Jake Grellner is a different kind of narc. He has no goatee, no tattoos, and more sarcasm than bluster. He was a full-scholarship chemical engineering student at the University of Missouri before he felt the pull of law enforcement. He can draw a meth molecule on a chalkboard, he can describe its effect on the brain, and in crime-fighting he prefers to think long-term.

Grellner has become Missouri's leading proponent of taking away access to the drug's raw ingredients‹especially the one that's common to all the popular Missouri recipes, pseudoephedrine. A cheap and effective decongestant, pseudoephedrine is also a close cousin of speed, easily converted to meth with the help of a few household chemicals. In 2002, Grellner launched a program called Operation Chem. He teaches retailers what tweakers are likely to buy or steal, from cold pills to iodine, and asks them to call in the license plate number of any suspicious shopper. Once the manager and the clerks have been trained, he puts a poster in the store window that reads "Operation Chem" as a warning to cooks.

But what Grellner would really like to do is reclassify pseudoephedrine as a narcotic. Designating the drug as "schedule five," a term used by both the federal government and most state drug control boards, would mean that only licensed pharmacists could sell it. Customers wouldn't need a prescription, but they would have to show photo identification and sign a register. A few Missouri retailers already do something similar on their own. Shelly, a Dollar General store manager in Franklin who did not give her last name, asks for ID and a signature whenever she feels suspicious, figuring that a legitimate shopper won't mind. "Some of them cuss at me," she said of the not-so-legitimate ones. "But they don't come around here anymore."

In theory, reclassifying pseudoephedrine as a schedule five drug would lift the plague of Beavis and Butt-Head. The labs would shut down. The shoulder of I-44, the interstate that runs from St. Louis to Oklahoma, wouldn't be littered with empty Sudafed blister packs. The woods of Franklin and Jefferson counties wouldn't be filled with toxic trash. The foster care system could catch its breath. The drain on money and manpower would end.

Sherry Green, executive director of the National Alliance for Model State Drug Laws, recently interviewed cops and prosecutors in the Midwest for a survey about state meth laws, and she didn't interview "one person who deals with this problem on a daily basis," not one cop or prosecutor who doesn't want to try reclassifying pseudoephedrine. Law enforcers want schedule five badly even though they know it won't shut down the other source of meth, the West Coast superlabs. "Let the Mexicans have the meth trade," snapped Sam Bertolet, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri. "We'll have done a great thing if we take pseudoephedrine out of the game."

So far, Oklahoma is the only state that has passed a bill requiring pharmacy shoppers to show photo ID and sign a registry when they buy cold pills. The law went into effect in stages starting last April. By mid-July, with the law fully in effect for one month, the state was already claiming a 25-percent decrease in lab busts for the year to date, and a 70-percent drop since the new law's enactment.

Oklahoma's Bill 2176 passed because of the death of a state trooper. The morning after Christmas 2003, a meth cook who was out on bond allegedly shot and killed trooper Nikky J. Green. The murder was caught on video. Green was the third Oklahoma cop killed in a meth-related incident in the previous few years. His widow endorsed the schedule five law and attended legislative hearings to show her support for it. Before then, retailers and drug makers had mounted a full-court press against the bill. Pfizer, the world's largest drug company and the maker of Sudafed, has 27 "governmental relations managers" in state capitals and more than 80 lobbyists in Washington, D.C. The leader of the attack on Bill 2176, however, was Nancy Bukar, director of government relations at the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a lobbying group for companies that make over-the-counter drugs. She started working the Oklahoma Legislature as soon as Governor Brad Henry endorsed the bill.

JAKE GRELLNER HAS FACED OFF AGAINST BUKAR AND HER ALLIES in Missouri each year since 2001, and each time has come away with nothing but box limits. He understands the drug companies' opposition as a matter of self-interested economics. "It has to be greed," he said. He based his argument on DEA statistics that show consumption of raw pseudoephedrine by U.S. drug firms climbing 178 percent between 1990 and 2003. The amount sold rose from 9 to 14 tons between 1998 and 1999 alone. Grellner assumes the retail sales of cold pills made with pseudoephedrine have shown similar growth. "Do you remember the great cold outbreak of 1999?" he asked sarcastically. "Neither do I. But we do remember the great meth lab outbreak."

CHPA is fighting a schedule five designation for pseudoephedrine, Bukar said, for the convenience of cold remedy customers. "What we don't want to do is criminalize legitimate behavior," she argued. Instead, CHPA prefers retailer education and sponsors a program not unlike Operation Chem, called Meth Watch. She points out that in many rural counties, where pharmacies are scarce, residents buy their cold remedies at convenience stores, which aren't allowed to sell pseudoephedrine under Oklahoma's law. "Let's say someone has a cold and drives all the way to a drugstore and then realizes she's forgotten her ID," Bukar said. "Should she have to drive home and get it?"

But in Iowa, state drug czar Marvin Van Haaften commissioned a poll that showed 94 percent of Iowans supported reclassifying pseudoephedrine. They would not feel inconvenienced by showing ID, they said. As a former sheriff, Van Haaften supported a schedule five bill because of his memory of an early 1970s cough syrup epidemic in which codeine addicts shoplifted syrup, leaving empty boxes in store bathrooms and parking lots. "I remember very, very well that when they made codeine schedule five, the problem ended instantly," Van Haaften said. "In my last 15 years as sheriff, I don't think I arrested one person addicted to cough syrup."

Van Haaften convinced Iowa governor Tom Vilsack to back his effort. But by the time a bill was proposed last winter there was nothing about reclassifying pseudoephedrine in it. CHPA-sponsored ads on local talk radio touted the benefits of pseudoephedrine for colds and allergies, without mentioning any brand names. The version of the bill that passed in July was so watered down that its only sales restriction was a box limit on a small class of products in which pseudoephedrine was the only active ingredient‹in other words, 2 percent of all 800 or so pseudoephedrine-based brands. Tweakers could buy only three boxes of Sudafed, but they could still buy Actifed in bulk because Actifed has multiple ingredients.

Until other states follow suit, however, Oklahoma's innovation is just another way to make homegrown meth labs somebody else's problem. Woodward said that while lab totals are down statewide, they're up slightly in those counties that border other states. "They're driving into Fort Smith, Arkansas, to do their shopping" (15 minutes from the Oklahoma state line), and then coming home to cook, he said. Iowa's Van Haaften said that Arkansas officials have told him that pseudoephedrine sales in the state's western counties have "skyrocketed" since Oklahoma changed its laws. "It's really important that all the states be on the same page," said Julie Rosen, the Minnesota legislator.

It's possible that he'll be proven right. Until recently, the Bush Administration's position on schedule five was equivocal. Drug czar John Walters said that pseudoephedrine offered "an enormous, legitimate benefit" and made it clear that the White House had no plans to push for federal reclassification of the drug. Then in August, Walters's deputy, Scott Burns, announced a change in policy, without calling it that, at an appearance in Oklahoma. "President Bush sent me here . . . to find out what they are doing in Oklahoma that has made such a dramatic difference," Burns said, and he went on to express the White House's newfound interest in a federal schedule five. (John Kerry has taken no position on the issue.) Burns spent the next week taking commercial flights around the Midwest to give the same speech. In Iowa, he pledged to help Marvin Van Haaften pass his statewide measure.

Posted by lois at 12:21 PM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2004

Detroit offers therapy not jail

In an effort to reduce overcrowding, the Macomb County Jail is
involved in a one-year pilot program called Macomb's Mental Health
Jail Reduction Program, which helps nonviolent inmates get help
outside the jail to make room for violent inmates.

http://www.detnews.com/2004/metro/0410/28/d01-318330.htm

Jails redirect inmates

Programs get nonviolent into therapy, free up space

By Tony Manolatos / The Detroit News

Counties get creative

Faced with a lack of jail beds and shrinking budgets, law enforcement
officials in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb are stepping outside the box
to build jail diversion programs. Those include:

Wayne: Sentences some prostitutes addicted to drugs to residential
centers where they're treated for their addictions.

Oakland: Uses drug and alcohol screens and strict court supervision
to keep people busted for retail fraud and other nonviolent crimes
out of jail.

Macomb: Operating a one-year pilot program to move inmates suffering
from mental illnesses to residential treatment centers and outpatient
programs.

Source: Detroit News research

MOUNT CLEMENS - For years, frustrations mounted for mental health
case workers at the Macomb County Jail as they watched people who
didn't belong there land in already overcrowded cellblocks.

Now, thanks to a $291,000 grant from the state, case workers are
able to move inmates suffering from mental illness out of jail cells
and into residential treatment centers and outpatient programs.

Macomb's Mental Health Jail Reduction Program, a one-year pilot
project that's saving the county money and freeing up jail space,
is one of a handful of new jail diversion programs rolled out in
the tri-county area within the past year.

Faced with a lack of jail space and shrinking budgets, law
enforcement officials in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb are creating
programs that take nonviolent offenders out of their cells and into
programs.

The goal, which some say risks public safety, is to free up jail
space for violent offenders and provide treatment for criminals
suffering from drug and alcohol addictions and mental illnesses.

Since receiving the grant money eight weeks ago from the Michigan
Department of Corrections, Macomb's jail has moved 10 mentally ill
inmates from jail to treatment programs. A reduction of 10 inmates
would save $56,000 over three months.

Over the next 10 months, 90 additional inmates are expected to be
placed in similar programs."We need to figure out how to be smart on
crime," said Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel. "It's no longer good
enough to just be tough on crime. We can't just warehouse people in
jails. There's not enough room."

All three counties use work-release programs, electronic monitoring
and drug courts in lieu of jail time, but jails are still at or near
capacity.

Judges in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb have recently been forced to
release inmates early to alleviate overcrowding, freeing people
doing time for drunken driving, drug offenses and other nonviolent
crimes.

Wayne releases about a dozen nonviolent inmates a day, before their
sentences are fully served. In Oakland, 40 inmates were released in
July before their sentences were served. Twice within the last year,
Macomb was forced to release dozens of inmates.

Residents are caught in the middle of the dispute. Some don't want
to pay more taxes to build bigger jails and others are uncomfortable
with the jails releasing inmates early.

"If you start releasing people, you start losing control," said Jim
Rogers, 35, a county road commission employee from Macomb Township.
"Nobody wants to see taxes raised, but you don't want to lose
control, either. They should at least consider building a larger jail."

In Wayne, prostitutes with drug addictions who are busted more than
once now are sentenced to residential centers where they're treated
for their addictions. They're also learning vocational and
educational skills. In the past, they sat in jail cells for 90 days
or more.

"Continuing to put these girls through the criminal justice system
just wasn't working," said Wayne County Undersheriff Lawrence Meyer,
noting that Sheriff Warren Evans started the Fresh Start Program
about a year ago with the help of several local agencies.

The program, funded with grant money, doesn't cost the county a
dime. Without the grants, the program probably would be scrapped,
Meyer said. The sheriff's office in Wayne is facing a $6 million to
$7 million budget shortfall this year.

"Unless we win the lottery, the county general fund isn't going to
bear the burden of new programs," Meyer said. "We need more creative
ideas and more aggressive grant requests."

About a year ago, Oakland County started offering drunken drivers
with three or more convictions intensive treatment options on top of
90-day jail sentences. The new concept replaces jail sentences that
lasted up to 11 months with little to no treatment.

"What we've noticed with multiple drunk driving convictions is
incarceration alone is not enough. They need the treatment," said
Deborah Carley, chief deputy prosecutor in Oakland County.

Oakland officials also use drug and alcohol screens and strict court
supervision to keep people busted for retail fraud and other
nonviolent crimes out of jail.

A Teen Court, run by youths and supervised by judges, keeps juveniles
out of trouble - only 5 percent land back in court for other offenses
- which means they're less likely to end up in jail in the future,
Carley said.

"We're always looking for something else because we never have an
abundance of jail beds," Carley said. "The treatment programs are
time- and labor-intensive, but they generally keep people out of jail."

In Macomb, jail officials have worked for months at lowering the
inmate population. When they sent their grant request to the state
for the mentally ill reduction program, they didn't expect the state
would return a check for nearly $300,000.

"We asked for about half of that, so we were real pleased," said jail
administrator Michelle Sanborn.

The program's mission "is to keep them out of jail and to get them to
a point within six months where they are self-sufficient," said Linda
Verville, who oversees the program as assistant director of Macomb
County Community Corrections. "Getting them hooked up with jobs and
housing is the hardest part."

About 195 of Macomb's 1,400 inmates receive psychiatric medications,
Verville said. Only about 25 percent of those have a job, and 54
percent have no family support.

At the state level, a task force Gov. Jennifer Granholm formed three
months ago to study jail and prison overcrowding is expected to make
its recommendations to the governor by January.

"We're getting our hands around this grease pig, finally," said
Terrence Jungel, a member of the task force and the executive
director of the Michigan Sheriffs' Association. "There is no silver
bullet to the problem we're facing ... We need to decide who the
worst of the worst are and how we're going to use our finite
resources."

Locally, part of the solution rests with the jails, Hackel said.
County jails in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb have fewer beds than the
state average of 1.84 beds per 1,000 residents.

During the first quarter of next year, Hackel expects to present a
$50 million to $60 million jail expansion plan to the Macomb County
Board of Commissioners for approval.

"I'm hoping we can get federal funding for part of it ... but taxes
being raised, I don't see that happening," Hackel said, noting that
diversion programs are useful to a point. "The question is how many
more diversion programs will judges consider without risking public
safety?"

You can reach Tony Manolatos at (313) 222-2069 or tmanolatos@detnews.com.

Posted by craig at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2004

200,000 civil rights applicants rejected by Jeb Bush since he took office

"Florida's Clemency Board has rejected more than 200,000 civil rights applications since Gov. Jeb Bush took office in 1999, the highest rejection rate in at least 16 years, a Herald investigation has found."

Miami Herald, Oct. 31, 2004

CLEMENCY BOARD
200,000 rights applications rejected since '99
Gov. Jeb Bush says he has restored the rights of 48,000 felons since he took office. But more people than ever are asking for clemency.

BY JASON GROTTO AND DEBBIE CENZIPER
jgrotto@herald.com

Florida's Clemency Board has rejected more than 200,000 civil rights applications since Gov. Jeb Bush took office in 1999, the highest rejection rate in at least 16 years, a Herald investigation has found.

Bush, head of the board, said he has made improvements since the state fought and lost a 2001 lawsuit that exposed widespread errors in the clemency process.

''I believe in personal redemption, that people can learn from their mistakes, and that people who take those lessons to heart and apply them to their lives deserve a second chance,'' Bush recently wrote to The Herald.

He says more felons than ever are regaining their rights, 48,000 in the last six years.

But more felons than ever are applying as well. The Clemency Board under Bush has received twice as many applications as it did under Republican Gov. Bob Martinez or Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles.

Before the 2000 presidential election, Florida's system for restoring civil rights to felons attracted little attention. Each year, tens of thousands of felons petitioned the Clemency Board in obscurity.

Then Florida decided the contentious 2000 election by only 537 votes. And Jeb Bush, the brother of a presidential candidate, had more say than anyone on whether tens of thousands of people could vote in a deeply divided swing state.

Suddenly, the state's clemency system was thrust into the national spotlight.

''We have a different issue in the mix now that was never really there before, the issue of voting,'' said former Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat who spent 16 years on the board.

Butterworth admits that he was, at times, one of the toughest members of the board, especially when crime rates were high in Florida. He said he didn't want to be attacked for being soft on crime.

In 2000, he was on the board when it put into place some of the most restrictive rules ever. At the time, there were two Democrats on the board and five Republicans, including former Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

That same year, the year of the presidential election, the board restored voting rights to barely 1,000 people, the fewest in at least 25 years.

The board also objected to more than 1,200 applicants who were fully qualified under its own rules that year. In fact, it rejected more qualified civil rights applicants in 2000 than it approved.

The board receives lists of all eligible felons and their crimes. If the governor or two or more other members object, the application is denied. By law, no explanation is required.

There were so many objections that board member Tom Gallagher chided his colleagues.

''If you're going to basically [object] to the entire list, then . . . you ought to at least have a reason,'' said Gallagher, Florida's chief financial officer.

Although the voting records of elected officials are public, clemency objections are secret and protected by Florida statutes. The board need not say why applicants are rejected.

Critics say the secrecy of the process, coupled with Florida's highly charged partisan atmosphere, raises concerns about whether decisions are influenced by politics. Since 2000, Florida gained two electoral votes and now controls one-tenth of the number needed to elect a president.

''Provisional ballots, manual recounts, even the hypertechnical interpretation of voter registrations laws -- I'm not sure politics influences the bulk of those issues,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. ``But I do think there are people whose rights are being held hostage by considerations that are infected or polluted by darker, partisan motives.''

Bush vigorously denies those claims. In an e-mail to The Herald, he said the suggestion that the clemency process is partisan is ''not only inaccurate, it's offensive'' and ``presupposes the majority of Florida felons are of a specific . . . party affiliation.''

© 2004 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

Posted by lois at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

Attica to Abu Ghraib: Conference in Oakland, Feb 25-26, 2005

"Faced with the globalization of repression, how can we globalize our resistance?" Conference now in the planning stages.

Attica to Abu Ghraib: Human Rights, Torture, and Resistance’ Conference Convenors: International Human Rights Initiative (IHRI)

Friday, February 25th ’ Saturday, February 26th, 2005
Oakland, CA - Laney Community College

Contact Info:
Email: info@attica2abughraib Kali Akuno
Website: www.attica2abughraib.com (under construction) (510) 593-3956
Phone Number: (510) 433-0115 kaliaw@sbcglobal.net

Conference Brief

Torture, illegal detention and other human rights abuses have always been weapons used by the US government to crush resistance. Today we see a terrifying escalation in that repression, whether against Iraqis and Afghans half a world away or immigrants, prisoners and political activists here at home. Our strength lies in building on the experiences of those who resist-here in the US, in Latin America, Palestine, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and in countless communities throughout the world.

Faced with the globalization of repression, how can we globalize our resistance? Help plan a conference to:

Declare an International Day of Solidarity to draw attention to, support, protect and demand freedom for all Political Prisoners;

Urge, propose and support litigation and/or other forms of redress in domestic and international forum against the U.S. government and its agents for committing systematic violations of human rights, domestic law and international law;

Develop and implement coordinated access to and use of institutions of civil society, i.e. schools, media, grassroots organizations, to condemn violations of human rights and international law by the U.S. government and its agents.

We want to involve as many organizations and voices as possible in the planning process.

For more information, contact us at
www.attica2abughraib.com or

Goals and Objectives

The overall aim of the Attica to Abu Ghraib International Conference is to develop strategies for and coordinate resistance to U.S. government policies that violate human rights and international law. A structure will be established to create a network to coordinate solidarity work among domestic and international groups to achieve the following objectives:

Initiate an international campaign to stop the systematic use of torture, illegal detentions, grand jury abuses, secret probes, immigration raids, registrations and other violations of domestic and international by the U.S. or its agents;

Increase domestic and international support for Political Detainees, Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War who were detained before and after 9/11 within and out side the U.S. borders;

Pursue litigation and redress in domestic and international forums against the U.S. government and its agents for systematic human rights abuses and violations of domestic and international law.

Practically support this undertaking by compiling relevant evidentiary documentation of these violations and abuses.

General Strategy Points

1. We see the conference organizing process as a vehicle for building an international campaign to challenge the human rights record of the United States, and to ignite an international campaign to challenge these ongoing abuses.
2. We are eliciting international support and presence at the conference to build the international campaign. We are aiming specifically for representation from South Africa, Cuba, and Venezuela. Our aim is to have one or more of these nations represent our case to the UN and various international legislative and/or judicial bodies (like the International Court of Justice/ICJ). We are also aiming for representation from various international bodies of the UN, like the International Labor Organization (ILO), and from various international NGO’s that focus on defending human rights.

Focus Areas

To meet the goals of the campaign we have divided the conference program into three broad areas of focus and analysis. Each area is a key component of the workings of U.S. empire domestically and internationally, and provides a focus for linking movements within and outside the U.S. to more effectively resist imperial strategies of repression, criminalization, and assaults on the sovereignty of the worlds peoples and nations. Our aim is to formulate strategies and concrete plans from the analysis of these focus areas to unite domestic and international organizations in the pursuit of successful anti-imperialist campaigns.

Methods of Repression:
a. The systematic use of racial profiling, mass incarceration, domestic militarization, torture and sensory deprivation to criminalize oppressed peoples and peoples’Äô struggles, and as instruments of repression.
b. The training and promotion of torture and terrorism, including the production of instructional courses and manuals in how to use torture as part of counterinsurgency operations, provided by the US to its allies and proxies (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Salvadorean Army).
c. The systematic use of grand juries, secret detentions, secret evidence and deportations to repress dissent and to avoid civil and international law.
d. The international promotion of legislation and policies modeled on COINTELPRO and the Patriot Act.

Criminalization and Detention:
a. The privatization of war and security operations, specifically the increasing use of "contractors" to conduct wars and run prisons.
b. The systematic refusal by the US government to apply the Geneva Conventions to domestic and international political prisoners and prisoners of war.
c. The policy of criminalizing and/or falsely labeling resisters as "terrorists" and the equation of all forms of resistance with criminal activity or acts of terrorism.

Assaults on Sovereignty
a. The support and defense of dictatorial regimes (e.g. Israel, Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, Zaire) that have systematically violated the human rights of people within their borders and/or occupied territories.
b. Undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of nations, including the illegal overthrow of legitimate governments through coups and invasions (e.g. Chile, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Haiti) as well as the ongoing subjugation of oppressed people inside US borders.
c. Providing sanctuary convicted war criminals, human rights abusers, and terrorists, including exiled Cuban-American mercenaries and death squad leaders from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Chile, Angola, the Philippines and Haiti.

Partial List of Sponsors and Endorsers

Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Africa Initiative
Amnesty International - Western Region
Arabs Building Community
Black Radical Congress (BRC) ’ SF Bay Area
California Prison Focus
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA)
Challenging White Supremacy Workshops
Critical Resistance (CR)
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC)
GABRIELA Network
Global Exchange
Haiti Action Committee
Jericho Movement
Justice in Palestine Coalition
LAGAI Queer Insurrection
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC)
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM)
National Committee to Free the Cuban Five
National Lawyers Guild (NLG) San Francisco
Out of Control
Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC)
Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!)
San Francisco Women in Black
School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch)
SUSTAIN-Bay Area Chapter Stop U.S. Tax Aid to Israel Now
Trans Africa Forum

Posted by lois at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)

Death of Jessica Lee Roger at Bedford Hills

"For more than a third of Roger's 1,200 days at the prison in Westchester County, she was, as she said in a letter to her mother, ''locked up and locked in'' as punishment for her fits of rage and resistance. For 250 days, she was confined to her cell, unable to participate in programs or communal meals. She spent another 160 days in the ''special housing unit,'' what inmates call the box. The box is the most severe punishment in prison: the final threat, the ultimate time out."

October 31, 2004, NY Times
A Death in the Box
By MARY BETH PFEIFFER

By the time Jessica Lee Roger was discovered on the floor of her prison cell on Aug. 17, 2002, it was too late. In the 24 minutes since guards had last checked her, she had tied a bed sheet around her neck and, after many attempts over three years in prison, finally strangled herself. When word of Roger's suicide spread through the cellblocks of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility that sultry weekend, two correction officers cried. Fellow inmates were angry. The superintendent, who was away for a few days, was devastated. A mentally ill young woman had died, and she had died in the most stressful and isolating place in the New York state prison system. Jessica Roger, 21, killed herself in the ''box,'' and many thought she didn't belong there.

For more than a third of Roger's 1,200 days at the prison in Westchester County, she was, as she said in a letter to her mother, ''locked up and locked in'' as punishment for her fits of rage and resistance. For 250 days, she was confined to her cell, unable to participate in programs or communal meals. She spent another 160 days in the ''special housing unit,'' what inmates call the box. The box is the most severe punishment in prison: the final threat, the ultimate time out. It is a small barren chamber set apart from the general population with a concrete floor, a steel door and no clock to mark the time. The essential quality of the box is isolation -- a gloved hand passes food through a slot in the door; a caseworker's muffled voice filters through the holes in a small Plexiglas window. Inmates are allowed few personal possessions. Lights are never fully extinguished. It is four walls for 23 hours a day -- a psychologically punishing experience by design. For people like Jessica Roger, it can also be an incubator of psychosis.

Forty years ago, America's seriously mentally ill were housed in psychiatric hospitals that kept them too long and often without good cause. As those hospitals closed, a promise to provide care in communities went unfulfilled. At the same time, America's prison capacity grew; it has quadrupled since 1980. People with untreated mental illness are often poor and homeless. Many commit petty crimes, creating arrest records that often lead to harsh sentences. Today some 250,000 Americans with mental illness live in prisons, the nation's primary supplier of mental-health services.

Mentally ill inmates do not do well in the tense and rulebound world of prison. They create scenes, lash out unpredictably and cannot or will not obey orders. Special housing units are intended for the most violent inmates, but they also tend to collect those who are troublesome and mentally ill. More than 800 of the 4,300 inmates in New York's special housing units suffer from mental illnesses like schizophrenia, major depression or personality or trauma disorders. They may talk to voices only they can hear. They may see conspiracies in simple routines. They may have little emotional control or be obsessed by inexplicable fears. For these people, prolonged confinement to a cubicle-size room is a grueling psychological test that many fail. About 6 percent of inmates in New York have been housed in the box since 1998. Yet 34 percent of suicides, 26 in all, have occurred there.

This isn't news to prison officials, who have been sued over special housing units in at least 10 states. In California, a federal judge said that placing the seriously mentally ill in such confinement was ''the mental equivalent of putting an asthmatic in a place with little air to breathe.'' Over the years, advocates in New York have challenged conditions in the box at four state prisons. Those lawsuits resulted in incremental but largely isolated changes -- increasing the mental-health staff at one prison, providing inmate counseling at another. But the underlying problem remains: when people with mental illness end up in prison, the need to treat them collides with the need to keep prison order, and everything about the system favors the latter.

Consider Attica, the infamous New York prison, where in 1998, after 18 years of fighting in court, officials settled a lawsuit on behalf of mentally ill inmates in its special housing unit. The prison promised to monitor inmates closely, provide better mental-health care and do a better job of training staff members. Nineteen months later, a court expert found that little had changed: the symptoms of ill and psychotic inmates were routinely written off as ''malingering.'' Men who broke down were hospitalized and inexplicably returned to the box afterward, only to break down again. Since the settlement, there have been seven suicides at Attica, among New York's highest. Frustration with this slow pace of change led advocates for mentally ill inmates to file a suit against the entire state prison system in 2002. The suit, for which witnesses are now being deposed, asserts that mentally ill inmates are punished for exhibiting symptoms of illness that the system has failed to treat. Relegated to the box, they become sicker from the ''near total lack of human contact.''

Roger had attempted suicide in the box at least four times before she succeeded. Once, she tied a sheet around her neck during a 100-day sentence, which was meted out after she refused orders and overturned furniture. She left a note with the outline of her hand spattered with blood: ''This is how I feel.'' She was sent to a prison psychiatric hospital for a month, where she was counseled, medicated and treated. Then, although she received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and other mental illnesses, Jessica was returned to complete her punishment in the small airless cell that had broken her. Within days, she again attempted suicide.

Jessica Roger was a large young woman with hazel eyes and a ponytail of dark blond hair. She was needy, bright and emotionally so much a child that in the visiting room she would cling to her mother, head on her shoulder, arms wrapped around her. Born and raised in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Roger had been in and out of mental hospitals 17 times since she was 11; she had gotten only as far as the fifth grade.

When she was 16 years and 4 days old, just past the threshold at which children become adults under New York criminal law, Roger was arrested for the relatively minor offense of biting her sister's arm in a fight. But while in custody, the explosive teenager kicked a jail guard who was trying to refasten the handcuffs that had slipped from her wrists. She was convicted of second-degree assault of a correction officer.

Dutchess County Court Judge George Marlow tried hard to avoid sentencing Roger to prison. He approved a plea deal to send her to an intensive program for emotionally troubled juveniles, one of few suited to her. But while she waited in the hospital for a bed to become available, she set fire to a mattress. The deal collapsed. ''When someone has a documented history of mental illness, as this defendant does,'' the judge said at her 1999 sentencing, ''there ought to be a place where there could be both isolation and treatment. That is the only humane response.'' Lacking that place, Marlow made what he called one of the most painful decisions in a 32-year career: sentencing Jessica Roger to 3 1/2 to 7 years in prison. It was her first foray into the criminal-justice system.

New York is one of more than 30 states that operate 23-hour confinement units and prisons, sometimes called ''supermax'' facilities. Many of these were built in the 1990's in a frenzy of construction; there are now more than 20,000 inmates nationwide in these units. The resurgence of isolated confinement is often dated to the 1984 lock-down at the federal penitentiary at Marion, Ill., after rising violence led to the murder of two guards. But it was also fed by America's incarceration binge: prisons crowded with gang members, the drug-addicted and the mentally ill presented a daunting management challenge. And in an era when the rehabilitative ideal had long been waning, punitive forces took another step forward. ''The supermax,'' said Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin in 1996, ''will be a criminal's worst nightmare.'' In New York and elsewhere, there was little public debate about the effect that the units would have on the people confined there.

Between 1998 and 2000, New York built special housing units for 3,000 inmates, almost doubling capacity in the belief that completely shutting off troublemakers would make prisons safer. Under the state's disciplinary system, rule-breaking inmates face escalating sanctions. Smoking or failing to carry an ID card, for example, could mean a loss of phone, recreation or commissary privileges. Harassing staff members or refusing an order could mean cell confinement, called ''keeplock.'' A sentence to the box was meant for the worst offenses, which is how Glenn S. Goord, commissioner of the New York State Department of Correctional Services, has defended the units. (Goord declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the pending litigation.) In a November 2000 report on prison safety, he described some of the offenses by those in the box: Anthony Burton punched and stabbed an officer with a pen; Carlos Rodriguez stabbed another inmate to death; Claudio Cuadrado cut an officer with a razor. ''The inmates confined in disciplinary housing,'' he said in a press release last fall, ''are 'the worst of the worst.'''

But attorneys, psychiatrists and legislators who have visited New York's special housing units describe the occupants in different terms. While some are violent criminals befitting the system's most extreme form of punishment, many others are mentally disturbed people consigned to the box for lesser offenses -- creating disturbances, using drugs or failing to follow orders. In fact, in 1986 assault counted for half of sentences to the box; in 2000 just 15 percent of special-housing-unit sentences were for assault.

Prison is an inherently dangerous place, and it is easy to understand why correction officers view the box as an irresistible tool for controlling violence. Donald E. Premo Jr. has served as a correction officer and supervisor in New York prisons for 19 years. When inmates refuse orders or start fights, whether they are mentally ill is irrelevant, he said: they are a security threat, and his job is to contain them. ''It's not so much the harm to them,'' Premo said of mentally ill inmates who are sent to the box. ''But what is the harm to the facility if they are not controlled?'' The statistics in New York do show a significant drop in staff and inmate assault, but staff attacks had been dropping before the units were built. A study of facilities in three other states found little evidence of improved safety. Still, Premo and other officers say they have no doubt that the special housing units have made prisons safer.

Among Roger's personal papers were dozens of yellow disciplinary citations, mementos from her time at Bedford Hills: she repeatedly refused to tuck in her shirt; she tossed toilet water; she smoked cigarettes in her cell and shouted obscenities at staff members; she bit an inmate. She was 280 pounds of attitude and illness who, in one profanity-laced outburst, told an officer: ''That's what I'm in here for, hitting one of you. . . . '' Roger's second sentence of 60 days in the box was for an ''unhygienic act'' -- spitting on an officer. She made it through 56 days before attempting suicide.

"There's not a room she's not in,'' says Joan Roger, 46. Jessica's mother is sitting at the green Formica-top table of her three-room apartment in a downcast neighborhood of Poughkeepsie, a Hudson River city about 80 miles north of Manhattan. The white walls of the apartment are crowded with photographs. There's Jessica at 11 months clutching a teddy bear, and at 4, beaming and bright-eyed in matching short sets with her older sister, Cora. There's Jessica at 13 with her mother and grandmother. And in her mother's bedroom, a picture of Jessica in her casket, wearing a lavender Tasmanian Devil T-shirt and jeans, framed by a heart-shaped wreath of faded silk flowers. There's a visible bruise on her forehead that adds to her mother's questions.

Wisps of hair fall from a tight knot and across Joan Roger's ruddy face. Her sweatshirt is stained and worn. She accepts blame, maybe too much, for what happened to her Jet, as she called her daughter. Driven by ''mood swings,'' Joan was verbally abusive to her daughters, she said -- ''fine one minute, the next minute I was off and running.'' Her ex-husband, Kevin Roger, 46, recalls Joan yelling awful things at the girls and once grabbing a knife from her hand that, she acknowledges, ''had his name on it.'' Joan left the girls with Kevin around the time Jessica turned 11. Jessica was shattered.

Kevin Roger's alcohol abuse is a refrain in Jessica's letters and records. But unlike Joan, Kevin, who is suing the state prison system, does not apologize. ''I drank,'' he says. ''I still drink. It's legal.''

''To me,'' Jessica Roger told a psychiatrist when she was 17, ''my life has been nothing but hell.'' She spent much of her adolescence in institutions for troubled and sick children. She broke more than a dozen windows during her fits and tantrums. She first attempted suicide by overdosing on pills when she was 13. She was a regular at the local psychiatric emergency room. She might have gone on this way except that there came a point at which her behavior -- a fight with her sister -- ceased to be regarded as the acting out of a troubled adolescent and instead became a crime. This time police insisted that charges be filed, and Roger's fate was sealed.

"Mommy these people are stressing me out again. They took my sheets, my blankets and my mattress out of my cell because I keep hiding under the bed and covering myself so they can't see me. . . . Mommy I really feel like hurting myself but I am afraid to tell these people because I don't want them to put me in a cold . . . cell with nothing but a thin mat and a gown. . . . Mommy the feeling of hurting myself is getting stronger. Why won't these feelings just stay out of my head forever? I can't deal with them anymore. My thoughts about hurting myself are racing now they are going faster than before.''

When Roger wrote to her mother in June 2001, she was serving 60 days in keeplock -- locked in her cell for all but an hour of exercise a day -- for setting fire to a book, yelling during the inmate count and other offenses. These forays into solitude were intended, a hearing officer told her, as ''an understood deterrence to future similar behavior.'' But like many ill inmates, Roger seemed inured to punishment. In a county jail, she was so uncontrollable that a stun device was used on her more than once. Another time, jail officers stripped her of her jumpsuit and bra, after she refused to do it herself, and put her in a suicide-proof gown. ''Do whatever you want to me,'' she impassively told a jail officer in 1998.

Inmates like Roger are at the heart of a societal debate -- played out mostly in courts, academic publications and the reports of reform organizations -- over whether seriously mentally ill people belong in isolated confinement. But it's a question that is debated in prisons too, with lines sometimes drawn in unexpected ways. The Department of Correctional Services runs New York's prisons, but clinical care of the mentally ill is left to the Office of Mental Health. Bedford Hills Superintendent Elaine Lord, who retired in March, was known as an advocate for mentally ill inmates for whom harsh punishment in the box could be destructive and lead to a spiral of misbehavior. Lord, who declined to be interviewed for this article, sometimes clashed with mental-health clinicians, who advocated punishment to curb what they saw as inmate ''malingering'' or ''manipulating'' -- feigning or using illness, usually to get out of disciplinary sanctions.

It is a classic tug of war in an overburdened system in which the corrections side is supposed to take the ''bad'' inmates and the mental-health side is supposed to take the ''mad'' -- and where both sides have limited resources, arguments ensue as to who belongs where. In a deposition taken for the lawsuit against the state, the superintendent summed up a school of thought with which she agreed. ''We need to stop arguing about whether people are mad or bad,'' testified Lord, who cried at the inquiry into Roger's death, ''and design some effective interventions.''

Roger's borderline personality disorder marked her as willful, manipulative and, incorrectly, all but untreatable. In her time at Bedford Hills, she was sentenced to 16 terms in disciplinary confinement, mostly in keeplock, on 46 separate charges. She had two sentences to the box totaling about five months. She was luckier than others in New York. Inmates who are mentally ill spend on average about three years in special housing units, according to a Correctional Association of New York survey. They get caught in a vortex of worsening illness and behavior that leads to ever more punishment.

he debate over the effects of isolation on even a normal human psyche is longstanding. In 1821, the New York Legislature directed its prison at Auburn to conduct an experiment: put 80 of its worst offenders into what a group promoting the idea described as ''complete solitary confinement, free from all employment, all amusement, all pleasant objects of external contemplation.'' The inmates soon became suicidal and psychotic. One leapt from a gallery when his door opened; another beat his head against the walls of his cell. The experiment was abandoned within two years. ''A degree of mental anguish and distress may be necessary to humble and reform the offender,'' the warden, Gershom Powers, wrote, ''but, carry it too far, and he will become either a savage in his temper and feelings, or he will sink in despair.''

Modern research on prisoners of war; immobilized spinal-injury patients; solo, long-flight pilots; Antarctic dwellers and prison inmates has shown the human mind vulnerable to unraveling during periods of isolation and sensory deprivation. In 1979, Stuart Grassian, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, was asked to assess 14 inmates who were housed in the small, windowless cells of a solitary confinement unit at a maximum-security prison in Walpole, Mass. One inmate could not recall the days before he slashed his wrists. Another described feelings of panic and fear of suffocation. Many heard voices, were hypersensitive to sounds or obsessed over thoughts of torture and revenge on guards. Since then, Grassian has evaluated scores of inmates in New York and other states, and has no doubts about what he calls the ''toxic'' effect of isolation.

Grassian's findings are part of a body of research that is consistent and ample but also, in the words of a recent article in The Prison Journal, ''weak methodologically.'' For one, his research was conducted in the context of a lawsuit -- often the only way to get access to the cloistered world of prisons. And it is based on observing and interviewing inmates rather than tracking them over time or comparing them with control groups. A research team in Canada tried to settle the debate in the late 1990's by comparing the mental health of 23 inmates segregated for 60 days with those who were kept with the general population. It found no harm to the isolated inmates, who were less mentally healthy than the control group. However, the study's subjects -- many of them volunteers -- had access to personal possessions, televisions and computers. In an article in the Canadian Journal of Criminology, the researchers cautioned that their findings are ''somewhat irrelevant'' to conditions in the United States, ''where prisoners can sometimes be segregated for years for disciplinary infractions with virtually no distractions, human contacts, services or programs.''

Researchers and advocates generally do not object to short periods of confinement for ill and unruly inmates; they recognize that truly violent prisoners must be contained. But since the 1980's, the number of New York inmates serving special-housing-unit sentences of longer than six months has increased at six times the rate of the population. Inmates can, and do, spend years in the box. In 2002, New York had among the nation's highest proportion of inmates -- nearly 8 percent -- in isolated confinement, which includes the box and keeplock. ''The scale of punishment in New York State is particularly onerous,'' said Hans Toch, a prison researcher who is a professor of criminal justice at the State University at Albany. ''They think nothing of putting someone into a segregation setting for a year and a half for what is a serious but not horrendous offense.''

Carlos Diaz, 46, had been in a special housing unit in New York for five years when he hanged himself with a shoelace in 2000. He had accumulated so many infractions that he had 10 years left in the box. Such deaths are investigated by an oversight board called the New York State Commission of Correction, which found that Diaz had been virtually abandoned. Although he was at one point ''extremely delusional,'' no one was monitoring his condition or providing mental-health care. ''It is a well-established fact,'' the commission noted pointedly, ''that inmates serving long-term sentences in S.H.U.'s are likely to decompensate due to extended periods of isolation and sensory deprivation.''

In 2001, the commission investigated two deaths six months apart that painfully illustrate lapses in mental-health care that lead ill inmates to act out and be disciplined. In each case, severely mentally ill inmates at separate prisons died from ''decreased intake of food and water'' -- they starved, in other words -- one after announcing a hunger strike and the other while on a suicide watch. The Commission of Correction was searing in its criticism: ''In both cases, the inmates had been identified as having significant mental-health and/or medical problems and were not afforded the care and treatment that these services are required to provide.'' Significantly, the commission's findings are nonbinding; they are often rejected or ignored.

Cases like these are symptoms of a system under strain. The number of mentally ill inmates grew by 78 percent since 1991, while mental-health staffing has grown by 57 percent. Complicating matters, jobs often go unfilled. Pedro Molina appealed for help in 2001 at a prison with chronic recruiting problems. His note in Spanish was found weeks later on a stack of 40 requests; no one had translated or triaged the request, and Molina, 27, hanged himself in the box.

When another inmate, Ralph Tortorici, 31, killed himself in 1999, Goord himself expressed frustration, appealing to the Office of Mental Health for more psychiatric hospital beds. ''I am seriously concerned about the potential for unfortunate occurrences similar to the premature demise of Mr. Tortorici,'' Goord wrote. Tortorici suffered from schizophrenia and believed the government had implanted computer chips in his body; he was so ill that he had been hospitalized four times for periods of up to a year. The prison system's lone 189-bed hospital has not been expanded since opening in 1980. Since then, New York has built 38 prisons.

Each morning at Bedford Hills, Jessica Roger would visit Andy DeMers, a correction officer she had made friends with. She would put her head, puppy-dog-like, on the high counter he manned. It was a ritual they shared: He would ''tune'' her nose, making a noise as he tweaked it. One day, she called to him as she was led to a van bound for the prison psychiatric hospital. ''Who's going to tune my nose?'' she asked. DeMers recalled that ''there was a sweetness inside her,'' a quality he said few officers saw. Officers aren't trained to connect with inmates but rather to control them, many experts told me, leading to many confrontations and failures of opportunity. ''She was reachable,'' said DeMers, who has since retired.

Betty Guzzardi, a petite woman in her 50's, lived on Roger's cellblock in the months before her suicide. She was one of a handful of mother hens who would try to lift Roger's spirits. ''We used to tell her, 'You're a young girl; you'll be getting out,''' said Guzzardi, who has a daughter Roger's age. The women would play cards and Yahtzee with her, and Roger would laugh and enjoy the company. Guzzardi once watched Roger pull an electrical outlet cover off a wall and gouge her wrists with the broken pieces; she had often seen her cry. When told that Roger had been put into the box two days before her suicide -- in an incident that apparently began with Jessica smoking and ended with her throwing a chair -- Guzzardi was incredulous. ''Are you crazy?'' she told an officer. ''She's too depressed.

''The whole facility was like 'How could they do this knowing how she was?' It was very upsetting to us that a young girl like that took her life, and more than that, the facility helped her take her life.''

State prisons bear the brunt of what is often called the ''criminalization'' of mental illness. In New York, the tally of mentally ill inmates has swelled to 7,500, or 11 percent of the population. Unprepared for the task, the system has tried to respond, if inadequately. Units have been built for mentally ill prisoners who cannot live with the general population. Therapy programs have even been started at a few special housing units. In the face of the systemwide lawsuit, the state is proposing to expand these services, along with measures to reduce time in the box for good behavior and for offenses that stem from mental illness. But advocates say that more in-patient hospital beds and dedicated units are needed for mentally ill inmates, along with training to help correction officers recognize the manifestations of illness. Just as important, better oversight is needed of a system with little accountability.

Thanks to a previous lawsuit against Bedford and the 1987 settlement that was reached, the prison has among the highest levels of mental-health staff in the state and the mental-health care that Roger received was most likely far superior to that in the rest of the system. Women in the special housing unit are monitored regularly and given monthly therapy. But while the lawsuit improved care, it did not achieve what Jessica Roger needed most. It did not keep her out of the box. Facilities in at least four states preclude the seriously ill from 23-hour confinement; a proposal to do that in New York has languished in the State Legislature. Had it been law, Roger might still be alive.

In her final tortured hours, Jessica Roger was moved from the box to a suicide observation cell and back again. She exhibited ''self-injurious behaviors'' on the way back to special housing, the Commission of Correction's report states, questioning why she wasn't returned to observation. But mental-health staff members had considered a prior gesture to be ''manipulative,'' the report asserts; Roger, they thought, was trying to get out of the box. ''The ultimate tragedy,'' writes Terry Kupers, a prison expert and psychiatrist, in an article in The Correctional Mental Health Report, ''is when overconcern about malingering leads mental-health staff to miss what would otherwise be clear signs of an impending suicide.''

On Aug. 20, 2002, Roger's counselor closed out her file, recalling recent encounters with Jessica. ''This writer would ask inmate if she had decided if she wanted to get a new ticket yet (misbehavior report) and inmate would laugh and say she wasn't going to get locked.'' Before long, however, the inevitable happened.

''Inmate acted out after hours and was sent to S.H.U.,'' the counselor wrote. ''Writer was informed of her death yesterday morning on 8/19/02. She will be missed.''

Mary Beth Pfeiffer, who is on leave as the projects editor at The Poughkeepsie Journal, is a 2004 Soros Justice Media Fellow.

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