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March 29, 2005

CA: Nearly Half of Blacks, Latinos Drop Out, School Study Shows

By Duke Helfand
LA Times Staff Writer, March 24, 2005

Nearly half of the Latino and African American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education, according to a Harvard University report released Wednesday.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the situation was even worse, with just 39% of Latinos and 47% of African Americans graduating, compared with 67% of whites and 77% of Asians.

The report concluded that the public remains largely unaware of the true extent of the problem because the state uses "misleading and inaccurate" methods to report dropout and graduation rates.

The California Department of Education reported that 87% of students graduated in 2002, but researchers pegged the rate at just 71%. Nationally, about 68% of students graduate on time, according to the analysis.

The troubling graduation rates are most alarming in minority communities, where students are more likely to attend what researchers call "dropout factories."

The exodus of tens of thousands of students before 12th grade is exacting significant social and economic costs through higher unemployment, increased crime and billions of dollars in lost revenue, according to the report by researchers from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, among others.

"A diploma is a passport to economic success. If our high schools can't get students the education they need, that will be . an economic and social problem moving forward into the next generation," said researcher Christopher Swanson of the nonprofit Urban Institute in Washington, which produced data for the report released by Harvard's Civil Rights Project.

Statewide, just 57% of African Americans and 60% of Latinos graduated in 2002, compared with 78% of whites and 84% of Asians, the report said.

Using enrollment data, researchers produced what they believe are the most definitive graduation rates for California and its largest school systems.

They cast aside the state's method, which even California Education Department officials acknowledge is flawed. The state officials say they are forced by the federal government to use a formula that relies on undependable dropout data from schools.

The Harvard report found that African Americans and Latinos in the state were far less likely to graduate than their white and Asian peers, reflecting an achievement gap that first appears in elementary schools.

UCLA researchers noticed one troubling pattern in Los Angeles Unified: Most students who leave high school do so between ninth and 10th grades.

In several Los Angeles high schools, UCLA researcher Julie Mendoza found that less than one-third of ninth-graders graduated on time.

Principals at two of those high schools - Jefferson and Manual Arts - said students leave for a number of reasons but that their schools are taking steps to boost graduation rates.

Jefferson High School Principal Norm Morrow attributed his school's graduation rate - pegged by UCLA at 31% - partly to a transient student population and overcrowding that leave little opportunity for personal attention.

"If you don't connect with [students], they are going to drop out," said Morrow, who disputed the UCLA graduation figure and put the rate at about 45% last year.

He said that gangs, drugs and students working to support their families also figured into high dropout numbers. Jefferson serves large numbers of students from immigrant Latino families.

To retain more students at the South Los Angeles campus, Morrow said, he has been working on dividing the school of 3,800 students into smaller learning centers.

Manual Arts High School Principal Edward Robillard called the more personalized approach "one of the most powerful tools for inner-city schools to increase graduation."

Administrators created some smaller programs at Manual Arts three years ago. Next year, Robillard said, the 4,200-student school will be broken up into nine academies with about 450 students each.

Los Angeles Unified Schools Supt. Roy Romer said the district is aggressively tackling the graduation problem by dividing large schools into smaller units and by better preparing elementary school students with new reading and math programs.

"We've got to raise performance beginning in elementary school," Romer said. "The problem is severe. It's something we have to cure."

Inaction, researchers said, could prove costly.

UC Santa Barbara education professor Russell Rumberger estimated that the 66,657 dropouts reported by California in 2002-03 could cost the state $14 billion in lost wages over the students' lifetimes, and add 1,225 inmates to state prisons. The real costs could be far higher, he noted, because of the state's underreporting of dropout data.

"There are huge social costs" associated with high dropout rates, including "lower wages, higher unemployment, poorer health, lower tax revenues, increased crime," Rumberger said. "If we are going to make a dent in these problems, we need to start with kids [when they] are little."

Rumberger and the other researchers will present their findings today during a conference at Cal State Los Angeles.

The Harvard report said that current education policies - including those that require annual standardized testing of students - may exacerbate the dropout crisis by creating "unintended incentives for school officials to push out low-achieving students."

The federal No Child Left Behind education law requires annual testing in most grade levels and also calls for schools to report their high school graduation rates annually.

Under the law, schools must raise their test scores and graduation rates or face possible sanctions.

In California, high schools can meet their graduation targets each year by showing any increase over the preceding year.

The Harvard researchers accused the state of failing to demand more from its high schools. State officials said they did not want to place demands on campuses based on data they believe are unreliable.

Any true gauge of graduation rates, they said, would depend on developing a system for tracking individual students as they move from school to school. Such a system has been in the planning stages for years but could begin tracking data next year.

"We know this is a serious issue, and that's why we have focused on high school reform," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, who has urged districts to increase graduation requirements.

Sponsors of the Harvard report urged the state to reexamine its approach to producing dropout and graduation data, and called for schools to redouble their efforts to retain students.

"Whether or not students graduate is the most important thing that happens to them in school," said Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project. "If students don't make it through high school, they really have no chance in our economy."

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Graduation rates

A study found that less than three-quarters of California's high school students graduated with their class in 2002.

Statewide: 71.3%

Asians: 83.5

Whites: 77.8

Latinos: 60.3

Blacks: 56.6

For chart of school districts go to URL http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me graduate24mar24,0,6137422.story?
coll=la-home-headlines

Times staff writer Erica Williams contributed to this report.

Posted by lois at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

RISE UP Act launched HR 1184

The Daily Campus - News, Univ. of Connecticut
Issue: 3/28/05

Defending the drug offenders
By Rashid Grier

According to press secretary Jennifer Gore, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is submerging into the trenches of the nation's drug war. Frank and 55 other Congress members launched bill H.R. 1184, also known as the Removing Impediments to Student's Education (RISE) Act March 9. The act is designed to repeal a 1998 drug provision of the Higher Education Act (HEA).

If the bill were to pass, students denied financial aid due to previous drug misdemeanors, felonies and state or federal drug offenses would receive financial aid instead of losing it. Presently, an amendment to the Higher Education Act proposed by Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) withholds financial aid from students under those circumstances.

Over 100 student government organizations, 180 community organizations and 56 co-sponsors, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Faces and Voices of Recovery, are championing the bill before the 160,500 students denied financial aid since year 2000 increases.

"Students who have drug convictions but don't come from families that need financial aid are not affected by this law," Frank said, through information provided by Gore. "I don't condone drug use and believe that someone who commits a violent offense or is a major drug trafficker should be denied financial aid. But preventing students with minor convictions from being able to pursue an education is counterproductive and excessive."

There have been no hearings on the RISE Act as of yet and the primary committee dealing with the act, the Education and Workforce Committee, hasn't scheduled any either, Gore said.

Similar attempts for legislation to repeal the 1998 drug provision are simultaneously occurring. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) is introducing the S371, a higher education bill similar to the RISE act. In another similar attempt, the Arizona General Assembly came to a bipartisan resolution and introduced the "concurrent memorial" on Feb. 3.

A significant flaw with the 1998 drug provision is that it targets minorities, primarily young African American males, according to the NAACP and Students for Sensible Drug Policy's web site (SFSDP). African Americans make up 13 percent of the population and 13 percent of the drug users, but account for 55 percent of the drug convictions, according to the Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform (CHEAR). Further information shows 36 percent of blacks are arrested in drug violations, 42 percent are sentenced to federal prison and 57 percent are sentenced to state prison, according to figures from the Justice Department.

According to CHEAR, there are various issues besides discrimination, such as the harm it causes lower income families, punishing students twice for a crime and steering students from returning to college. Thirty-six percent of students that left four-year colleges before the beginning of their second year did not return within five years, according to the Department of Education.

A situation similar to Marisa Garcia's, a junior at California State University-Fullerton convicted of possession of drug paraphernalia, defers students from returning, according to CHEAR representative Chris Mulligan.

"The HEA drug provision created an immense burden on me and my family, but I had a support structure to help get me through this - many others are not so fortunate," Garcia said, according to raiseyourvoice.com. "This law is fundamentally flawed."

The 1998 drug provision possesses three ironies according to CHEAR. The first irony is that the drug provision fails to hinder students convicted of rape or other violent offenses. Second, it does not target the country's primary drug problem, alcohol abuse. Third, the HEA already withholds financial aid from students earning lower than a "C" average, causing the drug provision to target students doing well.

"I have a hard time finding the justification and rational for this provision," said Tom Angell, a member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, according to blackamericaweb.com. "Souder's first instinct was to strip students with drug offenses without even thinking about other offenses such as rape or arson."

The intent of the provision was to provide a deterrent to keep students from committing drug offenses while enrolled in higher education, according to information provided by Souder through the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrator's website. Supporting students that use drugs contradicts the government's war on drugs, according to an SFSDP video.

"Students have to realize that their choices have consequences, and if they break the law, then they should have to pay their own way through college," said Lori Waters, a participant in an SFSDP video.

Students do not have to attend college - there are other alternatives, such as working their way through community college, Waters said in an SFSDP video. Federal money is not a necessity, especially when we should think about awarding illegal behavior, according to Waters in an SFSDP video.

The HEA was enacted in 1965 under then President Lyndon B. Johnson for the purpose of extending the opportunity of secondary education to minorities and low-income families. The 1998 drug provision proposed by Souder denies financial aid based on set periods of time for students with drug convictions.

Students that marked anything but "no" on question 35 for their FAFSA form are required to fill out an extra worksheet that determines their when they may begin to receive aid again. Ineligibility lasts for one year for first time possession, two years for a first dealing offense and is indefinite for repeat offenders.

In 1998, the drug provision slipped into funding for the HEA and Congress would have to vote against completely funding the HEA or allow the drug provision to stay and keep the HEA, too, according to Gore. Since the drug provision went into effect, congressmen have persistently reintroduced the RISE Act to repeal the provision. Presently, The RISE Act is still pending, Gore said.

Posted by lois at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2005

Gang of Our Own Making

March 28, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Gang of Our Own Making
By LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ

San Fernando, Calif. — IN 1996, I was present at a meeting of gang members and community leaders in San Salvador. Heavily tattooed young men, one with a hand mangled from a hand grenade blast, told of the horrifying violence and gang warfare that had succeeded the battles of the 12-year civil war on El Salvador's streets. Aside from their tattoos, what was striking about these gang members is that they had grown up not in El Salvador, but in the United States, and that the gangs they were in - Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street - were started in Los Angeles.

That gathering was startling evidence of the globalization of United States-based gangs. Just how much Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, has grown since then was evident this month when the Department of Homeland Security announced the arrests of 103 gang members in New York State, Miami, Washington, the Baltimore area and Los Angeles.

Mara Salvatrucha is now reported to operate in 31 states and five countries, with 100,000 members across Canada, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. The government says MS-13 is the fastest-growing and most violent gang in the country. It describes MS-13 as having "cells" that smuggle people, guns and contraband across international lines, and some federal officials have mentioned possible ties between MS-13 and Al Qaeda.

While there's no proof that MS-13 has any connection to Al Qaeda, it has something in common with it: American policy played a role in the creation of both groups.

MS-13 is a result of our policy in Central America, specifically the policy that fueled the civil wars that sent more than two million refugees to the United States in the 1980's. Some of their children confronted well-entrenched Mexican-American gangs in the barrios where they landed. For their protection, they created their own groups, emulating the style of older Chicano gangs like 18th Street. MS-13, for instance, was born in the crowded, crack-ridden Mexican and Central-American community of Pico-Union, just west of the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles.

After the Los Angeles riots of 1992, government officials declared the main culprits to be young African-American and Latino gang members. In the mid-90's as many as 40,000 youths accused of being members of MS-13, 18th Street and other gangs were deported every year to Mexico and Central America. Sophisticated, tattooed, English-speaking young men raised and acculturated in the United States were sent to countries with no resources, no jobs and no history with these types of gangs.

Soon the deported members of MS-13 and 18th Street began recruiting among homeless and glue-sniffing youth who had never been to the United States. In a few years, these new members were making their way to the United States, ending up in far-flung corners of the country and recruiting a new generation. When the Department of Homeland Security deports the men it arrested last week, the cycle will start again.

When I was growing up in East L.A. in the 1960's, I was a member of a Chicano street gang. I was shot at a half-dozen times and arrested on several occasions. I understand why a teenager finds joining a gang necessary. But thanks to a few teachers, youth workers and community leaders, I eventually left the gang life.

What would have happened to me if I had been deported to a homeland I barely knew? The gang members at the 1996 meeting I attended were trying to find alternatives to violence and drugs. They wanted to be incorporated into the country, to be allowed to rebuild, to learn skills, to make decisions about bettering their communities and to stop being harassed or beaten by the police and attacked by death squads.

While the meeting ended on a high note, with people applauding and promising changes, in the end little happened. A group of former MS-13 and 18th Street gang youth formed a peace and justice organization called Homies Unidos, but their efforts over the years to obtain jobs, training, tattoo removal and counseling were largely ignored.

Instead, El Salvador instituted a "mano dura," or "firm hand," policy. It became illegal to be a member of a gang, whether a crime was committed or not. Jails became filled with gang youth from Los Angeles. The same policy was instituted in Honduras. According to news reports, these governments were getting advice from American law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department.

Today we're confronted with the same choice: we can continue the repression, arrests and firm-hand policies that only guarantee more violence and more lost youth. Or we can bring gang youth to the table and work to create jobs and training, providing real options for meaningful work and healthy families. In other words, we can help sow the seeds of transformation, eliminating the reasons young people join gangs in the first place.

We have the means to do both. Both have great costs. But one choice will worsen the violence and terror; the other will help bring peace, both in the streets of the United States and in the barrios of America's neighbors.

Luis J. Rodriguez is the author of "Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." and the forthcoming "Music of the Mill," a novel.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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

Bob Herbert- NY Times: Is No One Accountable?"

NY Times: March 28, 2005
By BOB HERBERT

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one. People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process. No charges. No lawyers. No appeals.

Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked - hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box. He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

(This was not a boast from the blue. On Saturday, for example, The Times reported that the Army would not prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Mr. Ali's story is depressingly similar to other accounts pouring in from detainees, human rights groups, intelligence sources and U.S. government investigators. If you pay close attention to what is already known about the sadistic and barbaric treatment of prisoners by the U.S., you can begin to wonder how far we've come from the Middle Ages. The alleged heretics hauled before the Inquisition were not permitted to face their accusers or mount a defense. Innocence was irrelevant. Torture was the preferred method of obtaining confessions.

No charges were ever filed against Mr. Ali, and he was eventually released. But what should be of paramount concern to Americans is this country's precipitous and frightening descent into the hellish zone of lawlessness that the Bush administration, on the one hand, is trying to conceal and, on the other, is defending as absolutely essential to its fight against terror.

The lawsuit against Mr. Rumsfeld was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, a New York-based group, on behalf of Mr. Ali and seven other former detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan who claim to have been tortured by U.S. personnel.

The suit charges that Mr. Rumsfeld personally authorized unlawful interrogation techniques and abdicated his responsibility to stop the torture and other abuses of prisoners in U.S. custody. It contends that the abuse of detainees was widespread and that Mr. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials were well aware of it.

According to the suit, it is unreasonable to believe that Mr. Rumsfeld could have remained in the dark about the rampant mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. It cites a wealth of evidence readily available to the secretary, including the scandalous eruptions at Abu Ghraib prison, the reports of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, myriad newspaper and magazine articles, internal U.S. government reports, and concerns expressed by such reputable groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

(The committee has noted, among other things, that military intelligence estimates suggest that 70 percent to 90 percent of the people detained in Iraq had been seized by mistake.)

Whether this suit will ultimately be successful in holding Mr. Rumsfeld personally accountable is questionable. But if it is thoroughly argued in the courts, it will raise yet another curtain on the stomach-turning practices that have shamed the United States in the eyes of the world.

The primary aim of the lawsuit is quite simply to re-establish the rule of law. "It's that fundamental idea that nobody is above the law," said Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First. "The violations here were created by policies that deliberately undermined the rule of law. That needs to be challenged."

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States. Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

Posted by lois at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2005

Wal-Mart ---Race to the Bottom

..."As Jesse Jackson and other black leaders have pointed out in response to this boast, the slave plantation was once a "leading employer" of African-Americans as well."

by LIZA FEATHERSTONE
The Nation: March 28, 2005

"Wal-Mart is working for everyone," read the newspaper ad, which ran in January in more than 100 newspapers nationwide, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. "Some of our critics are working only for themselves." The same day, the company launched walmartfacts.com , a website to counter criticism of the kind you may have read in this magazine. Along with some misleading information intended to make Wal-Mart's wages and benefits sound much better than they are, the new campaign materials feature many smiling African-American faces; the website explains, accurately, that Wal-Mart is a "leading employer" of Hispanics and African-Americans.

As Jesse Jackson and other black leaders have pointed out in response to this boast, the slave plantation was once a "leading employer" of African-Americans as well. But this ad campaign was only the latest salvo in Wal-Mart's fervent battle for the goodwill of black America, inspired by the difficulties the company is having as it tries to move into urban areas.

Wal-Mart spent more than $1 million on a PR campaign backing a voter referendum to build a Supercenter in Inglewood, California, where the majority of voters are people of color, and was decisively defeated last year. The company faces continued resistance in Chicago as well, where it has been trying to open stores in black neighborhoods. A Wal-Mart on that city's West Side is scheduled to open by next February--to the frustration of those who opposed it--while plans for a South Side store have been scuttled. Controversy continues to rage about a Wal-Mart project in New Orleans, and in late February plans for a New York City Wal-Mart were scrapped in the wake of protests by labor, small business and neighborhood groups. Much of the opposition to the retailer has been led by activists of color. And, of course, since many people of color are poor, Wal-Mart depends on them as shoppers and as workers. It's no surprise, then, that the company would be eager to appeal to racial minorities.

If you own a TV, you've probably seen what many of Wal-Mart's critics call its "happy black people" ad, which has been airing since 2003, when the Inglewood fight heated up. Filmed at a Wal-Mart store in Crenshaw, a Los Angeles neighborhood, the ad features smiling African-Americans giving glowing testimony to what Wal-Mart has done for the "community." ("Community" in Wal-Mart World often seems to mean "black"--on the website, for instance, the word is illustrated not by a group of people, as it's commonly understood to mean, but by one exuberant, young woman of color, a beneficiary of a Wal-Mart scholarship.) In another TV spot, a black woman who works for Wal-Mart raves about the "opportunities" she's found working with the company. As the writer Earl Ofari Hutchinson has observed, the fact that black women are absent from most advertising imagery potentially makes Wal-Mart's campaign that much more powerful. The company also takes out ads in black newspapers, especially in cities where it faces political opposition, and radio spots during Sunday- morning gospel hour. And Wal-Mart celebrates Black History Month, distributing free booklets to consumers with inspirational sayings from accomplished African-Americans.

Much like that of the Bush Administration, Wal-Mart's image-making strategy includes not only advertising but paying for positive media coverage from black journalists. This year the company will begin awarding scholarships to minority journalism students at Howard, Columbia and elsewhere--a worthy use of Wal-Mart's funds, given that people of color are underrepresented in this profession, but a rather transparent move to buy off potential critics. (In an unusual twist, the recipients will attend Wal-Mart's annual shareholders' meeting, a massive pep rally whose primary purpose is to immerse attendees in the company culture.) The company knows what favors its money can buy: Wal-Mart underwrites Tavis Smiley's popular television talk show in Los Angeles, and Smiley returned the favor last year when, during the heated battle in Inglewood, he invited Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott on the air for a fawning interview, taking no calls.

Wal-Mart even gives money to civil rights organizations fighting racism--groups like La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, the Urban League, the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP. As with the journalism scholarships, this isn't all bad: far better that Wal-Mart's money be used to fight for racial equality than to elect Republicans or simply further enrich its own CEO, who at nearly $23 million a year makes well over 1,000 times as much as the average Wal-Mart worker. Unfortunately, however, taking money from Wal-Mart may sometimes compromise organizations politically. In Chicago, the NAACP chapter supported Wal-Mart in the political battle over the South Side store; likewise, in a recent battle over Wal-Mart in suburban Atlanta, Wal-Mart found the NAACP on its side.

Indeed, the company has become a skillful grassroots player. In both Inglewood and Chicago, Wal-Mart gave money to black churches, community groups and politicians. Wal-Mart courted Emma Mitts, an African-American alderwoman representing Chicago's West Side, and found her easily seduced. Mitts became a strident advocate for the retailer. Like many other organizations and individuals, she wasn't much of an expense; according to campaign disclosure documents filed with the State of Illinois, Wal-Mart rewarded her efforts last November with $5,000. (Mitts did not return calls for this article.)

Many black community activists were appalled that black leaders were so easily bought off. "I was ashamed to be black!" says Elce Redmond of the South Austin Coalition, a Chicago neighborhood organization, describing how the clergy and elites rolled over. "A lot of people have no principles. They will wear the dashiki, but always take the green money from a multinational corporation." Wal-Mart was deliberate, Redmond observes: "In almost twenty years of organizing, I have never seen anything so divisive. If you're going to take their money, take it, but don't pretend Wal-Mart is good for the community." He's not posturing: Redmond's South Austin Coalition received a check from Wal-Mart for a youth center, cashed it and continued to work politically to oppose the retailer.

But the organizing Wal-Mart representatives did, and the arguments they made, may have been just as important as any cash they doled out. They talked to ministers and community groups about the jobs the company was going to bring, and the low prices. "It was just smart," says Renaye Manley, the national field representative in the AFL-CIO's Midwest office, which is based in Chicago. "And it made our job that much harder." Manley, who is black and from Chicago's South Side, thinks Wal-Mart's outreach was more important than its money and that most community leaders were not bought off but genuinely convinced: "People just wanted to see jobs. These folks have a vision for their communities." James Thindwa, a Zimbabwean who heads Chicago's Jobs With Justice, says, "A lot of good, decent people bought the argument that any job is better than none." Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, writing for The Black Commentator , had a harsher take on this "slavish" acceptance of anything corporate America has on offer, chastising Chicago's black politicians for failing "to address Black community development as an issue of democracy."

Most destructively, Thindwa says--and other Chicago activists agree--"Wal-Mart played the race card." The company told the city's black leaders that the unions fighting the retailer were racist, effectively exploiting existing racial tensions in the city. As elsewhere, the building trades unions in Chicago have historically discriminated against blacks. But it is service unions like the Service Employees International that are speaking out the most against Wal-Mart, and in cities, their membership is mostly people of color. "[Wal-Mart] knew what buttons to push," Redmond acknowledges, but he's outraged that so many black leaders bought the simplistic line that all unions are racist. "I've never seen so much ignorance. They had no sense at all of the history of African-Americans in unions. A. Philip Randolph, ever heard of him? So they're going to side with the corporate enslaver, like, 'Wal-Mart will save us Negroes!'"

Thindwa says, "Wal-Mart was able to paint this as white unions protecting their turf, instead of as a broad-based community issue." Worse, activists now agree, the anti-Wal-Mart coalition failed to respond effectively to the company's race-baiting. Dorian Warren, an African-American community activist and member of the Chicago Workers' Rights Board, says, "The media framed it as 'white labor versus the black community.' We were not able to change the frame."

There are clearly profound racial tensions in the labor movement, and as Wal-Mart continues to move into cities it is likely to continue to exploit these tensions. Warren, a public policy scholar at the University of Chicago, says, "I've been at a loss to figure out why the labor movement can't have an honest conversation about race." Contributing to the problem, black-led labor activism has declined in recent decades, and many mainstream unions aren't training black leaders (which is closely related to their failure to develop leaders from the rank and file of any race). There's a sense--in these battles over Wal-Mart, as in many other situations--that labor uses communities of color when it's convenient but drops them when a particular campaign is over. That's easily exploited since, as Warren puts it, "there's just enough truth to it."

Of course, there's still plenty of skepticism among African-Americans about Wal-Mart.

Indeed, some black clergy were leaders in the fight against Wal-Mart in Chicago. Community opposition probably did contribute to the retailer's defeat on the South Side and may help the coalition's attempts to pass an ordinance requiring Wal-Mart to pay a living wage to workers on the West Side. In Inglewood, the fight against Wal-Mart was led by black and Latino church and community activists, and very few leaders were bought off. Blacks there did not buy the line that Wal-Mart was antiracist and the unions--therefore, all of Wal-Mart's opponents--were racist. That's partly because in Inglewood relations between the United Food and Commercial Workers and the community groups were much better. Whereas in Chicago the union often insisted on having its white and male leadership speak at public events, in Inglewood black women who lived in the town and worked in supermarkets were prominent faces in Wal-Mart's public opposition; they knocked on doors and talked to their fellow citizens about why their unionized grocery job was so important to them and their families, and why Wal-Mart was such a threat.

Madeline Janis-Aparicio of the Coalition for a Better Inglewood says about her campaign's success: "We were also lucky--Wal-Mart did something really stupid." In trying to pass an ordinance exempting itself from the town's laws, the company violated the largely black community's most basic
requirement: respect. "We used that," says Janis-Aparicio, who credits that theme with winning over the church leadership and many Inglewood voters. After one large, mainstream black church joined the anti-Wal-Mart fight, the rest followed, not just lending passive endorsement but enthusiastically rallying their forces. Another helpful issue was crime--Wal-Mart is the nation's leading purveyor of guns. To rural white communities, that's often a political asset, but to urban black voters it's a harsh liability. In the last few days of the Inglewood campaign, the anti-Wal-Mart coalition hung a flier in the shape of an M-16 rifle on everybody's door. "Some on our side felt it was a scare tactic," Janis-Aparicio admits, but, she adds with justified pride, "it had a powerful impact."

Even in Chicago, Wal-Mart's own actions may end up helping its opponents. Elce Redmond says, "A lot of people who supported Wal-Mart at first are now saying, 'Elce, you were right.' Wal-Mart made a lot of promises, and hasn't delivered." Politicians and community leaders are now finding that since Wal-Mart secured permission to open the West Side store, its officials aren't returning their calls too readily. Rather than agreeing to pay workers decently, the company sent 300 holiday turkeys for the community's needy. That struck many people as a shallow response to concerns about the store's economic impact. "People are beginning to ask questions," says Redmond. "Why can't Wal-Mart pay a living wage? Why can't its workers have a union if they want one? Why not?"

This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050328&s=featherstone

Posted by lois at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)

As Farmers Dwindle, Towns Make Best of What's Left

New Crop
In Bid to Hang On, Miner County, S.D., Downsizes Dreams
As Farmers Dwindle, Towns Make Best of What's Left; Big Grant Helps Fight Odds
Windmills and Organic Beef

By JONATHAN EIG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 25, 2005; Page A1

HOWARD, S.D. -- With farm jobs disappearing at a rapid clip, almost every small town on the American prairie dreams of getting bigger.

Some wait for Wal-Marts. Others push for new factories and jobs. Still others lobby for new roads, new highway exit ramps or new airports.

This town has a different plan, evident to anyone driving the two-lane blacktop that cuts east to west through Miner County. At the eastern edge of Howard, an old slaughterhouse that had been vacant for 30 years is up and running again, this time in the production of organic beef. Just south of the town's busiest intersection, where cattle once grazed, a new housing development is under construction, bringing seven low-cost homes. Two wind turbines tower over the western end of town. At their feet sits a small turbine-repair shop staffed by former farmers and tractor repairmen.

Howard and the surrounding Miner County are at the center of an unusual campaign to rescue farm towns from extinction. Backed by $6 million in foundation grant money, residents here have adapted a survival strategy that is both radical and modest. They plan to let some of the dying pieces of the economy die and focus instead on niches in which small businesses can compete -- like organic beef and wind-turbine repair.

The key, residents say, is that they're willing to accept the county's dramatic population losses -- down to about 3,000 residents from a peak of 8,500 -- as long as they can come up with enough high-quality jobs to prevent further declines.

"We don't need to be a Watertown or a Madison," says Randy Parry, a former basketball coach and high-school teacher who leads the revitalization effort, referring to towns with populations of 20,000 and 6,500, respectively. "We don't need to be big."

Some economists think Howard's approach might be the last best chance for towns that have seen family farms vanish and their economic bases crumble.

"In these communities, you don't really need much," says Stephan Weiler, an economist at the Center for the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Many of those communities still have a relatively strong supply of skilled workers, Mr. Weiler says. The challenge is keeping them. "People need to ask, 'What do we have and what can we do that the market will value?' "

Miner County is fighting against a strong tide. The population is still falling and some of the county's experiments have failed to take root. In building an economy without a strong business base and heavily dependent on a handful of small ventures, the county is plotting a risky strategy. If consumers lose interest in wind energy or organic beef, or if Miner County businesses can't keep up with competitors in those industries, the economic revitalization will have to start all over again.

"We're the guinea pigs," says Mr. Parry, director of Miner County Community Revitalization. "Rural America is slipping by the wayside. If we don't do something about it in time, it will be too late."

Miner County sits about 65 miles northwest of Sioux Falls, a city of some 125,000 that's been growing about as quickly as many of its rural neighbors have been shrinking. For decades, the county was a thriving chunk of middle-American heartland, with hundreds of small farms raising corn and soybeans, and railroad cars crisscrossing the flat earth. At its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, even the county's smaller towns each supported a bank, a diner, a gas station, a grocery, a schoolhouse, and a bar or two.

As the smallest towns vanished, Howard, the county seat, became the life raft, with displaced residents clinging to its relative prosperity. But even Howard has been losing a dozen or so residents every year, and its population is now down to about 1,000.

One idea for turning things around came from the younger generation. In 1995, students at Howard High School surveyed Miner County's 1,000 registered voters and found that about half of all respondents were shopping in larger towns outside the county. The students calculated that if residents spent 10% more of their disposable income at local businesses, they would add more than $7 million to the local economy, assuming the money continued to circulate in the community at the normal rate. In the year after the survey, discussed widely in town, taxable sales in Miner County increased 40%.

Advising the students was Mr. Parry, 56 years old. Besides coaching basketball, he worked as the school's business teacher and ran a popular ice-cream shop called Coach's Corner. The student project gave him ideas.

He says he began to think of the community as he thought of some of his basketball squads. Once a team started winning, Mr. Parry observed, players seemed to practice and play harder. Crowds got bigger and cheered more loudly. As a coach, he called it momentum.

Though sales-tax revenue continued increasing for several years after the student survey, the economy was not so easily transformed. In 1996, the community's biggest manufacturer, Wrapit, which made wrappers for baseball cards, laid off 75 of its 210 workers. Soon after, Mr. Parry used a $20,000 grant presented to the high school to form the Rural Resource Center, which brought together students and adults to discuss ideas for improving the community.

They developed focus groups on housing, employment, health care and education. Instead of looking to outsiders for growth, they focused on how to lure back former residents who had moved away and keep the next generation from doing the same.

Meanwhile, a Minnesota-based nonprofit called the Northwest Area Foundation was looking for an innovative way to help a rural community. In 1997, it decided to offer a small town millions of dollars and other support over a span of 10 years. The community would determine how the money should be spent.

In November 1998, foundation officials arrived in Miner County the day after an enormous snowstorm. Small roads were almost impassable. Farmers were busy corralling animals that had climbed over snow banks and strayed from their land. Still, 80 of Mr. Parry's 82 committee members showed up to meet the out-of-towners.

Impressed, the foundation gave Miner County $500,000 in seed money to help it map a long-term strategy.

Mr. Parry quit his job at the school and devoted himself to the community-building work. The more he talked to residents, the more evident it became that no one wanted Miner County to get a lot bigger, or to change in a dramatic way. In other words, says Mr. Parry, they wanted the town "to feel like it used to be."

Local committees began organizing projects to build community spirit and demonstrate to the foundation that Miner County residents were ready to go to work. Residents pulled hundreds of tree stumps from downtown Fedora. They cleaned and painted old homes in Howard. Farmers attended seminars on how to make money on organic beef or alternative livestock such as elk and deer.

"It was grass-roots," Mr. Parry says. "It was grind work."

County leaders gave the foundation a 35-page plan that promised among other things to create affordable housing, build a child-care center, update land-use plans, help farmers explore niche markets and set up a business-assistance program. The key was getting the entire community involved and making better use of the assets already on hand.

In February 2001, the Northwest Area Foundation awarded Miner County about $3.8 million and the South Dakota Community Foundation, a nonprofit, kicked in $2 million more.

Not long after that, the first wind turbine went up in Howard. It was the work of a former Howard High School student, Joe Kolbach, who decided to open a repair shop for the machines in his old home town. He said he knew that many people who fixed tractor engines could learn to fix turbines.

"A small town with low overhead is what a young company needs," says Mr. Kolbach, president of Energy Maintenance Services of Gary, S.D.

The two turbines -- one purchased by the town of Howard, the other by Mr. Parry's group -- earned the town energy credits from one of the local power companies, reducing bills for everyone. They also served as a sign that things were changing. "To be honest," Mr. Parry says, "I still get goose bumps every time I drive by."

Mr. Parry's group created a revolving loan fund to help businesses start or expand. It helped establish a day-care center with preschool and Head Start classes in downtown Howard. The group pushed to get cellular phone service for the area. It helped convert a vacant school in Canova to a wellness center, with exercise equipment and a miniature-golf course.

When Robin Hattervig, the county's only dentist, began thinking about moving elsewhere, Mr. Parry's organization helped him apply for a federal grant that would pay him to see more Medicaid patients. Now, low-income patients drive from across the state to Dr. Hattervig's clinic, and he has hired another dentist.

Scott Lively, whose wife grew up in a small town in South Dakota, said he wanted to set up an organic-beef business in a community that needed jobs, even though he probably could have improved his profit margins by locating closer to a major highway. When he heard about an old slaughterhouse for sale in Howard, Mr. Parry's group offered to help him negotiate the purchase. "These guys were relentless," says Mr. Lively, 33, who lives in Martha's Vineyard with his family but has been spending much of his time lately in Howard.

Now, Mr. Lively's Dakota Beef is one of the more promising ventures in town. One local farmer already feeds cattle for Dakota Beef, and two more farmers have expressed interest in having their farms certified organic, Mr. Lively says. Dakota Beef employs 20 full-time workers and expects to triple that number by the end of the year, he says.

Still, Mr. Parry's group faces long odds in its fight to keep Miner County from slipping away. From 2000 to 2003, the county's population dropped a further 5.8%, according to Census Bureau estimates. From 2000 to 2001, 5.5% of all nonfarm businesses disappeared. Even some businesses launched with the revitalization group's help discovered there wasn't enough money to be made. A café, a cheese-making plant and a fish farm all came and went.

Only about one in four Howard High graduates who went to college in the late 1990s has returned, according to a recent survey. "The more highly skilled they get, the less likely they are to come back," says Larry Holland, who teaches at the high school and also serves as its guidance counselor, athletic director and part-time bus driver. "How would we employ an engineer in Howard? Those kinds of jobs aren't there."

The local high school and elementary school have suffered. As people leave Miner County for jobs elsewhere, they take their children and property-tax contributions, leaving the schools short of bodies and cash. Those left behind have voted to accept property-tax increases, but educators say the money coming in still isn't enough.

Howard High has been forced to lay off teachers and cut back on available classes. Even Mr. Parry's old business class that got the community revitalization started a decade ago wasn't spared.

Many students say they're encouraged by the recent burst of economic activity, but staying in Howard "would be the failure of my life," says Brianna Hanson, a 17-year-old junior, whose father works as a veterinarian for the state and whose mother is a nurse at a local nursing home. "When you see your parents struggling, it really peels a lot of your hope away."

As he drove through town one day in his pickup truck, down Main Street, out to Route 34, and over to the town's new industrial park, home of the turbine-repair shop and other small businesses, Mr. Parry acknowledged that economic forces will continue to wipe away many small towns.

"I read somewhere that someone said it wouldn't matter if everything between Sioux Falls and Rapid City were covered in ash," he says. He thinks at least a few of those small towns can be saved. For now, he says, one will do.

Write to Jonathan Eig at jonathan.eig@wsj.com

Posted by lois at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

Jail Expansion Opponents Push Alternatives

Sunday, March 27, 2005 Copyright C 2004 Mid-Hudson News Network

A small crowd gathered in Poughkeepsie to hear activists argue a multi-million dollar expansion of the Dutchess County Jail will not solve any problems and that the focus should be on alternatives to incarceration.

In fact, Dana Kaplan, a consultant with the National Resource Center on Prisons and Communities, sees little connection between the number of prison beds and the commonly touted reasons for building prisons.

"Prison and jail populations are not determined by the level of criminal behavior, and they are not determined by questions of community safety", Kaplan said. "Prison and jail population are determined by the politics of the time period and of the political will of those with the power to make those decisions."

Another speaker was Democrat County Legislator Barbara Jeter-Jackson. "Not saying that it may not turn out to be the fact that we have to build, but right now, all the questions that I need answered haven't been answered."

Asked if she thought more focus is needed on developing alternatives to incarceration, Jeter-Jackson replied "Absolutely".

Republican Legislator Patrick Nesbitt was there simply to listen to what they were saying. Nesbitt said there are reasonable questions that need to be asked about where the county needs to go with this, but he watching the work of the Criminal Justice Council, which is looking at a smaller addition than what was considered earlier this year, only to have the design funding vetoed by the County Executive.

"I've got a lot of confidence in them", Nesbitt said. "They have people form both sides of aisle. They have people from all areas of occupation, all kinds of expertise on that. I'm putting a lot of faith in their guidance."

The forum, at the Family Partnership Center, was organized by Dutchess Justice. Members describe themselves as a "community-based group", formed recently in response to the closing of some community programs including the Youth Resource Development Corporation.

Shortcut to: http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/DC_jail_forum-27Mar05.htm

Posted by lois at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2005

WA: Gregoire Agrees to Let Private Investors to Build Prison

DAVID AMMONS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
http://www.theolympian.com/home/specialsections/Legislature/20050323/111403.shtml

Gov. Christine Gregoire is proposing a $2.8 billion construction boom and endorses her predecessor's proposal to let private investors build a new state prison. The governor also is proposing a supplemental state budget of $219 million to tide the state over until the new fiscal year begins July 1. And she sent lawmakers a no-new-taxes $4.6 billion transportation budget, although she is on record as supporting a still-developing revenue package.

The construction, supplemental and transportation proposals were part of a thick stack of budget documents the Democratic governor sent to the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Monday.

Gregoire's main operating budget proposal calls for spending $25.8 billion during the next two years, financed in part with a $203 million tax increase on cigarettes and a new state tax on estates of more than $2 million.

The separate construction budget, meanwhile, would provide money for public school and college projects, prisons, parks, wildlife habitat and recreation, drought preparedness and several local projects.

About $1.5 billion of that amount would come from the sale of state bonds. The state operating budget pays the debt service -- $1.25 billion in the upcoming budget to pay for the interest on previous bond sales.

Gregoire said the construction budget would generate nearly 20,000 direct and spinoff jobs.

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, House Capital Budget Chairman Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish, and Senate construction subcommittee Chairwoman Karen Fraser, D-Olympia, said Tuesday that Gregoire's plan was well received by legislative Democrats.

Highlights

- Schools: Gregoire proposes $436 million for state matching funds for local voter-approved school construction. She said this level would fully erase a backlog of projects.

- Higher education: The governor requests $323 million at the four-year universities and $383 million for 64 community college projects.

The University of Washington would get $46 million for assorted projects and its new Tacoma campus would receive $13 million. Washington State University is in line for $48 million for its main campus, including a new biotechnology-life sciences building. The WSU Tri-Cities campus would get $13 million, Eastern Washington University $1.7 million, Evergreen $22 million, Central $2.2 million, and Western $51 million.

Among the community college projects are ones at Green River, Bates, Walla Walla, Everett, South Puget Sound, Yakima Valley, Columbia Basin and Grays Harbor.

- Prisons: The biggest plan is for a 2,000-inmate prison at Coyote Ridge in Connell, Franklin County, to be built by a private investor for an estimated $267 million. The state would lease back the facility and operate it with state employees.

Gregoire provides $21 million to complete the final phase of the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island to house and treat dangerous sex offenders.

The Shelton prison would get $11 million and $4 million is provided for completion of the state crime lab in Vancouver.

- Natural resources: Gregoire provides money for fish and wildlife habitat, cleanup of Hood Canal, water storage projects water-supply projects, parks and drought preparedness.

- Housing: The plan includes $82 million for housing and farmworker housing.

- Community grants: Gregoire provides $119 million for a variety of projects, including Olympia's Heritage Park, the West Barracks project in Vancouver, planning for redevelopment of the Port of Bellingham, Seattle's McCaw Hall, Spokane's Fox Theatre renovation, Yakima redevelopment, an Asian counseling center in Seattle and an upgrade of TVW, the state's version of C-SPAN public television.

Online Extras

Gov. Gregoire's budget proposal for the 2005-2007 biennium

Trancript of Gov. Gregoire's Capitol Chat and her answers for readers' questions

Numbers from the latest revenue review (.pdf)

Posted by lois at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

WA: Prison Not the Best Way to Deal with Drug Use

By ROGER LAUEN AND DANIEL R. MERKLE, GUEST COLUMNISTS
Thursday, March 24, 2005 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/217264_prison24.html

The state has built several new prisons -- adding more than 10,000
prison beds -- since 1988. The huge state deficit doesn't appear to
deter prison promoters; they want to build another prison for almost
$200 million, even though responsible alternatives exist. During this
period, the state population grew 32 percent while the state's prison
population grew a staggering 172 percent.

What's behind all this demand for more prisons despite the fact that
crime has declined 21 percent between 1989 and 1999 and police arrests per crime are reported 13 percent down during the same period?

First, the failed "war on drugs" has filled jails and prisons with
non-violent offenders who often have substance abuse and mental health problems.

Second, prosecutors' filings per arrest are up 40 percent and, as
counties experience tremendous budgetary shortfalls, it is time the
public demands that prosecutors focus on crimes against people and
property.

Third, an overwhelming majority of the drug war defendants are poor and a disproportionate number are African American males. We must find a better way to deal with drug use, since we know it takes place in all racial and income groups.

Fourth, perhaps the most important group of decision-makers is state
legislators. Although the '80s and '90s were periods where "tough on
crime" was a favorite campaign slogan, genuine political leaders now
realize they have to focus on being "smart on crime" and must develop
sound and responsible alternatives to incarceration. The goal is to make our communities safer, not blindly punish people because they make mistakes.

Washington state and some local communities have made some good
decisions over the past few years as we have begun downsizing the war on drugs. These suggestions will reduce prison-bed demand without risking public safety:

*Tell legislators to support alternatives to incarceration and shorter sentences and reinvest the savings in treatment, job training, transitional housing and education. Let's give the new Department of Corrections director, Harold Clarke, an opportunity to work with others in further developing these alternatives as he has in other states.

*Amend laws that mandate fixed and unreasonably lengthy prison
sentences -- particularly for non-violent offenders and older inmates
where studies show the possibility of re-offending is much lower and
their health care costs are much greater.

*Stop making charge, plea bargain, sentencing and prison release
decisions based on crime type and give judges and corrections officials more discretion to evaluate the circumstances of the offense and the particular treatment and supervision needs of the offender.

One-third of the inmates released from the state's prison return for
either technical rule violations or a new crime. This is an unacceptably high rate of recidivism and we believe Washington state can do better.

To increase the success of returning inmates, we need to bolster the
community treatment services (substance abuse treatment, employment
services, affordable housing) and reduce structural barriers (12 percent interest rates on court-ordered fees; prohibiting licensure of select trades). If those community programs are better funded and more widely available to offenders, police and prosecutors will be more inclined to divert low-risk property and drug offenders to those programs in lieu of a prison sentence.

Washington state needs money for colleges, universities and human
services, which all have higher demand than the existing supply
provides. Let's start putting money into something we can be proud of
and invest in our intellectual and economic future and the health and
safety of our communities.

Roger Lauen, Ph.D., is a retired criminologist who lives on Bainbridge Island. Daniel R. Merkle, J.D., is the executive director of the Center for Social Justice in Seattle.

Posted by lois at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)

Bruce McM. Wright: Judge Whose Bail Rulings Caused an Uproar

March 26, 2005
Bruce McM. Wright, Erudite Judge Whose Bail Rulings Caused an Uproar, Dies at 86
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Bruce McM. Wright, a retired black judge in Manhattan who denounced what he called racism in the criminal justice system and created a furor in the 1970's by setting low bail for many poor and minority suspects, died in his sleep on Thursday at his home in Old Saybrook, Conn. He was 86.

His death was announced by his wife, Elizabeth Davidson-Wright. Justice Wright, who retired at the end of 1994 from State Supreme Court, suffered a heart attack in March 2000.

Justice Wright spent 25 years on the bench in both criminal and civil cases, gaining a reputation as a scholarly and provocative jurist who sprinkled his opinions with literary quotations.

But it was in Criminal Court early in his judicial career that he found himself at the center of a storm over his out-of-court remarks and bail policies, which had the effect of releasing many suspects, some of them charged with vicious attacks on police officers.

"Turn 'Em Loose Bruce" was the sobriquet supplied by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, which called him "the best friend criminals ever had." At various times, Mayor John V. Lindsay, who appointed him to the bench in 1970, as well as Mayors Abraham D. Beame and Edward I. Koch and many other politicians, joined the chorus of denunciations.

But civil libertarians, Legal Aid lawyers and others defended Judge Wright's use of bail as appropriate in the context of its statutory and traditional purpose: to assure the presence at trial of a defendant, who is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

In setting bail, judges typically weigh a defendant's character, employment, finances and community roots. Also considered are any criminal record, possible danger to the community, the seriousness of the charges and the probable sentence that a conviction would carry, which, if severe enough, might raise the possibility of flight to avoid prosecution.

While no records were kept on the bail practices of judges, Judge Wright's were not very different from those of his colleagues, lawyers familiar with the courts at the time said, but his decisions were monitored more closely by the police and reporters.

Judge Wright insisted that bail should not be used punitively, to detain people for the sake of crime prevention or to coerce guilty pleas. He said his aim was to uphold the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which says "excessive bail shall not be required." For some poor people, he contended, $50 could be excessive.

Judge Wright also drew angry responses with out-of-court speeches asserting that white judges often did not treat black defendants fairly and that the acquittal of white officers by white juries had given the police "a license to hunt down blacks and kill them with impunity."

While opponents called those remarks intemperate for a judge, many black and Hispanic New Yorkers regarded him as a compassionate counterweight to an overwhelmingly white justice system. In the mid-1970's, only 2 to 3 percent of America's judges were black. The City Bar Association, meanwhile, called his performance on the bench "decidedly better than average."

Judge Wright's perceptions were shaped by his own experiences with racism. He had been a distinguished student, but was turned away from Princeton; he had been a decorated soldier in World War II, but had to serve in segregated units; he had worked for a major New York law firm, but said he was told that he could not hope to become a partner.

A tall, trim man with angular features and an athlete's confident bearing, he was an amateur painter, an avid reader and the author of three published volumes of poetry. He also wrote "Black Robes, White Justice" (Lyle Stuart, 1987), about race and the judiciary.

Bruce McMarion Wright was born on Dec. 19, 1918, in Princeton, N.J. His father was a baker. He was an excellent student and applied to Princeton, but was dissuaded by an admissions official, who wrote him saying that the school did not discriminate but had "no colored students" and advised him that "a member of your race might feel very much alone."

Sixty-five years later, the Princeton graduating class of 2001 made Judge Wright an honorary member.

In 1936, the young man enrolled at Virginia State, a black college, but was expelled for a prank: changing a headline in a student newspaper from "Religion Week" to "Religion Weak." He attended Lincoln University, a predominantly black school in Pennsylvania, and after graduation in 1942 entered the Army.

He served in a segregated medical unit and was in the third wave of the Normandy invasion in 1944. He won two Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars.

In 1946, he enrolled at New York Law School, taking classes at night while working at odd jobs. In his last year, he was a clerk with the prominent firm of Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn. After passing the bar exam in 1950, he asked about his prospects. As he recalled it years later, he was told that there could be no future for him there. A senior partner later voiced doubt that any member would make such a statement.

Over the next 17 years, Judge Wright practiced law in New York with a number of black firms. In 1967, he was named counsel to the city's Human Resources Administration, and three years later was named to the Criminal Court bench by Mayor Lindsay.

The judge's bail policies soon became controversial. There was an uproar in 1972, when he twice released on $500 bail a man accused of killing a police officer. Another judge raised the bail to $25,000. The suspect was later convicted of assault and robbery but acquitted of murder. In 1974, Judge Wright released a man accused of kidnapping, rape and the attempted murder of a police officer.

After repeated protests by the police union, Judge Wright was transferred to Civil Court in 1974 by the city's administrative judge, who denied that the move had anything to do with his bail policies. Judge Wright sued in federal court, seeking reinstatement to Criminal Court. In 1978, as hearings were about to begin, he was transferred back to Criminal Court.

The bail controversy resumed, and the protests rose to a peak in April 1979, when Judge Wright released without bail a black man charged with slashing the throat of a white decoy officer, Robert Bilodeau.

Judge Wright noted that the suspect, Jerome Singleton, had no criminal record and had a family and other community ties. He also said prosecutors had offered no compelling reason to ban Mr. Singleton's release. In two trials, Mr. Singleton was found not guilty of attempted murder but was convicted of second-degree assault.

With little hope that Mayor Koch, a harsh critic, would reappoint him when his 10-year term expired, Judge Wright ran successfully for Civil Court judge in 1979, and was elected a justice of the State Supreme Court in 1982. He served in the court's civil branch for 12 relatively quiet years, until his retirement on Dec. 31, 1994.

But his opinions, especially about race, remained provocative.

"I have never changed my mind about the Eighth Amendment," he said a few days before retiring. "To say that I would've done things differently means to me I would have been a good boy, kept my mouth shut and availed myself of the benefits of the system. I don't think I can do that. I don't think I could ever do that."

Besides his wife, Judge Wright's survivors include a brother, Robert, of Willingboro, N.J.; five sons from previous marriages: Geoffrey, a civil court judge in Manhattan, Keith L., a Democratic state assemblyman from Harlem, Alexis, of Chicago, Bruce, of Washington, and Patrick, of Connecticut; a daughter, Tiffany, of Brooklyn; and two grandsons.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |

Posted by lois at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2005

"Education Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track"

Rocky Mountain News

Study claims unfair discipline at DPS
Padres Unidos findings say minorities targeted more often than Anglos

By Julie Poppen, Rocky Mountain News
March 24, 2005

Denver Public Schools disciplines too many students for nonviolent offenses and targets minorities more than their Anglo peers, a study to be released today says.

The study, called Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track, found that minority students were 70 percent more likely to be suspended, expelled or ticketed by police than Anglo students in the past four years.

The study is also critical of DPS' zero tolerance approach on discipline, saying it goes too far.

"I think there's a tendency to criminalize students of color," said Pam Martinez, co-director of Padres Unidos, a group that advocates for Hispanic rights in Denver. "We need to take clear, decisive action to address that and turn it around."

Padres Unidos authored the study in partnership with the Advancement Project, a national racial justice organization.

School district officials don't dispute the statistics, but do take issue with their interpretation.

"We don't on a whim - because a kid was pushing or shoving - expel," said Bob Anderson, the district's director of prevention and intervention initiatives. "Our real focus is to keep our learning environment safe."

The study found that the number of students expelled rose to 146 in 2003-2004 from 116 in 2000-2001. And that 53 percent of the expulsions in 2003-2004 were for "non-violent" acts rather than more serious transgressions such as weapons or drugs.

Over the past four years, the number of suspensions has increased to 13,423 in 2003-2004 from 9,846 in 2000-2001.

"They make it sound like we round 'em up and get 'em out of there," district spokesman Mark Stevens said. "This is safety-net city."

Officials at DPS said 90 percent of students expelled end up in the district's many alternative schools and programs.

Stevens did acknowledge a racial gap in how students are disciplined.

"Even when the (school) staff is well-represented by minorities, we still see some of these patterns," Stevens said. "It bears ongoing work and investigation."

Anderson said the district has seen more expulsions in recent years because of more serious offenses.

"The situation with drugs is up noticeably," Anderson said. "We're seeing an increased amount of kids not only in possession but using on campus."

Bullying and gang activity are increasing, and there are more reports of sexual harassment in fourth through eighth grades and sex assaults in middle schools, Anderson said.

Martinez said youths often are kicked out of school for nonviolent "subjective" offenses, such as verbal fights, obscenities, inappropriate clothing or bullying.

"Why can we not find ways to deal with these minor offenses in school and not miss class time . . . and not end up with the start of a record in the juvenile criminal justice system?" Martinez asked.

The study found that the number of DPS students ticketed or arrested by police has climbed to 1,401 in 2003-2004 from 818 in 2000-2001. Yet 68 percent of the cases heard in Denver County Court were dismissed in 2004. Data for the study were culled from East, West, North and South high schools and Lake and Rishel middle schools.

Anderson said the district is already creating some alternative discipline programs suggested in the study such as peer mediation and conflict resolution.

Stevens pointed out that three years ago the district came under intense pressure for not reporting all potential crimes to police after a 14-year-old girl was threatened with expulsion if she reported a sex assault and there was no conviction.

"There was sleeplessness around this district about what we were and weren't doing," Stevens said. "The simple message was: When in doubt, report."

Nohely Escalera, 14, a West High School student, said she was suspended for three days for wearing a low-cut top. Timothy Romero, 17, said a friend was suspended for walking the hallway at the wrong time.

"They worry more about how we dress than our education," said Escalera's cousin and West senior Nancy Figueroa, 18.

But West student Deisy Flores, 16, said students who fight should get suspended. "If you don't do anything to people who fight, they're more likely to do it again," Flores said.

Jane Grady, assistant director at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado, said DPS is "doing the right things."

"It's possible there is some overreaction from time to time," Grady said. "But in the case of incidents in Minnesota and Columbine, wouldn't we all have liked somebody to overreact at some point?"

Report's findings

A study prepared in part by Padres and Jovenes Unidos of Denver takes aim at the rising number of Denver Public Schools students who face discipline.

Number of students ticketed or arrested by police:

• 2000-01......818

• 2001-02......1,359

• 2002-03......1,390

• 2003-04......1,401

The study says:

Prevention and intervention programs are the most effective methods for addressing school violence and creating a productive learning environment.

Some solutions:

• School districts should limit suspensions, expulsions and arrests to conduct that poses a serious threat to safety.

• Schools should adopt clear and concise discipline guidelines that provide students and parents with notice of potential disciplinary actions for specific offenses.

• School districts should establish discipline oversight committees to handle complaints about school discipline practices and review discipline and arrest statistics to ensure that discipline is meted out in a fair, nondiscriminatory manner.Source: Education On Lockdown: The Schoolhouse To Jailhouse Track

Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
To print this page, select File then Print from your browser
URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_3646418,00.html

Posted by lois at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2005

Iowa: $70 million on another jail

"The facility would be not merely the largest county jail in Iowa but also the largest single penal institution in Iowa - nearly three times the capacity of the State Penitentiary in Fort Madison. It would house a combination of state and federal criminal convicts and individuals awaiting hearings or trial."

Des Moines Register
Editorials
Polk County needs new jail, unfortunately
On Tuesday, voters should approve bonds.
By REGISTER EDITORIAL BOARD
March 23, 2005

Given all its needs, it is regrettable that Polk County is proposing to spend nearly $70 million on another jail. County officials have little choice, however. They deserve voters' support in next Tuesday's special election to authorize issuing the bonds. If voters give their blessing, the county will build a new jail in northeast Polk County with capacity for 1,500 prisoners. The facility would be not merely the largest county jail in Iowa but also the largest single penal institution in Iowa - nearly three times the capacity of the State Penitentiary in Fort Madison. It would house a combination of state and federal criminal convicts and individuals awaiting hearings or trial.

The county has come a long way in the jail business. Between 1907 and 1978 the county had one jail holding 150 prisoners. Thirty beds were added in 1979. That was replaced with a new 180-bed jail built in 1984. Then the floodgates opened: Polk County today has jammed prisoners in every nook and cranny of the '84 jail and a "temporary" jail annex with capacity for 300. Still, with more than 800 prisoners on the average day, the county houses about 300 prisoners a day in other counties and a facility in Missouri.

Several reasons are cited. Illegal drugs - meth, especially - are blamed. The Iowa Legislature has steadily toughened penalties and enacted mandatory-minimum sentences. And Polk County criminal prosecutors feel duty-bound to put criminals away. That said, Polk County does a commendable job of diverting offenders from jail. It offers everything from ankle bracelets to drug courts to programs that give youthful offenders a second chance. Still, the numbers are expected to climb an average of 6 percent a year, which is reason for the state to tackle a long-overdue study of alternatives to incarceration. Meanwhile, Polk County officials have no choice but to house the prisoners who show up on the jail's doorstep each day from 33 federal, state and local law-enforcement jurisdictions.

Polk County Sheriff Dennis Anderson has put together a good plan: All county prisoners - including those now in the '84 jail, the interim facility, other county jails and the Missouri facility - would be consolidated in the new jail. That would save the county more than enough on transportation and housing charges by other jails to offset the annual principle and interest payments on the bonds. Housing an expected 200 federal prisoners would bring in additional revenue.

The new facility would be far more efficient to operate. It would have three courtrooms, to reduce commuting to the courthouse downtown. It would triple (to 194 beds) capacity for drug treatment, which the sheriff has shown to be effective in reducing recidivism. And the site has room for expansion. Besides making financial sense, housing all prisoners in Polk County would be more humane. It is wrong to send jail prisoners halfway across Iowa or to neighboring states, where they are removed from family, friends, support groups and legal aid.

For all those reasons, the county's jail plan deserves a "yes" vote on Tuesday. In the meantime, all Iowans ought to ask state and local leaders a pressing question: Why is devoting growing amounts of resources on jails and prisons better than alternatives that would help offenders straighten out their lives and become productive citizens?
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050323/OPINION03/5
03230305/1035/OPINION>

Posted by lois at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

FedCURE Summary: Federal Parole/Fed Good Time Allowance

FedCURE Summary: Federal Parole/Federal Good Time Allowances
(March 2005)
I
SUMMARY
REVIVE THE SYSTEM OF PAROLE FOR FEDERAL
PRISONERS AND INCREASE GOOD TIME
ALLOWANCES FOR FEDERAL OFFENDERS
Parole of federal offenders began after enactment of legislation on
June 25, 1910. Under the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the
United States Parole Commission retained jurisdiction over defendants whocommitted their offenses prior to November 1, 1987.

At the same time, the Act provided for the abolition of the Parole Commission on November 1,1992. The phase out of the Commission has been extended by statuteseveral times. The status of the Commission beyond November 1, 2005remains unresolved despite the Commission having taken over supervisionof all DC offenders in addition to the remaining 4,000 Old Law offenders.Presently, the Commission has over 100 employees and a budget of over $10 million. When the U. S. Sentencing Guidelines were imposed for federaldefendants whose criminal activities took place subsequent to November 1,1987, parole was eliminated. Early release was limited to approximately 47days of good time each year and the sentences themselves were increasedappreciably. The majority of federal inmates are non-violent low-level drug
offenders with very long sentences. Moreover, the majority of this segmentof the federal inmate population is being incarcerated for the first time.

Thousands of people in prison are serving life sentences for non-violentoffenses without the possibility of parole. The vast majority of these peopleare also first time offenders.Ninety-seven per cent (97%) of all federal inmates are eventuallyreleased. 45,000 federal inmates were released last year in the United States.
Presently, there are 181,000 federal detainees. The cost to house these inmates increases exponentially as they age. Total cost to U. S. taxpayersfor federal incarceration is upwards of $7.25 billion yearly. Re-entry of mostly indigent elderly inmates is significantly affecting state budgets. After many years of incarceration, inmates tend to lose all support. Theirwives and children abandon them. They lose their ability to find and keep ajob because they are banned from most jobs requiring a license and havereceived no alternative training in prison. There is no money allotted to the
federal prison system for rehabilitation programs.

Reinstitution of the old parole and good time laws would reduce the
inmate population considerably. Those statues, with minor changes, would reward those inmates who have shown positive institutional behavior with earlier release. Although early release would not be guaranteed, it would allow a second chance to those that prove they deserve that chance. Supervision of all offenders would revert once again to an existing agency with the expertise to determine the appropriate time for return to the community without endangering the public safety. It has been determined that this plan of parole and increased good time will save U. S. taxpayers upwards of $2 billion per year by taking mainly non-violent first-offenders out of the prison system earlier and enabling them to become part of the productive mainstream of American
life.
FedCURE
P.O. Box 15667
Plantation, Florida 33318-5667
URL: http://www.FedCURE.org
FAX: 408.549.8935
www.FedCURE.org
©2005 All Rights Reserved

Posted by lois at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

Ruth Gilmore Interview in Your Black Eye

For the extended interview go to:
http://www.yourblackeye.org/YBE_Interview_Gilmore_1Q05.html

YBE: What is the number one myth about prisons and prisoners in America today? How does this myth contribute to or
sustain the problems you have addressed in your answer to the previous question?

RWG: Two myths vie for first place: (a)There are so many people in prison because private corporations exploit their labor,
which they can do because of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and (b) there are so many new prisons because private
corporations team up with small-town folks hostile to prisoners (generally because they’re presumed to be racists) to create jobs
and profits. On the labor question: very few private corporations use prisoner labor because it isn’t cheap to set up a satellite
production platform in a prison. Most prisoners who work do so for a public entity (e.g., the Prison Industries Authority in
California). But many prisoners are idle, having no work, no school, no training, nothing. As for the second point: it is rare that
prison hosting towns have benefited economically from the prison, for reasons that have to do with the dynamic economic
geography of rural places – especially places where the topography is easy and the climate is mild. In addition, 95% of all prisons
and jails in the United States are publicly owned and operated. That was true 10 years ago and I suspect it will be true 10 years
from now.

These myths channel the energy of well-meaning folks into pointless projects and campaigns. Certainly, the enormous amount of
money that circulates because of prisons goes into somebody’s pocket. Closer understanding of public finance and the public
sector in general would do activists a lot of good, and save people from rushing down blind alleys. Of course, this presumes that
activists who decry over incarceration don’t simply mean they think it is bad only IF a big corporation or a few folks from a rural
community get money from the system. Making U.S. prisons 100% public, or putting them in communities where prisoners come
from, would not undo any of the generation-destroying consequences of keeping modestly educated women and men in cages for
part or all of their lives.

Posted by lois at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2005

Des Moines: Drug Penalties to Cover Religious Sites

Published March 22, 2005
A House bill would allow an extra five years in prison for offenses near places of worship.

By PERRY BEEMAN- REGISTER STAFF WRITER

People caught in illegal drug activity near churches and other religious institutions could face an extra five years in prison under legislation approved Monday by the Iowa House.

Backers said House File 254, which passed 87-11, is part of a one-two punch of anti-drug legislation that also includes a measure approved last week making it harder to buy ingredients to make methamphetamine.

The new bill applies to all illegal drugs. It would give judges the discretion to add five years in prison to other penalties if someone makes, distributes or possesses with intent to distribute illegal drugs within 1,000 feet of "religious institutions," which would join parks and other public places such as pools, schools and recreation centers, and marked school buses, in zones affected by the law.

The few critics, led by Rep. Ed Fallon, a Des Moines Democrat, said the effort to broaden the penalties is misguided and expensive. A cost analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Service Agency said the new law would lead to 1,200 new inmates a year by 2010. The agency predicted a new prison would be required by the 2008 budget year, at a construction cost of $45 million and annual operating cost of $28 million.

"Do you really support the bill?" Fallon asked Republican Rep. Dwayne Alons of Hull, who led debate. "If this is what you want, how will you pay?"

Alons said the cost analysis was flawed because other legislation, including the anti-meth bill to be signed into law today, would make it harder to make drugs here. He added: "How many of our vulnerable children would you like to leave unprotected?"

Fallon said setting a 1,000-foot buffer around "religious institutions" would cover much of the state. He asked Alons how much of Iowa the new zones would cover. Alons couldn't answer.

Fallon accused Republicans of pushing a bill that is unlikely to pass and added that the state drug-policy office opposed the new measure. Officials from that agency weren't available, and Matt Paul, spokesman for Gov. Tom Vilsack, also a Democrat, said he was unaware of the bill and declined to comment.

The bill defines religious institutions as having an active congregation. Records show there are 4,450 congregations in the state.

Copyright C 2004, The Des Moines Register.

Posted by lois at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)

Race Matters: Report Finds Predatory Lenders Set-up Shop in African American Neighborhoods

DURHAM, N.C., March 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Payday lenders who trappeople in triple digit-interest loans locate their stores in African-Americanneighborhoods in higher concentrations, according to a report by the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL).

African-American neighborhoods in North Carolina have three times as manypayday lenders per capita as white neighborhoods, even after controlling for variables associated with the industry's purported customer base such asincome and homeownership.

"This study shows in the starkest terms that African-American
neighborhoods bear the brunt of predatory payday loans -- loans that are not even legal in North Carolina," said Mark Pearce, CRL president. "This onfirms that the abusive loans made by payday lenders are not just an issueof fair and responsible lending, but are a civil rights issue as well."
Payday lending is illegal in North Carolina, but large national chainssuch as Advance America, Check 'n Go and Check Into Cash continue to operateopenly by affiliating with out-of-state banks which contend they are exemptfrom state law. Nearly 400 stores operate in North Carolina, even thoughstate law hasn't permitted them since 2001. Currently, the North CarolinaCommissioner of Banks and Attorney General are investigating payday lendingactivity.

Because CRL looked at stores owned by the national chains, the CRL reporthas implications far beyond North Carolina's borders. Twelve states, in addition to North Carolina, are subject to rent-a-bank arrangements because payday lending is not authorized by their state legislatures (Michigan,Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maine, Arkansas, Massachusetts, West Virginia, NewYork, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, and Maryland). In fact, over 3,000payday loans stores in the country are operating outside of the laws of their
state.

At a typical payday shop, a person short on money before payday borrows,$255 by writing a postdated check for $300. After two weeks the borroweroften can't repay the principal and writes yet another postdated check.Ninety-nine percent of payday loans are made to repeat borrowers, despiteindustry claims that the loans are for one-time, emergency use only. AdvanceAmerica has reported that their average number of loans per borrower was 9 per year in 2003.

CRL has previously estimated that predatory payday lending costs Americanfamilies $3.4 billion annually, a cost that is increasing rapidly as the sizeof the market explodes.

The CRL report, "Race Matters: The Concentration of Payday Lenders in
African-American Neighborhoods in North Carolina," along with charts and mapsof all metropolitan statistical areas -- illustrating the clustering patternin African-American neighborhoods -- is available from CRL athttp://www.responsiblelending.org.

ABOUT CRL -- The Center for Responsible Lending
(http://www.responsiblelending.org) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research andpolicy organization dedicated to protecting homeownership and family wealth byworking to eliminate abusive financial practices. CRL is affiliated withSelf-Help, one of the nation's largest community development financial
institutions.

SOURCE Center for Responsible Lending, Durham, NC
Web Site: http://www.responsiblelending.org

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

CO: House Panel OKs Medicaid for Drug Treatment

Rocky Mountain News

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News
March 22, 2005

Treating drug addicts, rather than just putting them in prison, will save Colorado money and give addicts a chance to rebuild their lives, a House panel decided Monday.

On a 10-1 vote, the House Health and Human Services Committee approved HB 1015, convinced that the measure would pay for itself by 2008.

The bill, sponsored by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, D-Denver, would add substance-abuse treatment to the benefits under Medicaid, the health plan for Colorado's poor.

Romanoff noted that Colorado ranks high in substance abuse and in the bottom two among states in the per-capita dollars spent on treatment.

"There's a connection," Romanoff said. "Let's try treatment for a change. If the experience of 47 other states and every study on treatment versus incarceration is wrong, this bill will repeal itself."

If the bill is approved in the House and the Senate and becomes law, about 4,500 Medicaid recipients probably will get outpatient treatment each year.

About 4,000 of Colorado's 20,000 inmates are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. Thousands of users are in county jails or on parole, getting no treatment.

The bill would provide $1,500 in substance-abuse treatment for each of the 4,500 people.

The $7 million yearly cost would be recouped by 2008 in medical savings alone, according to an analysis by the legislature's staff.

Romanoff said that doesn't include the savings to the state from housing fewer people in prison at $30,000 per year, or savings from putting fewer children in foster care, for example. It costs up to $1,500 a month to put a child of addicted parents in foster care.

A dozen people spoke in favor of the bill and none against.

Gilpin County Commissioner Jeannie Nicholson said none of the counties has enough money for treatment, and "we're paying the price in the long run."

The county foots the bill for those in greatest need and usually doesn't get reimbursed from the state or from the client. "One person paid in zucchini - that's all he had and he wanted to express his gratitude."

The clients who aren't helped often show up on sheriff's blotters for child abuse or neglect, Nicholson said.

Seventy percent of the people in Colorado's county jails have a substance abuse problem, said former Boulder County Sheriff George Epp, now executive director of County Sheriffs of Colorado.

People sentenced to jail or probation without treatment get caught in a revolving door of incarceration, he said.

Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/legislature/article/0,1299,DRMN_37_3640352,00.html

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

March 22, 2005

Lisa Fittko: Who Helped Rescue Many Who Fled the Nazis, Dies at 95

Lisa Fittko, who achieved fame, particularly in Germany, by leading Jews and members of the anti-Hitler resistance from Nazi-occupied France to Spain, died on March 12 in Chicago. She was 95.

March 21, 2005
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Correction Appended

The cause was pneumonia, said Evelyn Marsh, her niece.

Ms. Fittko emerged from a leftist, artistic family to become active in the resistance to Hitler in the early months of his rule, then fled to continue the fight in other European countries for seven years. For seven tense months in 1940 and 1941, she escorted refugees on a tortuous path over the Pyrenees mountains so they could go on to Spanish and Portuguese ports to seek passage to safe havens.

Many of the people she helped were intellectuals, artists and anti-Nazi organizers. The first refugee she helped was Walter Benjamin, a Marxist literary critic and philosopher whose work has drawn new interest in recent years because of his provocative insights on subjects from consumerism to surrealism.

But that initial mission was thwarted when the Spanish authorities ordered the group to return to France because they lacked proper exit visas, a requirement that had not been enforced in the past and was ignored in the future. Mr. Benjamin died at the age of 48 in Room No. 4 on the second floor of the Hotel de Francia, a cheap pension in Port-Bou, Spain, on Sept. 27, 1940, having apparently committed suicide.

Ms. Fittko had earlier helped the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had been her friend in Paris, get out of a prison in France.

Ms. Fittko and her husband, Hans, became part of the rescue mission of Varian Fry, an American who is credited with saving about 2,000 people, many of them artists and intellectuals, including André Breton, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst.

Miriam Hansen, a professor of English and cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago, said Ms. Fittko became well known in postwar Germany because Germans liked to find and honor people who resisted Hitler. She said Ms. Fittko's death was announced on German radio and television, and obituaries appeared in the major national newspapers. In 1986, the president of West Germany awarded her the Distinguished Medal of Merit, First Class.

In the United States, Ms. Fittko's story was eventually documented in several novels and films, including the 1998 documentary "Lisa Fittko: But We Said We Will Not Surrender."

She wrote two books about her experiences. One, "Escape Through the Pyrenees," which was first published in West Germany in 1985, won that country's award for the political book of the year. It was translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and, in 1991, into English by Northwestern University Press. The same press in 1993 published her "Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940."

Lisa Ekstein was born in 1909 in Uzhgorod in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire; it later became part of Czechoslovakia, then part of the Soviet Union and today is part of Ukraine. Most of her childhood was spent in Budapest and Vienna; she was evacuated and sent to the Netherlands with other children for a year during World War I. After the war, her family moved to Berlin.

Through her father, a writer and a publicist for avant-garde artists there, she met many members of the Weimar intelligentsia.

While still in high school, she joined what Ms. Hansen characterized as a Communist organization. She wrote and distributed leaflets protesting torture in Nazi prisons.

At 24 she was working as a secretary and went to a rally to see Hitler. She was reprimanded for not raising her arm in salute. She told an interviewer from The Vancouver Sun in 1999 that her failure to do so was hardly intentional.

"I was stupid, but not that stupid," she said.

She was soon pursued by the Gestapo, and in 1933, she fled to Prague, where she met Hans Fittko, a fellow exile and an even more committed leftist whom the Nazis sought to kill. They married on their odyssey through, among other places, Basel and Amsterdam, ending up in Paris in 1938. There, they continued helping refugees.

After Germany invaded France, Ms. Fittko was detained for a few months in a concentration camp for women at Gurs, France, along with others who had lived in Germany. It was there she aided her friend and fellow prisoner Hannah Arendt by helping to supply her with a stolen release document.

After the Fittkos found each other again, they made their way to Marseille, dodging the French authorities who were collaborating with the Germans. They planned to escape through Spain but separated because the Spanish had begun arresting men who they feared might make their way to Britain to fight Hitler.

Mr. Fittko tried to find sea passage from Marseille to Casablanca. His wife, as originally planned, had gone to the border to find a way to escape by land. In September 1940, Walter Benjamin knocked on the door of her room in Port-Vendres, saying Mr. Fittko had told him to ask her for help.

With the assistance of a local socialist mayor, who gave her an old map, she led Mr. Benjamin and two other refugees across the mountains to Port-Bou, a Spanish border town. Mr. Benjamin died there after swallowing some of the 50 morphine tablets he had earlier split with his friend Arthur Koestler.

Mr. Benjamin had been carrying a heavy, bulging briefcase that he told Ms. Fittko contained "the only copy of his latest writing." She wrote that he said it was "more important than I am, more important than myself."

The briefcase was lost after his death and its contents remain unknown.

For years people suspected that it might have been his lost work on the Parisian arcades, iron-and-glass-roofed shopping corridors, which provoked penetrating philosophical insights on the part of Mr. Benjamin. But those papers were discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where Mr. Benjamin's friend the essayist Georges Bataille had hidden them from the Nazis. They were published in West Germany in 1982.

Howard Eiland, who translated them as "The Arcades Project," published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, said the contents of the lost briefcase remained a mystery. He said, "This sounds like it was something completely different that no one knows about."

Ms. Fittko was soon joined on the French side of the border by her husband, who had not been able to find sea passage. They delayed their own escape when Mr. Fry asked them to help take refugees into Spain. They pretended to be vineyard workers and took people across the mountains on what was called the F route (for Fittko) two or three times a week for seven months. The number of those they helped is sometimes estimated in the hundreds; not one was caught, they said.

The Fittkos eventually escaped to Cuba, then went on to Chicago, where Ms. Fittko's brother lived. Mr. Fittko died in 1960, and Ms. Fittko left no immediate survivors.

She returned to Spain several times to look for Mr. Benjamin's lost briefcase, but never found it.
Correction: March 22, 2005, Tuesday

An obituary yesterday about Lisa Fittko, the anti-Hitler activist, misspelled the surname of the French essayist who helped hide the writings of Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic and philosopher. He was Georges Bataille, not Batailles.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |

Posted by lois at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

VT: DOC says they are getting better health care with PHS

Keeping Contracts Under Control in Corrections

By Meghan Mandeville, News Research Reporter
March 21, 2005 http://www.corrections.com/news/program/index.aspx

Providing quality healthcare and lowering costs are challenges that
drive many corrections agencies towards private companies. But once the contract is signed and the deal is done, departments can't turn a blind eye to what's going on in their facilities; they need to manage those contracts with private service providers to ensure that they are getting what they bargained for.

Vermont learned this lesson the hard way when seven inmate deaths in a year's time prompted the DOC and the State Auditor's Office to take a closer look at healthcare, among other things, at the state's
correctional facilities.  Both the Auditor's Report and the report
ordered by the Vermont Agency of Human Services found that the DOC
needed to step up its contract oversight.

Chief among those contracts that required better monitoring was the
department's arrangement with Correctional Medical Services (CMS), the state's inmate healthcare provider.  According to the Auditor's Report, the state suffered financially from ineffective monitoring of the CMS contract and had no real way to evaluate the quality of the services the company was providing to inmates.

"We didn't belly up to the bar to monitor them," said Andrew Pallito,
Management Executive for the DOC.  "[But] I think we have made some
improvements."

Since the reports were released last year, the Vermont DOC has committed to improving the way it does business with private contractors.  The agency believes it took a step in the right direction in early 2005 when it entered into a contractual agreement with a new healthcare provider, Prison Health Services (PHS). 

"We learned a lot from the Auditor's Report and our own investigation
into the contracts," said John Perry, Director of Planning for the DOC.  "One of the results was that we rebid [the healthcare contract] and now have a new provider."

Perry said that, with PHS, the agency is getting a higher quality of
healthcare at a better price.  The new contract is also far more
restrictive towards the provider, with controls built into it to help
the DOC keep a better handle on the medical services being provided to it inmates, he said.

According to Michael LaFaive, Director of Fiscal Policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan, it is essential for agencies that are working with private companies to design contracts that detail exactly what is expected from those providers.

"I must caution that privatization should be done right or not at all," said LaFaive.  "It requires an open bidding process and careful review of the duties to be performed by both parties and, in instances where human health is involved, careful monitoring of the contract to ensure that each party is living up to its responsibilities, not only to each other, but to the patients in their care."

LaFaive said that there should be a system of checks and balances set up so that the public corrections agency is able to keep close watch over the private entity that is providing its healthcare services.  He recommended that one person in the state agency be responsible for
monitoring the contract, rather than spreading that job over the entire operation.

In Vermont, the DOC has taken that approach and is in the process of
hiring a contract monitor, who will be dedicated to overseeing the
department's largest contracts: its medical and mental health services.

According to Pallito, that is just one of the changes the DOC is making to ensure that it works more in unison with PHS than it did with CMS.  The department also added a full-time medical director, who is an MD and is responsible for overseeing the medical and mental health contracts and the delivery of those services from an administrative and clinical point-of-view, he said. 

Additionally, Perry explained, the DOC and the state Health Department have joined forces.  While the details of the agreement between the agencies are still being worked out, the goal is for a quality assurance team from the health department to monitor the quality of healthcare services inmates are receiving in Vermont's prisons, he said.

"[The medical director's] team and the team from the health department will provide external and internal oversight over the whole health and mental health contract process," Perry said.

Pallito added that the healthcare team will likely be charged with
reviewing patient charts and waiting lists, determining if care is
timely and appropriate and assessing whether or not patients' conditions are improving over time.

"The team's job is to really focus on the offender's health from the
offender's point-of-view," he said.

While some positions are being added to ensure that the contract with
PHS is being monitored appropriately, new procedures are also being put into place to ensure that the DOC does not have the same issues it did with CMS.

According to the Auditor's Report, one problem the DOC ran into with CMS was when the company billed the state for full healthcare staff coverage when the staffing was not always sufficient at all correctional facilities.  To avoid this from happening with PHS, Pallito said that the DOC has implemented a dual identification system to determine when healthcare employees are actually at work inside correctional facilities.

According to Pallito, staff members must sign in when they enter a
facility and PHS has also installed an electronic record system, which requires that employees also swipe an ID card when they walk in.

The goal of all of these new mechanisms is to ensure that the PHS is
lives up to its contractual obligations and that the inmates are getting the care they need.

"The importance of monitoring this contract and all of our contracts is to make sure that the offenders are getting the services that we are purchasing," said Pallito.  "Paramount in this whole thing is offender health."

Posted by lois at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)

10,000 "ghost detainees"

For the entire story go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1440836,00.html

'One huge US jail'

Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace.

Excerpts:

What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002, it was essentially an offshore gulag - beyond the reach of the US constitution and even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004. The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or treaties. The military commissions, which had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal". Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000.

The roots of the prison network can be traced to the legal wrangles that began as soon as the first terror suspects were rounded up just weeks after the September 11 attacks. As CIA agents and US forces began to capture suspected al-Qaida fighters in the war in Afghanistan, Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, looked for ways to "dispense justice swiftly, close to where our forces may be fighting, without years of pre-trial proceedings or post-trial appeals".

Posted by lois at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

Income---but at a Cost

Published: Mar 22, 2005

By BARRY SAUNDERS, Staff Writer

Step right up, folks, and take a swig of Dr. Buzzard's magical elixir. C'mon
-- it tastes dandy and is guaranteed to cure whatever ails you, from poverty to bad water, maybe even ring around the collar. The potion being peddled, in this instance to residents of Tabor City, is a new prison that proponents claim will increase tax revenues and income, expand water service and improve electrical service to the city's 2,500 residents.

Because nearly 25 percent of Tabor City's residents -- almost double the national average -- live in poverty, it's hard to imagine the Columbus County town turning down any legal means of boosting its economy.

But a prison?

The 2000 census shows that the average income for Tabor City residents is $13,000 a year. The national average is $22,000. It could just be a coincidence, but I doubt it, that an Associated Press story noted that only 63 percent of the town's residents have a high school education.

Here's something to ponder: If a prison can do all that is being expected of this one, just imagine what a school could do.

Alas, there is more political capital to be earned from building a prison, which enables politicians to pimp criminals, than there is in championing schools and education.

It's easy to pooh-pooh a city's trafficking in human misery when neither your town nor you face the economic devastation afflicting Tabor City.

Phil Freelon, a friend of mine and founder of the Freelon Group architectural firm in Durham, faced hard economic times 15 years ago -- as does anyone who starts a new business -- but he refused then, and refuses now, to design prisons.

Even if, I asked, he was broke and the future of his company depended upon prisons as a source of lucre?

"Fortunately, we never got to that point," Freelon said. "We've been blessed to the point where we never had to make a choice of doing a prison or putting food on the table."

Besides feeling that "our talents can be better used upstream, building schools," he said a reason for his rejection of prison design is the "disproportionate number of African-American men" in prison.

Right on.

There are, to be sure, practical benefits to having 1,000 prison inmates as neighbors. For one thing, guards earn higher wages -- they start at about $25,000 -- than the average suds buster or ditch digger.

For another, no matter how bad your day at work, when you drive home you can gaze over at the prison and know that somebody -- possibly everybody -- in there is having a worse day than you are.

Unless, that is, Sweet Thang is on the warpath because you didn't take out the trash or forgot her birthday.

Since the prison is a done deal and is scheduled to open in 2007, let me offer the people of Tabor City a piece of advice: Don't make the same mistake as Durham, which made its jail the best-looking, or at least most dominating, structure in town. Tuck that sucker back up in the woods where nobody can see it.

Tabor City residents have to eat, so it's unfair to begrudge them welcoming a steady revenue source to their town.

But man, there's got to be a better way than that.

Call Barry at 836-2811 or send him e-mail at barrys@newsobserver.com.

Shortcut to: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/saunders/story/2241357p-8621787c.html

Posted by lois at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)

Don't Go Directly to Jail

http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2005/commentary05032103.htm

Don't Go Directly to Jail

By Lawrence Meyers
March 21, 2005

Prisons are a strange concept when you think about it. They're groups of buildings designed expressly to hold people whom society would prefer not to have around for a while. The idea of shipping off undesirables is nothing new, of course. The British sent their naughty children halfway around the planet to an island called Australia. No fuss, no muss, no state bonds to pay for it all.

In America, for better or worse, somebody will always find a way to make money off just about anything. So it stands to reason that prisons would be yet another way. See, prisons are just another money pit for state and federal governments, another thing they would rather not have to deal with. If something bad happens in a privately run facility -- say, for example, a prison break or some claim of prisoner abuse -- the state isn't on the hook. The private operator's insurance picks it up. It's a good cost-saving measure.

Warring wardens
Four major public companies currently deal in this unseemly business: Cornell Corrections (NYSE: CRN), Corrections Corporation of America (NYSE: CXW), Correctional Services (Nasdaq: CSCQ), and The Geo Group (NYSE: GGI). It's worth looking at these companies for one very unfortunate reason: There will always be crime. Just as there will always be car accidents. Just as people will always need food. Each of these businesses is different, of course, so before we incarcerate ourselves in a prison of our own making, we'd better check out the facilities first.

One of the problems with the prison industry is how revenues are generated. Generally, a company signs short-term contracts with state and federal agencies to run their prisons for them. Fees typically get paid to the company on a per-inmate basis, with certain price floors. The problem with this setup is that once a prison hits full capacity -- and many have done so
-- the company has maxed out its revenue opportunities at that prison, unless it can negotiate higher fees upon renewal. That means prison companies must constantly be trying to secure new contracts, expand current prisons, or buy up and possibly have to renovate other prisons. That makes for a lot of cash flow drain.

The other issue is costs. Prisons are expensive to run, and the need to carry expensive liability insurance is a big part of that cost. There's a lot of overhead, too. Remember, prisons have to provide everything from linens and clothes to food and guards. In some ways, prison costs aren't too different from the costs a hotel must bear. Of course, hotels have higher profit margins and don't need people to patrol the grounds for escapees.

With the overhead and revenue concerns, it helps to be a big player. Corrections Corporation owns 50% of the beds in the industry, and in a business like this, reputation really does make a difference. When it comes to safeguarding the community, the state and federal folks like to stick with established prison operators that have not had problems, so Corrections is a good place for many governments to go to first. With almost 14,000 employees, an enterprise value of $2.4 billion, and a decent profit margin of 5.46%, Corrections looks good at first glance. Factoring in analysts' expected 16% earnings growth from this year to next pretties up the picture even more.

But, alas, the story doesn't end there. Although the stock trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 24 -- a reasonable premium for the big player in the biz -- there's a problem on the balance sheet. Remember when I said this business is cash flow intensive? Corrections' free cash flow was negative $15 million over the trailing 12 months, although, to be fair, I should mention that those cash flows include considerable expansion capital expenditures. (Some analysts don't subtract expansion capital expenditures, which are optional expenditures, from operating cash flow when arriving at
FCF.) With a billion dollars in debt and only $60 million in total cash on the balance sheet, this is not a company looking poised to pay off much debt anytime soon. I have reason enough to pass.

The Geo Group, the second-largest player with an EV of $437 million, has some slightly better metrics than Corrections Corporation. For one, the debt load is not as bad. It has $85 million in cash and $241 million in debt. Its trailing-12-month FCF is a very impressive $47 million. Earnings are set to grow 20% over the next year, according to analyst estimates, from $1.49 to $1.80. But with a stock price of $29.50, Geo sports a YPEG (year-ahead P/E and growth ratio) of 1.50. Too pricey for me.

What also caught my suspicion is a thin profit margin just north of 2% and a whopping $160 million in capital expenditures in 2002 ($6 million to $10 million might be a more normal figure based on the company's habits). But a good portion of that amount was due to a business transaction in which the company essentially bought out a partner in the business. (You may remember Geo Group as once being called Wackenhut.) All in all, I would keep my eye on Geo Group. I'd like to see what the next year brings to its expansion plans and contract renewals. It services international customers as well, and that opens up another whole arena to expansion.

Of some interest is Cornell Corrections, but not for reasons investors might like. The Securities and Exchange Commission just recently cleared the company of any wrongdoing regarding a restatement of its 2001 and 2002 earnings. Hedge fund Pirate Capital scooped up a 13% stake in the company and was a major factor in forcing out the CEO. According to the Nov. 22, 2004, issue of New York Metro, Pirate wants the company sold and thinks it can fetch as much as $20 a share. (It currently trades around $13.50.) Six other hedge funds are, according to the article, also circling the company.

Finally, we have teeny Correctional Services, which is so small ($25 million market cap) that no analysts cover it. It's showing just a small profit and a negative FCF from the trailing 12 months, so it doesn't appear terribly enticing, at least based on a cursory look.

The final lockdown?
If I had to choose one of these companies as my cellmate, well, I'd probably first ask to be moved to solitary. Corrections Corporation looks overpriced. Geo Group is worth watching. Cornell Corrections is perfect for the purely speculative investor. And for most investors, Correctional Services won't be worth watching for a while.

Despite the lack of compelling values in the prison industry, businesses arising from government outsourcing can be good things to keep tabs on. If you can find a business that takes advantage of government's generally deep pockets and weak fiscal restraint, it's worth your time to investigate it further.

Fool contributor Lawrence Meyers writes about prisons and once visited Alcatraz. He owns no stocks mentioned in this article. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Posted by lois at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2005

More..ACLU Report: US Drug Laws Harm Women

March 17, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- America's war on drugs is inflicting deep and disproportionate harm on women -- most of them mothers -- who are filling prisons in ever-rising numbers despite their typically minor roles in drug rings, the American Civil Liberties Union and two other groups contend in a major new report.

The report, ``Caught in the Net,'' is being released Thursday as the focus of a two-day national conference in New York, bringing together criminal justice officials, sentence-reform activists and other experts to consider its package of proposed legislative and policy changes. The report recommends expansion of treatment programs geared toward women, says incarceration should be a last resort, and urges more vigorous efforts to maintain ties between imprisoned mothers and their children.

``Drug convictions have caused the number of women behind bars to explode, leaving in the rubble displaced children and overburdened families,'' the document says.

The number of imprisoned women is increasing at a much faster rate than the number of men, mostly because of tougher drug laws. There were 101,000 women in state and federal prisons in 2003, an eight-fold increase since 1980; roughly one-third were drug offenders, compared to about one-fifth of male inmates.

``Many of the drug conspiracy and accomplice laws were created to go after the kingpins,'' said the ACLU women's rights project director, Lenora Lapidus, a lead author of the report. ``But women who may simply be a girlfriend or wife are getting caught in the web as well, and sent to prison for very long times when all they may have done is answer the telephone.''

Lapidus acknowledged that legislation addressing the situation would probably need to be gender-neutral. But she and her fellow authors -- from New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice and the advocacy group Break the Chains -- make a detailed case that existing drug laws ``have had specific, devastating and disparate effects on women.''

Among their contentions:

--Many women are ensnared in drug investigations despite peripheral involvement, sometimes solely because they failed to turn in their partners to police. Sentencing laws fail to consider factors such as physical abuse or economic dependence that may draw women into drug abuse or deter them from notifying authorities of a partner's drug activity.

--Treatment programs, to the extent they exist, often are tailored for men and prove relatively ineffective for women.

--Black and Hispanic women are imprisoned for drug offenses at higher rates than white women even though their rates of illegal drug use are comparable. Factors include prosecutors' decisions, policing tactics and selective testing of pregnant minority women for drug use.

--Most imprisoned women, and relatively few imprisoned men, leave behind children for whom they were the sole primary caretaker. The separation can be shattering for mothers, who may lose parental rights, and for children, thousands of whom are placed in foster care at state expense.

The report makes an economic case for change, contending that the combined annual cost of imprisoning a mother and placing a child in foster care is seven times the cost of an intensive one-year drug treatment program.

Several mothers jailed for drug offenses are attending the conference, including Dorothy Gaines, whose 19-year prison sentence for cocaine conspiracy was commuted by President Clinton in 2000 after she served six years. Gaines says her son, Phillip, now 20, was devastated by the separation.

``He was an honor roll student, but when I went to prison, he just lost it,'' Gaines said in a telephone interview from Alabama. ``Even when I finally came home, he tried to kill himself. He's still bearing the scars.''

The issues raised in the report are difficult ones for criminal justice officials as their states debate building new prisons or diverting more nonviolent drug offenders into treatment.

``When there's a woman defendant with children, we generally try everything we can to put her into rehab rather than prison,'' said Michael Arcuri, district attorney in New York's Oneida County and former president of the state DA's association.

``On the other hand, we're supposed to treat everyone the same,'' he said. ``You see more women in prison because you see more women selling drugs. Some of them feel that, because we were softer on women in the past, they'll get some sort of easier treatment.''

Bruce Bullington, a Florida State University criminologist, said drug-offending mothers may win sympathy from some activists but often are viewed harshly by lawmakers.

``It's not just an issue of drugs, but of embedded moral values,'' he said. ``We demonize these women, and it comes back to haunt us in a variety of ways.''

^------

On the Net:

http://www.fairlaws4families.org
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Drug-Laws-Women.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Posted by lois at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2005

Treating Youth as Adults Means They are More Likely to go to Prison

Study Examines Juvenile Justice System

By GREG SUKIENNIK
The Associated Press
Monday, March 14, 2005; 6:04 AM

BOSTON - Treating offenders under the age of 18 as adults in the criminal justice system makes it more likely they will re-offend when they emerge from prison, according to a national study of youthful offender laws.

The Coalition for Juvenile Justice, in a study titled "Childhood on Trial," said "adult time for adult crime" policies have failed.

The organization called for changes in state and federal laws. It hopes to restore the authority of juvenile court judges to determine if juveniles should be tried as adults and to hold the boundary between childhood and adulthood at age 18.

washingtonpost.com

The group said the judicial system's responsibilities are to give young offenders opportunities to make positive changes and set things right, while meting out punishment fairly.

"One way to do so is to ensure that juvenile offenders are provided with the rehabilitative services and resources generally available in the juvenile justice system - and to reserve the use of adult sanctions for those older, chronic juvenile offenders for whom the juvenile courts resources have been exercised and exhausted."

In 13 states, defendants over the age of 17 - or age 16, in Connecticut, New York and North Carolina - are sent into the adult criminal justice system for any offense.

The study said that in states with large numbers of youths in adult prisons, those youths are more likely to re-offend when they emerge from prison. It said teenagers in adult prisons are more vulnerable to adult criminals and are often mentored by powerful inmates, resulting in them being released as hardened, angry and possessing increased criminal skills.

The study was scheduled to be released Monday at Northeastern University. The authors said they chose Boston because lawmakers in three New England states - Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire - are considering changes to their youthful offender laws, while those in Massachusetts, where the age of adulthood is 17, are not.

Other states where the age limit is 17 include Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin.

"New Englanders are quick learners," said David Doi, executive director of the Washington-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice. "They see from evidence in their states what has been shown to be true nationwide: 'adult crime for adult time' policies which sends hundreds of thousands of teen offenders into the adult criminal justice system each year have failed."

----

On the Web:http://www.juvjustice.org

Posted by lois at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

ACLU Report: U.S.Drug Laws Harm Women

1.)ACLU Report: U.S. Drug Laws Harm Women
http://www.rednova.com/news/health/136357/aclu_report_us_drug_laws_harm_women/index.html
”NEW YORK -- America's war on drugs is inflicting deep and disproportionate harm on women - most of them mothers - who are filling prisons in ever-rising numbers despite their typically minor roles in drug rings, the American Civil Liberties Union and two other groups contend in a major new report. ” [Break the Chains and the Brennan Center for Justice co-sponsored the report]
Read the Report:
Caught in the Net: The Impact of Drug Policies on Women & Families
http://www.fairlaws4families.org

Posted by lois at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

AL: More people incarcerated for drug possession than all other crimes combined

Non-violent convicts fill state prisons
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer
Alabama courts have sent more people to prison for drug possession than for the violent crimes of murder, manslaughter, rape and robbery combined. Second to possession is drug distribution.

None of the top five crimes for which people are sent to prison are violent offenses, according to an analysis of five years of data in the Alabama Sentencing Commission's 2005 report.

That breakdown could change if legislators adopt a commission proposal aimed at sending fewer nonviolent offenders to prison, to make room for violent criminals.

"The war on drugs needs to encompass what you do with them once you catch them, and obviously prison may not be the most effective alternative. Long-term drug treatment for some offenders may well be the most effective weapon in the war on drugs," said Rosa Davis, chief assistant attorney general who works on the commission.

"Some of them just need to be locked up. The drug users may need treatment," she said.

The proposal, called Sentencing Standards, would involve a point system based on an offender's current offense and criminal history. Separate worksheets for drug, property and personal offenses would cover 26 crimes.

Take an arrest for selling marijuana. The offender would get six points for the crime. He also could receive points for prior adult felonies, juvenile felonies, misdemeanor convictions, probation or parole revocations, and use of weapons. A sentence other than prison, either work release, probation or community corrections with rehabilitation, is recommended for a score of one to seven in a drug crime. Prison is recommended for eight or more points, with the sentence length determined by another worksheet.

The standards also could reduce wide sentencing disparities for the same crime. Now, a judge in one county might give a 10-year sentence for a drug crime that draws an 18-month sentence somewhere else.

The standards would be voluntary for judges.

Not conforming:

The commission's report is one of several studies and analyses of the state's prisons released in recent weeks as the Legislature deals with the General Fund budget, of which the prison system is a big chunk.

The reports show that Alabama's criminal justice practices are out of step with much of the country, giving the state the nation's fifth-highest incarceration rate. Of 8,800 admissions to Alabama's prisons in 2004, 4,298 people were locked up for third-degree burglary, theft, felony DUI and drug possession or distribution, the commission's report shows.

Another new report, by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, points to lengthy drug sentences as a key reason Alabama's prison population has jumped from 6,000 prisoners in 1979 to 27,000 now.

"Alabama's sentencing laws, ineffective use of probation, unregulated and politicized parole procedures and an underfunded prison system have conspired to create one of the highest incarceration rates in the world," the EJI, a Montgomery law firm that represents poor people and advocates for prison alternatives, states in its report Part One of Criminal Justice Reform in Alabama.

Urges mandatory use:

In the last 20 years, drug offenders in prison have increased 478 percent, while other offenders have increased 119 percent, EJI found. The average length of a drug sentence in Alabama was more than eight years, compared with 4½ years in the rest of the country.

The group makes a number of suggestions, some of which dovetail with the commission's proposals. But EJI Executive Director Bryan Stevenson said he believes the Sentencing Standards should be mandatory. "I'm not as confident that any kind of voluntary scheme is going to get us where we need to go," he said.

EJI also singles out the disparity between drug possession sentences and DUI sentences. People could spend more time on a first drug possession offense than on a fourth DUI conviction.

Nearly 75 percent of people convicted of felony DUI - which means they've had at least three previous DUI convictions - are white men. Fifty-nine percent of people imprisoned for marijuana possession are black men.

"We know both locally and nationwide that alcohol-related offenses are much more dangerous, much more costly, much more threatening to public safety than simple possession," Stevenson said. But, he said, "It's an offense that doesn't have the kind of race and class features that marijuana issues do."

EJI suggests that sentences for marijuana possession should be reduced to mirror those for DUI.

Maintaining the truth:

The proposed Sentencing Standards would come close to doing so.

The Sentencing Standards bill has passed out of both the House and Senate judiciary committees with little opposition.

Although the standards would reduce the number of people sent to prison and the sentence lengths for nonviolent offenders, they also would usher in more "truth in sentencing," which could keep some inmates in prison longer. Truth in sentencing, which prosecutors and victims have called for, means offenders serve their full sentences instead of getting early paroles.

With Alabama's prisons at 200 percent of capacity, the state cannot handle the explosion in population that other states have seen with truth-in-sentencing laws, Davis said.

"Truth in sentencing is what everyone wants, and we're trying to do that while protecting public safety - without any money," she said.
E-mail: ccrowder@bhamnews.com
Copyright 2005 al.com. All Rights Reserved.

Posted by lois at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

Baltimore: 52% of African American men in their 20's incarcerated or under criminal justice superivsion

Study: 1 in 5 young black city men in jail
By Ryan Davis
Baltimore Sun Staff
March 15, 2005

More than half of Baltimore's African-American men in their 20s are either incarcerated or under criminal justice system supervision, according to a study being released today by a Washington-based research organization.

The Justice Policy Institute, which favors alternatives to prison, argues in its report that much of the money spent on incarceration would be better spent on drug treatment and community redevelopment. The report combines Maryland incarceration statistics with conclusions from selected sociological studies to raise questions about the efficacy of imprisonment in lowering crime.

"The basic idea is there are too many people locked up," said Eric Lotke, co-author of the report and research director for the Justice Policy Institute. "We basically said, 'We've got to tell people about this. We've got to connect these dots.'"

While many in law enforcement expressed dismay yesterday with the study's statistical findings, some argued that detention remains a vital crime-fighting component.

According to the institute's report, there are about 25,000 black men in Baltimore between the ages of 20 and 30, and 52 percent of them are incarcerated or on parole or probation. Statewide, nearly 10 percent of black men in their 20s are incarcerated in either jail or prison. In the city, the percentage is nearly 20 percent, the study found.

State corrections officials confirmed yesterday the accuracy of the incarceration figures used to derive most of those statistics.

"You've got one in five young black men living in a cage," Lotke said. "I saw that 'one in five' figure for Baltimore, and I wanted to cry."

Lotke faulted police, lawmakers, prosecutors, state and city government, and judges, contending that they are running on "autopilot" and continue to lock up more offenders, even while crime is declining.

Some officials cautioned against using the study's figures to draw conclusions about the dispensation of justice.

"You need to look a little deeper before you make one big blanket statement," said Raquel Guillory, a spokeswoman for Mayor Martin O'Malley.

She said that since being elected in 1999, the mayor has more than doubled the slots available in city-sponsored drug treatment - from 11,000 to 25,000 - and has overseen the creation of early-disposition court, which is intended to quickly resolve lesser crimes.

Shareese DeLeaver, a spokeswoman for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., said the governor has been working to refocus the corrections system on education, treatment and training.

"Any statistic of this nature bothers the administration," DeLeaver said, "as it's a sign we can do better on several levels - state government, federal government and local government."

State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy was "alarmed" by the statistic, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office said. The city state's attorney's office attempts to target violent offenders for prosecution while nonviolent drug offenders are diverted into treatment, spokeswoman Margaret T. Burns said.

City police said they disagree with the assertion made by the Justice Policy Institute that "crime continues to rise in Baltimore neighborhoods most impacted by the justice system." Police spokesman Matt Jablow said that over the past five years, crime significantly decreased in virtually all city neighborhoods, especially those hardest hit by violence.

Lotke, who wrote the report with Jason Ziedenberg, conceded that the contention was based on a previous study that used crime data from 1990 through 2000, not through this year.

The new report expands on a 2003 study by the same organization. The two-year-old study found that nine of every 10 people imprisoned for drug crimes in Maryland were black, and that the disparity between whites and blacks serving drug sentences was growing.

In the most recent report, the statistics about the high percentage of blacks in prison are combined with conclusions drawn in previously published studies. One study found that neighborhood demographic changes - such as those created when so many young men are incarcerated - did not necessarily lower crime in certain violence-ridden sections of Baltimore.

The institute's report argues that the money spent on incarcerating an inmate - which Lotke estimates at $22,000 per year - could be better spent attacking social ills. He challenged public officials to demonstrate that money spent on prisons is getting the desired results.

"I feel like the burden is on them," he said.

Sun staff writer Gus G. Sentementes contributed to this article.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the numbers

African-American men in their 20s in Baltimore:

Total population: 25,215

In prison: 3,226

In jail: 1,269

On probation or parole: 8,680 -

Compiled by the Justice Policy Institute using U.S. Census data from 2000, and Maryland Department of Correctional Services and Public Safety data from October 2004
Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.incarcerate15mar15,1,471630.story?coll=bal-local-headlines

Posted by lois at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2005

Corrections Statistics by State

Corrections Statistics by State
This interactive Web application provides state-level corrections statistics and charts showing national rankings. The site provides detailed statistics covering crime, population, incarceration, and community corrections. See how your state compares to other states and the national average. (NIC) For more information, visit: http://www.nicic.org/WebTopic_346.htm
A very handy site.

Posted by lois at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)

DA Petitioned to Re-Visit School Zone Charges

By Carrie Saldo - Berkshire Eagle Staff

Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - GREAT BARRINGTON, MA -- More than 400 South County residents, business owners and high school students have signed a petition asking District Attorney David F. Capeless to reconsider seeking a minimum mandatory two-year jail term for seven of the 19 young people arrested last September on a variety of drug charges.

A letter being circulated with the petition from Concerned Citizens for Appropriate Justice asks that so-called school-zone charges be reconsidered only for those seven charged with small-scale marijuana distribution.

In all, 19 people age 17 to 24, the majority of whom live in South County, were arrested on charges ranging from marijuana possession to distribution of ketamine, a powerful horse tranquilizer. The majority of those arrested were also charged with committing a drug violation in a drug-free school zone.

State law requires judges to sentence those convicted of a school-zone charge to a minimum of two years in jail. A decision whether to levy the charge in the first place lies with the district attorney.

"Our contention is not that criminal acts should go without consequences, but that not all of these young people should be looking at a minimum of two years in jail," the letter reads.

"Punishment should be made in proportion to the crimes. Two years in jail is too harsh a penalty for a teenager with no criminal record who is involved in selling a small quantity of marijuana," the letter continues.

Erik Bruun, a member of Concerned Citizens for Appropriate Justice, said the petition and more than 400 signatures were sent to Capeless on Monday.

Yesterday, Capeless said he received the letter and petition and planned to meet with the members of Concerned Citizens for Appropriate Justice in the next few weeks.

"I want to sit and discuss this issue with these people and I don't want to rush to any judgment," said Capeless.

Capeless said his office is regularly contacted by groups and individuals who both agree and disagree with the way cases are handled.

He said the office had also received calls from people who support the planned prosecution for this series of cases.

Concerned Citizens for Appropriate Justice has been circulating the petition for about two weeks, Bruun said.

"We were really trying to do this discreetly and keep it out of the media," he said. "It is better not to engage in a dialogue like this through the press. This is about trying to express and understand the profoundness of the problem and come up with an equitable solution."

The letter suggests that a combination of "probation, public service, and drug treatment" could have a lasting positive effect "at a far lower cost in both human and fiscal terms."

"There is widespread and growing recognition that mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for nonviolent drug offenses, do not serve the public interest and do not deter the behavior they were intended to address," the letter reads.

Bruun said the petition and letter are ways for citizens to express their opinions about the situation.

"Many people haven't had an avenue to express their concerns," he said. "... Do we want as a community to support dishing out justice in that one-size-fits-all approach?"

In January 2004, police began an eight-month investigation in response to several incidents of violent behavior in the Taconic parking lot, which is in front of the Triplex Cinema complex.

During a September crackdown by town police and the Berkshire County Drug Task Force, an undercover state trooper conducted "buy-and-bust" operations centered around the parking lot of the former Taconic Lumber building.

Over several months, undercover police bought marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine, mostly in the downtown Taconic parking lot area. The location is within 1,000 feet of school property that has been declared drug free by local officials.

Some of those arrested are facing multiple school-zone charges.

Bruun said he understands the frustration that merchants, the public and law enforcement experience over the problems in the parking lot. And he is interested in hearing specific details about the various cases.

On Monday, Mount Everett High School senior Becky Kuhn read the letter aloud to fellow students in a morning English class. Following her reading she fielded questions and discussed the letter with about 20 students and asked that they sign the petition.

"This is an attempt to try to make a change," said Kuhn. "I'm not condoning what [the defendants] did. But to change them I don't think sending them to jail will be the best way to deal with it."

Many of the students said they were concerned the minimum penalty may be relaxed for all of those involved.

"If they did go to jail I think it would set a good example," said senior Lindy Marcel. "If you sell drugs in a school zone it is not OK and you go to jail."

The majority of the cases are proceeding in Central Berkshire District Court.

Bruun said many of the cases are scheduled for trial in May. Capeless declined to comment on the individual cases.

Alexandra Brenner, 17, of State Road, Great Barrington, charged with possession of marijuana, submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a guilty finding at her March 10 trial.

Her case was continued without a finding to March 9, 2006. She was ordered to be evaluated at the Brien Center, not use drugs or alcohol, submit to random screens and pay $21 per month to probation.

Carrie Saldo can be reached at csaldo@berkshireeagle.com or at (413) 528-3660.

Posted by lois at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

NY Campaign for Telephone Justice--Calendar of Events

The New York Campaign for Telephone Justice has been busy the last few months, and we wanted to bring in the warm weather of spring by getting back in touch and updating you on what we have been up to, and how you can get involved. The current contract between New York State and MCI ends in March 2006, and we need all your support in ending this unjust contract and bringing choice, affordability and quality service to the friends and family members of people incarcerated throughout New York State! Here's how we're hoping that you can show your support:

The New York Campaign for Telephone Justice has been busy the last few months, and we wanted to bring in the warm weather of spring by getting back in touch and updating you on what we have been up to, and how you can get involved. The current contract between New York State and MCI ends in March 2006, and we need all your support in ending this unjust contract and bringing choice, affordability and quality service to the friends and family members of people incarcerated throughout New York State! Here's how we're hoping that you can show your support:

Check out our new campaign website and forward it on to all your friends and contacts: The New York Campaign for Telephone Justice has just launched our new website - www.telephonejustice.org. You can visit it for more information on the issue, to read family members speak out about the MCI-DOCS contract, to post your own story, to send a letter to your local newspaper editor, and to send a letter to your elected officials. You can also go to the site to find out more about Worlddom Communications­ - and forward on their PSA to your friends as well.

Join us on Tuesday, March 29th for our next New York Campaign for Telephone Justice meeting: Starting this March, we will be having a monthly campaign meeting every LAST TUESDAY OF THE MONTH, to plan for upcoming campaign events and collaborate on this issue with other organizations. These meetings are open to all friends and family members of people incarcerated in NewYork State prisons, to all of our ally organizations, and to anyone else who is concerned about this critical issue. The first meeting will be held on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005, 6 pm to 8 pm, at the Center for Constitutional Right's office at 666 Broadway, 6th floor. Refreshments will be served. Call Dana at 212.614.6459 or Marion at 212.614.6407 to RSVP.

Participate in our monthly family member conference call: Once a month, we have a state-wide conference call for prison family members from throughout the State to call in to stay involved with the progress of the campaign, and to share their input. The next conference call is Tuesday, March 22, at 7 pm. After that, the calls will continue on THE THIRD TUESDAY OF EVERY MONTH. Call Dana at 212.614.6459 or Marion at 212.614.6407, or email info@telephonejustice.org for the TOLL FREE CALL IN NUMBER.

Join us for our monthly bus outreach: The New York Campaign for Telephone Justice joins with Prison Families Community Forum to do outreach every month at the Operation Prison Gap bus departure site at Columbus Circle. The next one is Friday, April 8th. We meet at 7:45 pm at the Starbucks on 60th and Broadway, and afterwards you can find us on 58th and 8th with the buses. Call Marion at 212.614.6407 or 646.247.6950 for more information.

Look forward to seeing you soon!

Posted by lois at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

FL: Caring and Compansionate for Who?

Tallahasee Democrat
Posted on Tue, Mar. 15, 2005
Florida should take care of the children it already has

By Lynn Paltrow
MY VIEW

In early March, Gov. Jeb Bush and Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings announced a plan to spend $4 million to finance a hot line that would counsel women with unwanted pregnancies to continue their pregnancies to term.

It is clear, however, that neither Bush nor Jennings is serious about reducing abortion rates. What they are serious about is keeping our attention focused on the abortion issue while they act like the proverbial deadbeat dad and welfare queen spending taxpayer dollars for their pet projects instead of on the children they already have.

In fact, Florida does a poor job of providing for the children it already has. Florida is noted nationwide for unnecessary removal of children from loving parents and putting them into an overwhelmed, sometimes dangerous foster-care system. Has Florida already forgotten Rilya Wilson, the 5-year-old foster child who disappeared from her foster home? It took Florida 15 months before anyone in the state child welfare system even noticed.

Is Florida really ready to have more children to care for? Considering how Florida treats its older children, this should be a serious question. Under legislation dubbed the Road to Independence Act, Florida abandons large numbers of foster children the minute they turn 18. The result has been well-documented cases of homelessness, unemployment and illness. The governor's newly announced plan for a token increase in aid for older foster children isn't nearly enough.

The abortion issue is wonderful because it keeps people on both sides of the debate so tied up that our policy-makers can go about the business of abandoning pregnant women, children and working families. The governor, referring to the hot-line plan, and a claimed increase in the number of abortions each year, said, "It does trouble me that in a state as compassionate and caring as ours ... the number of abortions that takes place in our state grows."

Caring and compassionate to whom? Certainly not to Florida's children in foster care, or the significant number of parents who love those children but have been denied custody of them. Here's what $4 million could buy for those families:

• $600 a month rent subsidies for 555 families, so their children wouldn't be taken away because of bad housing.

• $100 a week day-care subsidies for 769 families, so their children wouldn't be taken away on a lack of supervision charges while their parents worked.

• Intensive Family Preservation Services interventions for 800 families on the brink of losing their children to foster care, so those children could safely remain in their own homes.

Florida also refuses to provide health care for all of its already existing children. The state has frozen enrollment into the state's child health insurance plan and disbanded its waiting list. As a result of new eligibility requirements and extremely limited enrollment periods, many of Florida's children just won't be able to get the health care they need.

Florida also limits access to prenatal care for low-income women, has opposed the pregnancy discrimination act, which would prohibit discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace, and does not support paid family and medical leave so that women who do carry their pregnancies to term can spend time with their children. Florida ranks 33rd in the nation for its infant mortality rate, and Florida's maternal mortality rate is among the highest in the nation. If Florida really cared, some of the $4 million might go to reducing these appalling death rates.

There are also things that the governor and lieutenant governor could support if they really wanted to reduce abortion rates: mandate and fully fund comprehensive sexuality education, and ensure that contraceptive services and supplies are available to all those who cannot afford them.

Many of the special interest groups likely to receive taxpayer dollars under the Bush-Jennings plan are known to provide biased counseling and inaccurate medical information to pregnant women. Giving away millions of dollars to these organizations is neither caring nor compassionate. It is, however, a brilliant distraction from Florida's failure to support the children it already has.

Lynn Paltrow is executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org), a national nonprofit group that promotes the health, welfare and civil rights of pregnant and parenting women. Contact her at LMPNYC@aol.com.

© 2005 Tallahassee Democrat and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.tallahassee.com

Boston Globe
The abortion diversion

By Lynn M. Paltrow | February 20, 2005

HOWARD DEAN is not wrong to say that his party ought to make a home for prolife Democrats. People committed to a country that truly honors women, mothers, and families can and will disagree about abortion.

But Democrats must make clear that outlawing abortion and expanding fetal rights pose significant threats not just to women who want to end their pregnancies but also to pregnant women and expectant fathers who hope to become parents. Increasingly, pregnant women who have no intention of ending their pregnancies face arrest, forced surgery, and punitive child welfare interventions based on antiabortion claims of fetal rights.

At 27 years old and 25 weeks pregnant, Angela Carder became critically ill. She, her family, and her attending physicians all agreed on treatment designed to keep her alive for as long as possible. Nevertheless, based on antiabortion, fetal-rights claims, a court ordered Carder to undergo a C-section, knowing the surgery could kill her. The surgery was performed. Carder not only lost her right to informed consent and bodily integrity, she lost her right to life. The surgery resulted in the death of both Carder and her fetus.

Democrats need to stop talking only about the right to end a pregnancy and start talking about the right to continue pregnancies without abusive state interventions disguised as fetal rights. In other words, antiabortion ideology hurts both those for and against abortion.

Amber and John Marlowe, a deeply religious couple who profoundly oppose abortion, found this out when Marlowe went into labor with their seventh wanted child. She did not believe she needed a C-section and did not want to subject herself or her unborn child to unnecessary surgery. The hospital disagreed with both mother and father, and using antiabortion arguments developed over the last 30 years, got a court order giving it custody of the fetus before, during, and after delivery, and the right to force Marlowe to undergo invasive surgery.

Before the order came down, the Marlowes fled to another hospital. There, Amber delivered a healthy baby naturally.

In yet another case, Washington, D.C., doctors sought a court order to force Ayesha Madyun to have a C-section. The doctors asserted that the fetus faced a 50 to 75 percent chance of infection if not delivered surgically. A judge, relying again on antiabortion fetal rights arguments, said, ''All that stood between the Madyun fetus and its independent existence, separate from its mother, was, put simply, a doctor's scalpel." The court granted the order. When the procedure was done, there was no evidence of infection.

Democrats must oppose the proposed antiabortion and fetal rights laws that undermine fetal health by subjecting pregnant women and unborn children to unnecessary surgery and deprive pregnant women of the right to informed consent, bodily integrity, and in some cases life itself.

All women, pro- and anti-choice, living in blue or red states, have more in common than polls might lead you to think. The overwhelming majority of women who have abortions also have children whom they will spend a lifetime caring for. Women are united by the fact that the United States is virtually the only industrialized nation that does not require any paid maternity leave. Similarly, millions of pregnant women, especially those who work part-time or for small companies, lack legal protection from workplace discrimination based on pregnancy. Democrats should talk about ending this bias, not ending their support for access to safe and legal abortions.

Democrats should expose how the abortion debate has been used to divert attention from Bush administration assaults on pregnant women, mothers, and families. While President Bush was signing the Unborn Victims of Violence Act into law and declaring his commitment to a culture of life, he was also deregulating coal burning power plants. These plants release significant amounts of mercury into the environment, which is especially poisonous to fetuses and children. The Democrats, instead of talking about how the latest cleverly worded antiabortion bill threatens a choice, should address the Bush administration's threat to the born and unborn through deregulation of polluters.

While President Bush was making it a federal crime to attack the fetus as if it exits separate from the pregnant woman carrying it, federal funding for the Violence Against Women Act was being reduced for programs designed to protect women, including pregnant women, from violence. The leading cause of maternal death in America is murder of pregnant women. Democrats should be talking about how fetuses can’t be protected in a culture that does not value or protect the women who carry them.

While President Bush was reinterpreting the State's Child Health Insurance Program to allow states to cover unborn children, 43 million Americans, including 8.5 million children, were without healthcare coverage and nearly 20 percent of children were living in poverty. Instead of considering compromising on abortion, Democrats should be uncompromising in their attacks of new antiabortion laws that keep us divided and unable to see how many families, regardless of their views on abortion, can no longer ensure their children's health and well-being.

In short, Democrats must start defending pregnant women and families rather than abortion.

Lynn M. Paltrow is executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/02/20/the_abortion_diversion?pg=full

www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org

Posted by lois at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Work to Begin on New Regional Women's Jail

By KIMBERLY ASHTON Staff Writer, Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA March 14, 2005, B1

CHICOPEE - Officials expect to break ground this spring on a $28.7 million women's jail that would house inmates from the four western Massachusetts counties.

The jail, which will be the only all-female jail in the state, will be on Center Street and will house as many as 352 inmates.

The other women's facility, built in 1877 and the oldest in the country, is a prison in Framingham. Women in western Massachusetts serving sentences of less than two-and-a-half years are now jailed with men at the correctional center at Stony Brook in Ludlow, where men outnumber women by 11 to 1.

Although they don't live or eat together they often attend programs in the same space, according to Richard McCarthy, spokesman for Hampden County Sheriff Michael J. Ashe Jr. ''It's anything but desirable,'' he said. ''You won't find many correctional facilities that have women and men within the same fences. It's not appropriate for the dignity of the women.''

The new jail, which is being called the Western Massachusetts County Regional Women's Correctional Facility, is being built to improve the conditions of women's confinement, not because there is an increase in the number of women incarcerated, McCarthy said.

Originally, a women's facility was going to be built along with the men's center when it was built in 1992 in Ludlow. But part of the proposed site infringed on the habitat of the blue spotted salamander, so plans had to be scaled down and developers couldn't build separate facilities for women, according to McCarthy.

Construction on the new jail is expected to begin in the spring and it should be completed in two years, said Larry Lajoie, the assistant deputy superintendent of construction.

Kevin Flanigan, spokesman for the state's Division of Capital Asset Management, which is evaluating the two bids recently submitted for the project, said that his agency hopes to award a contract sometime next month. No bid figures have been released.

The Center Street jail will total 110,000 square feet and the campus will occupy 20 acres. It is expected to create 55 to 60 new jobs, McCarthy said.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@gazettenet.com.

Posted by lois at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2005

Suffolk Co NY: Small Jail = Less Crime

Small jail, less crime
Suffolk is smart to reduce the cost of a new jail with alternatives to incarceration

BY MICHAEL P. JACOBSON
Michael P. Jacobson is director of the Vera Institute and author of "Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration." He was New York City correction commissioner from 1995-1998.

March 13, 2005, Newsday

The $286-million fiscal bombshell dropped on Suffolk County when its consultants re-estimated the cost of building the new jail has led to a heated public discussion about how to eliminate or lower this cost.

Though this debate should have occurred well before the size and price of the jail were determined, it makes sense for the county officials who are negotiating for state permission to scale back the project to propose alternatives to incarceration. These have the potential to shrink the size and expense of the jail - with no risk to public safety.

The usual reasons for expanding a jail are overcrowding, population projections that show the number of inmates exceeding capacity, and deteriorating physical conditions. All of these exist to different degrees in Suffolk County.

It may well be that, simply based on physical conditions, some new capacity is warranted. The question is how much.

The answer requires a rigorous, non-ideological study of who is in jail, for how long and for what purpose. This is what the National Institute of Corrections likely will provide when it issues recommendations requested recently by County Executive Steve Levy and Sheriff Alfred Tisch.

Most inmates in Suffolk jails are awaiting trial. Even decreasing by one or two days the lengths of stays for thousands of detainees can result in the need for significantly less jail space. This is also a laudatory goal in terms of pure justice: People should spend as little time as possible awaiting sentencing.

Shortening jail stays will require a sustained effort among all the actors in the criminal justice system. Ending long adjournments between court appearances, open and early evidentiary discovery and firm trial dates all can speed the disposition of cases.

It's also a question of who exactly is going to jail. Are there low-level offenders with low bail who stay for only very short periods before either making bail or taking a plea? If so, what is the point of this policy? Simply sending someone to jail for a short period of time is no guarantee of public safety. Many jail systems have recidivism rates of 50 percent or more in the first year after people are released. There are other ways to achieve public safety than by simply building more and more jail cells. To see this clearly, all Suffolk has to do is look at its neighbor to the west, New York City. In fiscal 1991, the jail population in the city peaked at almost 21,500. By 2004, it was down 36 percent to 13,750. And from 1993-2003, the city led the nation in crime reduction with a 68 percent drop in crime and a 70 percent decrease in murders.

How do such alternatives to incarceration work? One example is New York City's Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, with an annual budget of $12 million, which provides services and supervision for about 14,000 offenders a year. Some of those are youth who have been arrested for their first felony. They are given strict supervision in the community, substance-abuse prevention training, school placement and literacy classes, and transitional job services. Anyone who doesn't keep up with the requirements is returned to court and usually sent back to jail.

Studies of New York City's programs have found no increased risk to public safety with fewer offenders in jail, and less recidivism than occurs after people are jailed. It's no coincidence that crime in New York City continues to drop as the jail population drops.

It is difficult to know precisely the extent to which the city's many alternatives to incarceration have contributed to the decline in jail population. Other factors include the police focusing more on quality-of-life offenses, and efforts have also been made to reduce lengths of stay. There is little doubt, however, that these programs have played a key role.

As for the understandable fears about having more convicted criminals living in our neighborhoods, one thing is clear: These people are already there. Remember that as many as half of everyone who gets out of jail returns within a year or so, and national statistics show that more than half of those who leave state prisons return within three years.

The lesson for Suffolk is less about exactly how New York City lowered its jail population and reduced crime, but that it is possible to have fewer people in jail and increase public safety simultaneously. It is a lesson that should frame Suffolk's effort to make sure, in an environment of incredibly scarce resources, that it makes all reasonable efforts to build only what is absolutely necessary.

Copyright C 2005, Newsday, Inc.
Shortcut to: http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opjac124174453mar13,0,1328114,print.s
tory?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

Posted by lois at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)

IA: " I mean, you can't build enough jails to lock up all the meth dealers"

Des Moines Register
...Overcrowded jail costs Polk County $4.5 million a year
Polk County will spend $4.5 million this year to manage its overflowing jail population. Some say the cost will continue to rise unless a new jail is built....

Published March 12, 2005

Number of beds available for inmates at the Polk County Jail Average daily inmate population in the Polk County Jail Estimated yearly cost of managing overcrowding problems at the jail Yearly revenue new prison could earn from housing federal prisoners Estimated cost of building a 1,500-bed jail in Polk County

Voter information

THE ISSUE: On March 29, Polk County voters will decide whether to borrow $68 million to build a 1,500-bed county jail on unincorporated county land north of Des Moines. The county's current jails hold 512 people. But on a typical day, the county has about 900 inmates. It will spend $4.5 million this year to send overflow inmates to rented cells in other counties. TO PASS: At least 60 percent approval is needed to pass the borrowing plan. If a new jail is built, the main building of the current jail complex on Sixth Avenue (shown above) would be used to process inmates going to and from the courthouse. The annex building on Ninth Avenue would be sold, county officials said.
REGISTRATION: People who have not registered to vote must do so by Friday to vote on the referendum. The Polk County Auditor's Office, 120 Second Ave., Suite A, has registration forms. Call the office at 286-3247 or get a form online at auditor.co.polk.ia.us . ABSENTEE VOTING: People can vote absentee by requesting a ballot from the auditor's office.

By KEVIN DOBBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

Josh Fales sat rigidly and rubbed his hands over a steel table as he described how, at age 25, methamphetamine mattered more to him than his baby daughter, more than the daily prospect of jail.

When he couldn't get high, thoughts of suicide consumed him. "I got real close to putting a pistol in my mouth," Fales said. "It was the only way, in my twisted way of thinking, that I could stop using."

That was until he landed last year in the Polk County Jail, one of many in Iowa packed with inmates because of the state's meth epidemic. Fales and thousands more like him have caused a massive overcrowding problem that costs taxpayers millions of dollars.

Sheriff Dennis Anderson ships more than 300 overflow inmates every day to county jails in Iowa and Missouri. Fales, for one, spent four months in area jails last year. This year, Polk County will spend $4.5 million to manage its overcrowding problem.

That figure will keep climbing, the sheriff said, unless taxpayers vote on March 29 to borrow $68 million for a new 1,500-bed jail that would be triple the combined size of the two existing county jails in downtown Des Moines. It would eliminate the outsourcing costs and would mean more space for a drug treatment program to help people like Fales, Anderson said.

The jail would be built on 44 acres of unincorporated land north of the city and would open in 2008.

Polk County Attorney John Sarcone called jail overcrowding "a nightmare" and added, "We just have to have space to deal with it."

But skeptics worry that the price tag is too lofty, that a tax increase would inevitably follow to pay off the debt. They worry, too, that adding more jail cells deals with the meth problem only after people become criminals. They say the county should focus more on drug prevention.

"It has been my belief for a long time that, in this community, we are not really dealing with the root of the problem," said Des Moines lawyer Maggi Moss. "I mean, you can't build enough jails to lock up all the meth dealers."

Supporters counter that a new jail would house 200 federal prisoners, four times the current level. The federal system pays counties $85.52 daily per inmate. That could generate $6 million a year to help pay off the jail debt without higher taxes, Anderson said.

What's more, supporters say, the jail would have a 192-bed wing devoted to drug treatment. Currently, the county has 60 beds for its treatment program, and inmates such as Fales wait months to get into it. The sheriff's department uses federal grant money to pay for the program.

Anderson said the majority of the county's inmates are repeat drug offenders, with meth the leading impetus. The best way to curb the swelling inmate population, drug counselors say, is to treat people while they're in custody to help them beat the addictions that drive them to crime. Anderson cited a University of Iowa analysis showing that 90 percent of people who complete in-custody drug treatment stay clean and out of jail.

"It works, but it has to be a long-term program, no shortcuts," said Kimberly Brangoccio, clinical supervisor of the jail treatment programs.

Fales vows he'll add to the positive statistics. After waiting six months, he started the 120-day program in December.

"I've been incarcerated or high my whole adult life," said Fales, a convicted meth maker, while sitting outside his jail cell. "That's got to change, and I think I'm learning here how to make that change."

Fales, who grew up near Des Moines, shares most waking moments with 40 other inmates - women are in a separate building - in a small cafeteria-like area that is flanked on three sides by cells, the fourth by guards. The inmates spend their days in therapy and support-group meetings. They carve out daily routines that will keep them away from drugs.

When they complete the program and get out of jail, they'll have another eight to 12 months of such meetings before they will officially graduate from treatment.

Ryan Cumming, a 31-year-old in treatment, is in jail on forgery and burglary charges - crimes committed to finance his daily meth use.

"I have a 6-year-old son, and I would have given up my son to use drugs; that's how powerful meth is. That's why I have to be here," Cumming said.

Same goes for Mike Nelson of West Des Moines.

Like so many others, Nelson was taken by the euphoric high that meth delivers to first-time users. He was 18 that first time. He's 26 now. In the time between, he spent nearly every day chasing, in vain, that initial high.

"My days have been consumed by making dope, selling dope and using dope," Nelson said. "I've been a plague on the community for a long, long time."

To be sure, meth is not the only drug problem.

Jackee Stewart of Des Moines attests to that. Stewart, now 22, started using cocaine and ecstasy when he was a student at Roosevelt High School. He has been in jail several times and is there now for cocaine possession.

"Cocaine, man, it's a big problem here, too. I know all about it. I've got two kids (ages 3 and 4). I want to be a father, but I just can't seem to because of all the activities I get into with drugs," Stewart said. "My 3-year-old said to me, 'Dad, why are you always going to jail? When are you gonna stay home and be my dad?' "

Stewart paused, then added: "That's crushing. That's what drugs get you."

All five members of the Polk County Board of Supervisors support the plans for a new jail, citing their confidence in future savings.

The county would pay at least $3.2 million per year toward the debt, compared with the $4.5 million it pays now on outsourcing. Anderson said the latter figure would top $6 million before the end of the decade.

No organized campaign against the jail has formed. But many question the validity of the county's financing plan.

Jeff Riese, executive director of the Polk-Des Moines Taxpayers Association, said his group sees the need for more jail cells but cautions voters to be leery about Anderson's assertion that federal prisoners will help pay off the debt.

If the jail population continues to soar, Riese asked, who's to say county inmates won't squeeze out the federal ones? Who's to say the jail won't be packed in a few years and drug treatment beds won't have to be converted for general population use?

When Black Hawk County taxpayers built a 272-bed jail in 1995, planners said it wouldn't fill up for two decades.

But Sheriff Mike Kubik said in a recent interview that the jail had neared capacity within seven years.

"The wizards, the people that said this would never fill up in 20 years, well, guess what? They were wrong," Kubik said.

Too many questions linger, said Officer Stewart Barnes, president of the Des Moines police union. "We can't support it because we don't know enough," he said.

The inmate boom is a national problem that dates to the 1970s, when crime rates were soaring. Americans demanded tougher punishments. Lawmakers responded with stiffer sentences. Thousands of new jails and prisons have been built since.

Iowa's county jails have collectively added more than 1,614 beds since 1999.

Polk County's daily inmate population hovers around 900. It has cell space for about 500. Five years ago it had 700 inmates on a given day; in 1995, it had 500.

The trend continues, owing largely to drug abuse and society's disdain for crime.

Consider the view of Larry Bartling.

The Altoona man's son was killed four years ago by a drunken driver. The driver was sent to prison for 25 years, with the possibility of parole after a decade. Bartling thinks it should have been a life sentence of hard time. Period.

Bartling said many people simply belong behind bars.

"You have to have deterrents," Bartling said. "People who do these terrible things, they should go through hell to pay for them."

Arthur Gamble, chief Polk County judge, said the court system has used work release and other programs to keep low-threat people out of jail. But he said the metro area's population is growing at a time when its drug-related crime problems are entrenched.

"It's obvious the current jail space is not adequate," Gamble said. Inmates sent to other counties are separated from their lawyers, their families and the courtrooms they must report to. "It's a significant drag on the criminal justice system."

Sheriff Anderson said a new jail would last at least 30 years because it could be expanded to 2,500 beds. An expansion could include more treatment beds, up to 284 in all. By helping people get off drugs, the county will chip away at the number of repeat offenders and save money, Anderson said.

Chris White, 37, said she's proof that can happen.

She started using meth in her early 20s. She would get high one morning and stay high for days. So life went for 15 years.

White lost her job, her home, custody of her daughter. She was in and out of jail.

Finally, during her last jail stay, she got into the treatment program in November 2002. She took the treatment seriously. She did the four months in jail and another eight months of treatment outside.

She's been clean since. She has a job, a place to live.

"The minute you put meth into your system, you are done in," White said. "You need help, long-term help to beat it. It's awful how hard it is, but it can be done."

Copyright C 2004, The Des Moines Register.
Use of this site signifies your agreement to the Terms of Service (updated 1/3/2003).

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

LA Times: Overview on Crowding in CA Prisons

Front page Sunday LA Times:
Crowding at Prisons Has State in a Jam
By Jenifer Warren and Tim Reiterman, Times Staff Writers
March 13, 2005

SACRAMENTO - Sixteen months ago, the chief of California's vast prison system told his wardens to prepare for a new day: The inmate population, he said, was poised to plummet; prisons would be closed.

That forecast proved far off the mark. Over the ensuing months, the number of men and women in state lockups soared to 165,000 - a record number that jammed prisons to twice their intended capacity.

Scrambling to cope, managers wedged inmates into gyms, TV lounges, hallways
- even a chapel. Some convicts bedded down on mattresses tossed on the floor. Thousands more were stacked three high in narrow bunks.

The overcrowding has pushed tensions sky-high in an already perilous environment. It has punched a $207-million hole in the $6.25-billion corrections budget. And it is jeopardizing one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's most ambitious initiatives: to make California's disgraced and troubled penal system a national model once again.

Now, instead of shutting down prisons, the state is opening a new one - and reopening a privately managed facility - in the quest for enough beds.

Criminologists and correctional officers who walk the state's cellblocks warn that overcrowding is a recipe for unrest, as well as health and fire safety problems. Already, California prisons report nearly twice as many assaults behind bars as those in Texas, which has about the same inmate population.

"You keep putting rats in a box, and pretty soon those rats go off and kill each other," said Lt. Charles Hughes, chapter president of the guards union at the state prison in Lancaster.

Overcrowding, coming even as violent crime in California continues to drop, reflects the failure of corrections officials to accurately project and plan for the most critical factor in their operation: the number of inmates they must house.

It also highlights the Department of Corrections' halting implementation of a host of parole reforms, which were expected to dramatically cut the inmate population and permit the closure of as many as three prisons.

Instead, California's correctional system - the nation's largest - now imprisons enough felons to fill Dodger Stadium nearly three times over. As of Feb. 23, the most recent survey, the number of inmates had settled at 162,276.

At California State Prison, Solano, in Vacaville, the effects of overcrowding are easy to see. Behind electrified fences and razor wire, nearly 6,000 men are doing time in a warren of buildings designed for 2,600.

In a gymnasium now called "G Dorm," the basketball hoops are folded back to make room for row upon row of triple-deck bunk beds. The noise - from televisions, radios, yelling and laughter - is constant, and the smell is about what you'd expect from 225 men living cheek by jowl who must use overworked toilets and wait in line for the few showers.

The dorm - watched by several guards on an elevated platform - evokes images of a refugee camp, only more crowded and more permanent.

"If it wasn't so crowded, it would slow down the tension," said Bryan Combes, a 34-year-old Lancaster man serving a sentence for assault with a deadly weapon.

"It's like living in a phone booth," added one his neighbors.

Officers and inmates at more than a dozen prisons agreed that the crowding had made life riskier than ever.

In makeshift dorms now common around the state, the rows of bunks obstruct sight lines for guards and make inmates and staff more vulnerable to attack. The cramped spaces, plus toilets that frequently fail and long waits for visits, medical appointments, canteen purchases and meals, increase the likelihood of fights.

Officers said some inmates, desperate for privacy and fearful of assaults, violated rules in hopes that a disciplinary citation would get them moved from an open dorm into a cell. So it goes at Mule Creek State Prison, where inmate lounges once used for watching TV and playing board games now hold beds for 40 convicts. Throughout the system, about 10,000 prisoners are now in what officials call "ugly beds" - those jammed into recreation rooms, hallways and other places not designed as living quarters.

"It's more work and more tension," said Lt. George King at Mule Creek, in the Sierra foothill town of Ione about 45 miles southeast of Sacramento. Inmates feel fearful in the temporary dorms, he said, and routinely have their possessions stolen.

Increased idleness compounds the problem. Without gyms and day rooms for recreation, without enough jobs and educational and vocational classes, inmates have little to do. Under those conditions, convicts are more apt to brew the crude alcoholic concoction known as Pruno, typically made from leftover fruit juice and bread.

One prison sergeant, Bruce Carter, said there was "an extreme upswing in violence" because of alcohol consumption: "They are bored stiff," added Carter, the supervisors' union president at Wasco State Prison, near Bakersfield. "They have nothing to do but wait for Pruno to ferment, and drink."

At corrections headquarters in Sacramento, officials said they had seen no statistical correlation between crowding and violence. But in February, the state's nonpartisan legislative analyst's office reported that the rate of inmate "incidents," including assaults, had risen 18% from 1997 to 2003 - a period of significant population growth.

Officers who walk the beat note that other confrontations go unreported. And they say crowding may have at least indirectly contributed to the slaying in January of correctional officer Manuel Gonzalez. The father of six was stabbed to death by an inmate whose mental health troubles and violent background would normally have landed him in a high-security housing unit. Instead, officials said, he had remained in a reception center because his condition and long list of prison enemies made him difficult to place.

Corrections officials said overcrowding was not a factor in the slaying - the first of a guard in two decades. Still, experts note that when prisons are packed, their managers have limited options.

"The problem with overcrowding is that you lose flexibility in how you house inmates," said Steve Martin, former second in command of the Texas prison system and now a corrections consultant.

Fire poses another danger when prisons bulge well beyond their design capacity, as is the case with every penitentiary in California. Many inmates smoke, though it is a rules violation, or light wicks of toilet paper to conceal noxious smells in their cell toilets. And most pack their living space with reading material and possess their own televisions, fans or other appliances. The more prisoners, the more opportunities for fire. Although there are smoke alarms and sprinklers, everyone lives behind locked doors and bars that make evacuation more difficult.

At San Quentin along the San Francisco Bay shore, ground-floor corridors used as emergency exits are sometimes crammed with bunk beds, records at the state fire marshal's office show. The crowding became so severe in August that officials obtained permission to temporarily house 44 inmates in a visitor room, 30 in two classrooms and 10 in the prison chapel, records show. A staff member served as a "fire watch."

The fire marshal routinely approves such prison requests: "How are you going to tell them no?" asked Hugh Council of the state fire marshal's northern region. "They have to put them someplace."

In fall 2003, relief seemed to be in sight, as prison analysts predicted a major population decline right around the corner. Instead, it grew at a steady clip. Officials said the number of inmates sent to prison for new crimes increased 8.8% last year, to almost 43,000.

At the same time, the Schwarzenegger administration's new approach to handling parole violators - diverting those guilty of minor slip-ups into alternative programs, instead of returning them to prison - stalled. Nonviolent parolees were to be diverted to halfway houses, equipped with electronic ankle monitors or enrolled in drug treatment programs. But the reforms were set back by contracting squabbles, labor negotiations and delays in obtaining the electronic monitors.

As a result, far more violators wound up in cells than had been expected.

"The reality is, we were overly optimistic in our estimates," James L'Etoile, the corrections official in charge of parole, said recently at a state Senate hearing on the stumbling reform effort.

Other forces are driving overcrowding as well. Corrections officials said some counties were moving convicts into state custody more quickly than before, to ease population pressures on jails. During certain weeks last year, for example, Los Angeles County - supplier of more than one-third of the new prison inmates - sent 14 busloads of prisoners to state lockups, almost double the normal number.

Determined to reform the correctional system, Schwarzenegger has pledged to dramatically expand education, counseling and job-training programs inside prisons. The governor has said he believes "corrections should correct," arguing that society suffers when parolees leave state custody unprepared for life on the outside. California leads the nation - by far - in the proportion of ex-convicts who falter and land back behind bars.

But with the prisons so packed and the state's finances so grim, Schwarzenegger's proposed budget for the coming fiscal year actually includes a $95-million cut to the very sort of inmate programs he wants to expand.

"It's great to hear talk of rehabilitation making a comeback, but there's just no way it will come true when the numbers are so huge," said Barry Krisberg, president of the Oakland-based National Council on Crime and Delinquency. "Our prison system has become this giant Frankenstein monster. It has to be brought under control for real change to occur."

George Deukmejian, the law-and-order Republican who authorized a vast expansion of the prison system as governor, voiced a similar view in a 2004 report. After leading an exhaustive investigation of California corrections at Schwarzenegger's behest, Deukmejian and his team concluded: "The key to reforming the system lies in reducing the numbers."

Despite those findings, California won't be closing prisons any time soon. Prisons director Jeanne Woodford, appointed by the governor last year, said she wanted to "take down those ugly beds" and free up day rooms, gyms and funds for inmate programs.

But the population numbers aren't cooperating. As a result, 215 beds became available in February under a contract renewed with a private prison that was closed at the end of 2003. And July 1, on a flat patch of brown earth in Kern County, the state will open a $380-million prison for 5,000 inmates known as Delano II, the 33rd prison in the system.

Some inmates are sounding the alarm about the jampacked conditions. At Solano, an active tuberculosis case last year - followed by tests showing that numerous other inmates were positive for the disease - prompted a protest by convicts who said overcrowding was increasing their exposure to communicable diseases.

More than 1,100 inmates signed petitions demanding a population cap, claiming that the crowded conditions were cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional.

Officials said they followed proper protocols in handling the TB outbreak and rejected the convicts' claims of a constitutional violation.

Prison law specialists were not surprised. Overcrowding may be uncomfortable, unfair and even dangerous, they said, but it is rarely illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court has found that crowding is unconstitutional only if it inflicts wanton pain or if basic human needs are not being met.

"Prisoners in California are packed in like sardines in a can," said lawyer Steve Fama of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, which has successfully sued the state to improve medical care and other inmate services.

"But the fact is that the courts, and our society, will tolerate a lot."

*

Begin Text of Infobox

California prisons
The nation's largest state prison system by the numbers:
--

Sex
Males: 93%
Females: 7%

--
Race/ethnicity
Hispanics: 37%
Whites: 29%
Blacks: 29%
Other: 6%

--

Annual budget (2004-05): $6.25 billion
Average yearly cost per inmate: $30,929
Number of employees: 49,073
Number of state prisons: 32
Number of camps where inmates are trained as wildland firefighters: 40
Number of community correctional facilities: 12
Inmate population, all institutions: 162,276
Average age of inmates: 36
Average sentence, in months: 53
Average time served, in months: 26
Commitment rate per 100,000 California population: 446
Notes: Latest figures available. Percentages may not total 100 due to rounding.

Source: California Department of Corrections

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons13mar13,1,6478940.story?coll=la-headlines-california

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

The Strategy Center's National School for Strategic Organizing is recruiting for its 2005 class

Dear Friends, The Strategy Center's National School for Strategic Organizing is recruiting for its 2005 class, beginning in July 1, 2005. We need your help to recruit new applicants for this year's class. We are looking for very hard working people, with particular emphasis on Black and Latino applicants, to work with us for six intensive months. We have extended this year's deadline to April 30, 2005. We ask people to call us to indicate their interest and availability, and then to send us a full application as soon as possible. We have now graduated 75 people many of whom are still working with the Strategy Center as staff or active members, or are in other social justice organizations throughout L.A., California, and the U.S. Please think through qualified and dedicated applicants whom you could refer to us.

The National School accepts classes of up to 5 students. Women and Black, Mexicano/Chicano/other Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and other people of color are strongly encouraged to apply. Applicants with Spanish and/or Korean language proficiency and prior organizing experience are also strongly encouraged to apply. We also encourage those with book distribution, website development, and outreach, administration and fundraising skills to apply.

Assistance is provided in the form of:

* A weekly stipend >

* A limited number of housing scholarships

* Passes for public transportation

* Healthcare for the duration of the program

We can be contacted at (213) 387-2800 or school@thestrategycenter.org. Thanks for your help, Eric Mann, Manuel Criollo, Damon Azali, Tammy Bang Luu, Francisca Porchas, Cynthia Rojas, Lian Hurst Mann National School for Strategic Organizing Committee Labor/Community Strategy Center
The Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles is recruiting participants for the National School for Strategic Organizing,
a training program in the strategy and tactics of building a Left social movement.

With an amnesia hanging over a nation's history of racism and national oppression, violence against women and colonization, building a grassroots independent social movement is a necessity. At the Strategy Center, an environmental and social justice "think tank/act tank," we are training organizers to face this challenge.

Organizers-in-training for the Strategy Center will participate in the Bus Riders Union, challenging corporate-driven transit policy and engaged in direct organizing to build a multiracial, multi-lingual organization on wheels. Through the BRU and other projects participants in the School will help build economic, political and cultural alternatives towards concrete victories that build a new community while transforming the organizer. The emphasis is on theory-driven practice taught through on-the-bus organizing, mentoring with senior organizers, and classes on political and organizing theory to:

• Develop a new generation of class-conscious, antiracist, antisexist, internationalist organizers • Teach organizers to initiate demands, build a leadership core, develop community allies • Build campaigns to organize new, independent social movements • Learn to assess different phases of a campaign: when to escalate, when to retreat, how to consolidate gains and victories • Understand the relationship of short-term tactics to long-term strategy•

We are looking for activists who want to forge a union between Left politics and organizing. We want people who understand the flexibility and patience needed as organizers. We appreciate humility to learn from experienced organizers, bus riders and communities. At the same time, we need people with the initiative and confidence to contribute constructive, innovative ideas to the organization. Participants will be involved in the following:

• Bus Riders Union Fight Transit Racism, Billions for Buses Campaign • Clean Air, Clean Lungs, Clean Buses Campaign - making a link between toxic pollution in communities of color and participating in an international movement to reverse global warming • Community Rights Campaign - challenging the criminalization of Black and Latina/o communities • Classes on political and organizing theory •

Other work in which organizers-in-training may be involved include:

• Community Graphics and Make History Media Project • Organizing Through Political Theatre • Agit-props, web and electronic organizing • Publication distribution and promotion•

For further information on applications, deadlines and all aspects of the school please contact Tammy Bang Luu or Cynthia Rojas.

Applications can be downloaded from www.thestrategycenter.org and are due on April 30, 2005. The program runs from July 1st through December 23, 2005.

National School for Strategic Organizing
3780 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1200; Los Angeles, CA 90010
voice: (213) 387-2800 fax: (213) 387-3500
e-mail: school@thestrategycenter.org

www.thestrategycenter.org
www.busridersunion.org

The National School accepts classes of up to 5 students. Women and Black, Mexicano/Chicano/other Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and other people of color are strongly encouraged to apply. Applicants with Spanish and/or Korean language proficiency and prior organizing experience are also strongly encouraged to apply. We also encourage those with book distribution, website development, and outreach, administration and fundraising skills to apply.

Assistance is provided in the form of:

* A weekly stipend >

* A limited number of housing scholarships

* Passes for public transportation

* Healthcare for the duration of the program

The National School for Strategic Organizing is a project of the Labor/Community Strategy Center,
a multiracial, antiracist, anticorporate think tank/act tank, based in Los Angeles.

The School is rooted in the Strategy Center's long-term organizing campaigns that demand comprehensive, structural and increasingly international solutions to the problems of urban poverty, racism, national oppression, environmental degradation, and the escalating attacks on workers, women, peoples of color and immigrants.

Posted by craig at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

Get Handouts from the Prison Town Comic Book!

As an extension of our comic book series, we have developed a number of one page handouts from the comics. Check out the latest handouts from Prison Town

Posted by mdbrenner at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2005

Parole Reversal

Parole Reversal
A surprisingly simple fix for our dysfunctional prison system. Bradford Plumer March 07 , 2005

To understand much of what's wrong with America's criminal corrections system, look no farther than a day in the life of a typical parole officer. He works, most likely, in a small, cramped office in the middle of an old, dilapidated neighborhood, earning much less than the average police officer or prison guard. An ever-growing pile of caseload files, for men and women released early from prison to serve out their sentences on parole, sit stacked on his desk-in parts of New York City, some officers handle a
mind-boggling 200 cases at any given time.

Now consider the cases. As a condition of their release, all parolees must observe strict behavioral standards-no drug use, no associating with other known felons, hold a job or be actively looking for one, maintain a permanent address, come on time to all parole appointments-or they risk going back to prison. And yet many parolees have never achieved goals like these at any point in their lives: on average, 80 percent have a history of drug or alcohol abuse, 14 percent have reported suffering from some mental illness, and 12 percent have experienced periods of homelessness prior to their arrest. Nor do they receive much help: once released from prison, the
parolees have meager access to employment or job-training programs, most of which have fallen prey to state-budget crunches over the past decade, and their case manager has no way of requesting more funds from the parole agency for drug treatment, job training programs, or even additional officers.

Inevitably, of course, the infractions start piling up. A missed
appointment. A smoked joint. Another missed appointment. A speeding ticket.
What does the officer do? Few agencies want to give a parolee a second
chance after a failed drug test, on the off-chance that that person will go
off and commit a crime. The public outcry, after all, would be deafening.
Meanwhile, the agency is under constant pressure to reduce costs and keep
under budget. It costs a fair bit for an officer to check up on a parolee
who just missed an appointment-and that might be merely one among hundreds
of cases on his or her desk. On the other hand, it costs the parole agency
nothing, nothing at all, to send the parolee back to prison on a technical
violation. No one complains. No one asks questions. The prison system has a
virtually unlimited budget. Who wouldn't make that choice?

Of all the problems with the U.S. criminal correction system, why should
anyone bother paying attention to parole agencies? Surely, one might say,
the problems go much deeper than that. There are the raw numbers: The United
States locks up a greater percentage of its population than any other
country on earth. Or the inequity: 1 in 3 black males, and 1 in 6 Hispanic
males will spend some time in prison over the course of a lifetime, compared
to 1 in 17 white males. Recent social research has described the vast and
largely detrimental effects of high incarceration rates on local
communities: children lose fathers and/or mothers, families fall apart, and
while ex-prisoners often find it difficult to find jobs and re-enter
society. Meanwhile, state budgets are feeling the strain: between 1988 and
2001, the corrections system was the only government function that grew as a
percentage of state budgets-swallowing money that could have been used for
education, or infrastructure, or public assistance. All of this would be
worth it, of course, if the all-devouring prison network actually reduced
crime. But the evidence on this score, while still subject to dispute, is
admittedly slim.

To see where parole fits into this picture, consider a 2002 Department of
Justice study on recidivism, the largest ever undertaken, which found that
51.8 percent of criminals end up back in prison within three years. (There's
not a lot of solid data on recidivism, but it doesn't appear that this
number has dropped at all since a previous study done a decade before.) Of
those, over half (26.4 percent) are sent back not for criminal behavior, but
for violating a technical condition of parole-a missed appointment, a failed
drug test, not landing a job. In many states, as many as a third of all
prison admissions each year result from decisions like that of our fictional
parole officer described above.

In a new book, Downsizing Prisons, Michael Jacobson offers an innovative
approach to reducing the strain on America's overcrowded prisons: namely, by
fixing the dysfunctional parole systems in states around the country. Having
first worked in New York City's Budget Office, Jacobson became Commissioner
of the New York City Departments of Correction and Probation in 1995, and
saw firsthand how difficult it would be to reform the prison system-and at
the same time, how wholly necessary.

As an ex-bureaucrat, Jacobson understands a key reality: When it comes to
crime control, sensible policy rarely wins out. Experts and academics may
agree that state correctional policies are misguided, and they may even
reach a wide consensus on alternative rehabilitation methods that work, like
"community policing" or college degree programs in prison. But laws are
usually influenced by public outrage and horrifying anecdotes, like the
murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, which led to California's "three strikes"
sentencing policy. Moreover, prison growth has a powerful constituency:
private prison contractors and the mighty corrections unions may not agree
on much, but they both have a keen interest in keeping prisons expanding
indefinitely, and lobby accordingly. State legislators, for their part, know
full well how the budget game is played, and realize that in times of
budgetary belt-tightening, any proposal to invest more money in prisoners-no
matter how well-intentioned or far-sighted-while schools and health services
are being cut, is the surest way to lose one's seat. Radical change becomes
nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, Jacobson argues that the recent wave of state budget
crunches-the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently tallied state
deficits at a whopping $190 billion over the past three years-may have
created an opening for more incremental reforms. (Indeed, even the Montana
state legislature, typically one of the "toughest" on crime, recently vowed
to rethink its prison budget.) It's also worth noting that since September
11, crime has largely faded as a hot-button issue among voters, according to
a Pew Survey released last month, and polls show that Americans no longer
value a "tough on crime" stance quite so much as they once did. Even
President Bush, in his 2005 State of the Union address, paid lip service to
"prisoners' rights" issues such as special training for public defenders, a
stance that would have been political suicide just ten years ago. The
foundation for a new order has been laid, and the most practical place to
start, Jacobson argues, is with parole agencies.

One number should immediately jump out at any would-be reformer. The cost,
on average, of supervising one person on probation or parole is about $200
per year, as compared to $20,000 for keeping that same person behind bars.
And yet prisons continue to get the lion's share of state funding. Moreover,
it's much easier for state governors to reorganize parole agencies-which
answer primarily to the executive branch-than to ram changes in sentencing
policy through legislatures. So why does the current system persist? In
conversations with state legislators around the country, Jacobson noticed a
simple pattern: politicians simply "do not recognize that technical parole
violations are costing their states so much money." Yet differences among
state parole policies can be stark. In Mississippi, for instance, 83 percent
of parolees successfully complete parole, whereas in California, the success
rate is a mere 21 percent. It's no surprise, then, that a whopping 58
percent of all new admissions to California prisons are parole violators,
versus 14 percent in Mississippi.

Jacobson argues that discrepancies like these can't be accounted for by the
sorts of criminals found in each state, or even discrepancies in funding
among parole agencies (California actually spends far more per parolee), the
difference lies purely with "policies, procedures, and organizational
cultures." So what actually works? Jacobson knows better than to lay out his
Platonic ideal policy. Hence, he doesn't advise states to eliminate parole
supervision altogether, as some have proposed-it's too politically risky.
Nor does he think, realistically, that legislatures can get away with
investing millions more in drug treatment and job training, even if that
makes sense.

Instead, he proposes several relatively easy changes that can make a real
difference. For starters, states should front-load existing parole resources
into the first several months after release, since "parolees tend to violate
quickly." The money can be focused on early-transition programs, and after
the first year, when chances of success increase, monitoring can be reduced.
Also, more sophisticated risk instruments (formulas like those used by
insurance companies) can help offices predict which parolees will need more
supervision than others. Jacobson argues that "incarceration should be a
decision of last resort" for parolees, and technical violations ought to be
met with incremental sanctions, rather than automatic prison time. Finally,
he notes, states will see more parolees succeed if they reduce many of the
barriers prisoners face upon reentering society. Felons should not be barred
from voting, nor ex-prisoners prevented from securing jobs or receiving food
stamps, college loans, or other public assistance.

What makes proposals like these so exciting is that they're mostly quite
boring. That is, they're precisely the wonky, technocratic, yet ultimately
realistic, sort of proposals that can actually pass. Indeed, Jacobson writes
the last quarter of his book almost exclusively for state policymakers,
offering step-by-step suggestions for navigating the complexities of
budgetary reform. In California, for instance, he suggests that legislators
put a "cap" on the length of time that technical parole violators stay in
prison. The savings here-up to $190 million-could then be partially
reinvested in drug treatment and employment training, with the rest freed up
for non-corrections programs. Likewise, if California sent fewer technical
parole violators back to prison immediately, the state could save up to $750
million. Again, a portion of this money could be reinvested in
community-based programs for ex-felons, thus further improving criminal
rehabilitation programs, while the rest could be spent elsewhere. What's not
to love?

Jacobson's book comes at exactly the right time. State legislatures around
the country are currently debating various ways to reduce their prison
populations, from reducing sentences for non-violent offenders (in Montana)
to increasing funds for prisoner rehabilitation (in Massachusetts) to
expanding private prisons (in Georgia). As yet, however, only a few
states-most notably Texas-have begun looking more carefully at one of the
easiest and most sensible places to start: the overburdened parole agencies
that are filling prisons with technical violators. As Leighton Iles, the
director of a new and Jacobson-esque probation program in Fort Bend, Texas,
told a local paper: "What we are doing here is a simple concept. Simple
works."

Bradford Plumer is the assistant editor of MotherJones.com.

Posted by lois at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

Death Behind Bars: NY Times Editorial

Published: March 10, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/opinion/10thu2.html?th

The United States has about 2.1 million people behind bars - a larger proportion of its population than any other nation in the world. The correctional system's price tag is more than $60 billion - up from just $9 billion two decades ago - and states are understandably eager to shave costs. Some are attempting to do it by cutting back on already dismal prison medical care.

Prison inmates are literally the sickest people in our society. States and municipalities frequently try to dodge the bill for treating them by ordering up bids from private providers and signing up with the cheapest, most bare-bones plan. Paul von Zielbauer of The Times recently opened a window onto this aspect of the problem with a harrowing series of articles about Prison Health Services, the nation's largest private provider of jail and prison medical care, handling about one in every 10 people who live behind bars in this country.

Among the horrific deaths described in the series is that of Brian Tetrault, a 44-year-old man with Parkinson's disease who died after an upstate New York jail's medical director drastically cut his medicine. Officials then falsified records to make it appear that Mr. Tetrault had been released before he died. Another upstate inmate, 35-year-old Victoria Williams Smith, died of a heart attack after being mocked by a prison nurse and denied treatment for days. Equally as troubling were accounts of how Prison Health Services failed to keep a close eye on inmates who later committed suicide, and its habit of sometimes employing doctors with criminal records and doctors who lacked state certification.

Shoddy care and the denial of care are unfortunately not unique to private companies, which do not provide the majority of the health care that is supplied to inmates. Many publicly run systems, which provide most of the care for the nation's inmates, are equally bad. The root problem is that the country has tacitly decided to starve the prison system of medical care, even though AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis are rampant behind bars, and roughly one in six inmates suffers from a serious mental illness.

The corrections system is largely cut off from the public health system, in part because of federal rules that deny Medicaid assistance to inmates. The denial of benefits is based on the notion that people who break the law don't deserve public help, a theory that has helped spread tuberculosis, AIDS and hepatitis from prisons to the world outside. Privatization of services is no magic cure for this growing threat to public health. The common-sense response would be a coherent, publicly subsidized program of testing, counseling and treatment that would slow the spread of disease, both behind bars and after inmates were released.

Posted by lois at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)

Wal-Mart Jobs and African-American Dreams

By James M. Lawson, Jr., AlterNet
Throughout his life, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made vital connections between the struggle for civil rights, freedom, economic justice and equality. Dr. King's 1967 "Poor People's Campaign" was a heroic effort to bring all these issues together with a powerful call for family-supporting wages that could build ladders from poverty to prosperity.

It was the dogged pursuit of that vision that motivated sanitation workers in Memphis to fight for a living wage by forming a union. When Dr. King was assassinated, he was supporting those striking workers, whose quest for dignity was captured in their campaign slogan "I am a man."

Dr. King's lessons still resonate, with sometimes painful relevance today. As the automation of the 1960s swept away jobs and living standards, he decried workers being pressed into low-wage jobs with longer hours and no protections. Yet even Dr. King could hardly have imagined that such standards would become the business model for the world's largest employer: Wal-Mart.

With 1.2 million U.S. workers, Wal-Mart is reshaping the American workplace. Its Supercenters are being built where productive factories once stood, and middle-class workers are now competing for jobs as all-night cashiers, making a fraction of their former wages. The Wal-Mart model of low costs, underwritten by low wages, has cast a shadow on Dr. King's dreams of an American economy that provides stability and prosperity for all workers. Just as the Memphis sanitation workers were asked to work without dignity, so too are Wal-Mart's.

For all its resources, Wal-Mart shares little with its employees. The average salesclerk made $13,861 in 2001, nearly $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

Less than half of Wal-Mart workers are enrolled in the company's health insurance plan. State after state has documented Wal-Mart workers' reliance on publicly-funded state health care plans for themselves and their children.

Wal-Mart stops at nothing to break the will of workers who seek to improve their lives by forming unions. When meatcutters in Jacksonville, Texas chose union representation, Wal-Mart eliminated the department and switched to pre-packaged meat. The company recently announced it would shut down an entire store in Canada rather than honor the newly formed union.

Finally, Wal-Mart imported $15 billion worth of Chinese products last year, a result of pressuring its suppliers for costs so low they can only be achieved in an environment where human rights are violated at will. Its insatiable demand for cheap labor has crushed local competitors and driven thousands of American jobs overseas, leaving nothing but, you guessed it, Wal-Mart jobs in their wake.

With more than 3,500 stores nationwide, the company has a voracious appetite for growth, and urban areas are one of the few places left to conquer.

That's why in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, Wal-Mart is sending its corporate flaks into African-American communities to trumpet the jobs a new store would create.

But we know that jobs in themselves are not enough. Throughout our history, African-Americans have all too often endured backbreaking jobs with low wages, long hours, no benefits, little respect, and even less hope for the future.

That is exactly why Dr. King and many other civil rights leaders have fought for our right to good jobs that pay enough for us to support our families and afford us the dignity that we deserve.

Wal-Mart made $9.1 billion in net income in 2004. The Walton family, worth $90 billion, is the richest family in America. Wal-Mart can afford to pay a living wage and offer decent health benefits. But they will only do so if we stand up together to make them accountable.

Jesus said, "The laborer deserves his wages." Wal-Mart is a wealthy corporation reaping profits off the backs of poorly paid workers. So when Wal-Mart arrives to seduce us with shallow promises, let's dig deeper and look closely at the company's real record. If we are going to follow through on Dr. King's dream, we can't settle for any jobs, we have to demand good jobs.

Posted on March 9, 2005, Printed on March 10, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21450/

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21450/

Posted by lois at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)

Toxic Sentence: E-Waste, Prisons, Economic and Environmental Justice

Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and the Computer TakeBack Campaign have developed an informational
report on UNICOR's federal inmate electronics recycling program that
discusses the lack of worker's rights and health and safety standards, and
describes a culture of intimidation and injustice. The report contains
quotes from inmates who have works on the disassembly lines, and a call to
action to support them and all of the workers in the electronics supply
chain.

Download the new 4-page fact sheet at:
http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/index.html

Posted by craig at 02:21 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2005

Lawsuits Challenge Prison Conditions

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Civil rights groups are challenging conditions in many of the nation's most restrictive maximum-security prisons because they believe long-term isolation breeds mental illness among inmates.
Chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union have filed lawsuits across the country seeking changes to such prisons, many of which lock dangerous felons in isolated confinement for all but three to five hours a week.

The lawsuits, filed in Connecticut, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio and New Mexico, claim that a disproportionate number of prisoners are mentally ill and not receiving proper medical treatment.

''The people who end up in 'supermax' prisons tend to be emotionally disjointed and behaviorally have a real difficult time with themselves,'' said Dr. Stuart Grassian, a former Harvard University professor who has written articles on the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement. ''Putting them in these environments makes it phenomenally worse.''

Former inmate Bob Dellelo, who served 40 years in a Massachusetts prison, described living in solitary confinement as ''maddening.'' Dellelo was convicted in 1964 for his part in a jewelry store robbery that resulted in the death of a police detective. He later was allowed to change his plea to a lesser manslaughter charge and was released on parole in 2003.

Dellelo, who now lives in Revere, served five years in a segregation unit at Walpole State Prison as punishment for escaping from the Old Colony Correctional Center in 1993.

''I thought I was losing my mind,'' he said.

The ACLU's lawsuits allege that even the healthiest of inmates succumb to mental illness if they are only allowed minimal human contact, recreation or programming.

A complaint filed against the Connecticut Department of Correction in August 2003 said some prisoners at the Northern Correctional Institute are ''subjected to social isolation and sensory deprivation that approach the limits of human endurance.'' They lash out by swallowing razors, smashing their heads into walls or cutting their flesh, the lawsuit claims.

Connecticut prisons spokesman Brian Garnett said many inmates at Northern are allowed to participate in programs, such as anger management. Prisoners can also earn their way back into the general prison population, he said.

A similar lawsuit filed last month in Indiana blamed the deaths of four mentally ill inmates on isolated prison conditions at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility.

''These places are restrictive, oppressive and destructive environments,'' said David Fathi, an attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project.

But those who work within the correction system say isolated confinement is a necessity for violent prisoners who pose a threat to other inmates and staff.

Three correctional officers have been killed by prisoners who are now living in segregated units in Michigan's Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility, said Leo Lalonde, a spokesman for the state's Department of Correction.

''So I mean these people have demonstrated through their behavior that they deserve to be locked up 23 1/2 hours a day,'' Lalonde said. ''They have shown us that they are not willing participants to get the programming and to get rehabilitated. That's the thinking.''

Fathi estimates that in the 1990s, more than 30 states operated so-called ''superma''x prisons - maximum-security facilities that keep inmates isolated for long stretches.

But in recent years, both Virginia and Michigan have converted supermax units to regular maximum security prisons, and Maryland has announced plans to transfer most of its supermax inmates to other facilities by the end of the year.

Connecticut agreed last March that it would no longer keep seriously mentally ill inmates in the segregation program unless the state deems it absolutely necessary. The agreement has not been put into effect because the two sides are still deciding how to monitor compliance. A federal judge must also approve the agreement.

Charles Cabone, a human rights attorney in California, attributes the trend to the hefty price tag that comes with such restrictive prisons. He said they tend to be much more expensive since paid employees maintain the facility instead of inmates and prison trusties. The California Prison Focus organization estimates that a super maximum-security prison in California costs $57,000 per prisoner per year, compared to $26,000 per inmate in a regular prison.

''There's also going to be a cost increase because of all these mental health issues,'' Cabone said. ''It costs money to take care of these prisoners.''
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA

On the Net: http://www.aclu.org/Prisons/

Posted by lois at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

MT: Legislators Add $31 million to Corrections--but not "special needs" prison

"Without that money, Slaughter said, the department probably wouldn't be able to go forward with a proposed special needs prison to be run by a nonprofit business in Warm Springs. That idea, endorsed last month by a separate panel of lawmakers dedicated solely to crafting Corrections' budget, would have housed elderly inmates, the chronically ill, sex offenders and drug addicts."

Legislators add $31 million to Corrections
By JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau

HELENA - Lawmakers on Monday essentially axed plans to build a new 256-cell prison for inmates with special needs in Warm Springs but still pumped an extra $31.7 million into the Department of Corrections budget.

"I feel good about it," said Corrections Director Bill Slaughter, adding that lawmakers seem to share both his and the governor's goal of finding better ways to punish nonviolent inmates, many of whom are serving time in prison for drug offenses.

The move is only the latest in the long process of balancing the state's overall $7 billion, all-funds, two-year budget. Of that, $2.6 billion comes from the state's general fund, or checking account, funded primarily by state income taxes on individuals and businesses.

The Department of Corrections gets 97 percent of its budget from general fund dollars.

The House Appropriations Committee is in the process of crafting the state budget and finalized Correction's part of the equation Monday.

Montana's prison population is expected to increase between 5 percent and 6 percent over the next two years, and most of the new millions of dollars will go to accommodate the increased number of convicts.

Lawmakers approved converting a wing of the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge to a new 85-bed revocation center. Prisoners on probation would be sent to the center instead of prison for certain probation violations. Lawmakers also approved hiring 56 employees to run the center.

They approved adding 287 beds in pre-release centers around the state, a proposition that could result in an entirely new pre-release center being built. They approved displacing up to 88 federal inmates currently housed at the state's only private prison in Shelby with Montana inmates. The state has first dibs on all the cells, and Shelby and can pre-empt the contract the facility currently has with the U.S. marshal's office in Billings.

Lawmakers allocated $1.4 million for more probation and parole officers and agreed to increase the amount of money the state spends per day to house inmates at the Shelby prison, at pre-release centers and at the county-run regional prisons throughout Montana.

Rep. John Sinrud, R-Bozeman, at the request of the governor's office, made several attempts to cut money from the budget, as it represented about $5.8 million more than the amount of money Gov. Brian Schweitzer suggested spending for the department.

Only one of those attempts, which cut $2 million from the agency's budget, succeeded.

Without that money, Slaughter said, the department probably wouldn't be able to go forward with a proposed special needs prison to be run by a nonprofit business in Warm Springs. That idea, endorsed last month by a separate panel of lawmakers dedicated solely to crafting Corrections' budget, would have housed elderly inmates, the chronically ill, sex offenders and drug addicts.

Slaughter said he didn't think the idea of a special needs prison would disappear - there's just a lot of worthy things for the state to spend its money on, and this time, a special needs prison may not make the cut.

He also said the agency could start concentrating inmates with certain medical and psychological problems in wings of the existing prison, as they already do with some mentally ill inmates.

The panel also approved studying corrections over the next two years to find out how the agency should expand to accommodate the ever-increasing population of felons in Montana.

"I'll bet (the special needs prison concept) will be back next time," Slaughter said. "It's not going away.

Rep. Tim Callahan, D-Great Falls, a member of the committee and head of the panel that studied Corrections' budget in-depth, said he was disappointed the special needs prison idea was cut.

"We're going to have to do something about it," he said. "This is less expensive in the long run."

Despite the $2 million cut, the budget approved Monday is still about $2 million more than the balanced budget Schweitzer proposed to lawmakers.

Party-line politics blurred in Monday's corrections debate with Democrats and Republics often crossing lines on votes. In some cases, a clear "party line" was difficult to discern at all.

Copyright C The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises. Shortcut to: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/03/08/bui
ld/state/66-corrections.inc

Posted by lois at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2005

CA has Chance to Rebound From Prison Fiasco

By Joe Morales, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and John Lum

(Updated Monday, March 7, 2005, 5:55 AM)

For the first time in more than 20 years, the infernal engine of California prison construction is about to fall silent.

In what one legislative adviser called "the biggest prison-building project in the history of the world," California has a chance to see the real effects of this failed strategy to create urban public safety and rural redevelopment. And California can put the golden state on a new course to enhance the well-being of vulnerable people wherever they might live.

Opposite is true

Contrary to the claims of iron-fist policing and draconian sentence- proponents, communities where policing is lighter and convictions are fewer have enjoyed far greater decreases in crime than otherwise identical communities where "tough on crime" reigns supreme.

The impact of the iron fist on prison towns is harsh. From Chowchilla to Tehachapi, new prisons have had one consistent effect: delivering the opposite of what their boosters promised.

First and foremost, prisons promised jobs, jobs, jobs. In Delano, the last of two dozen new prisons is scheduled to open later this spring. When Delano got its first prison in 1991, unemployment hovered at 26%. By 2000 the unemployment rate had risen to 29%. Or consider Corcoran, a small agricultural town with two prisons. After Californians had dropped an estimated $1 billion in prison construction and operation costs, 800 people lined up in the rain to apply for two entry-level positions.

It is hard to imagine getting less for our money.

But it's worse. On top of the false claim that prisons boost local economies, the claim that prisons are non-polluting is also dangerously misguided. Many prison employees live far from prison towns, meaning that Central Valley air quality deteriorates with each commute of 100 miles and more round trips to and from a workplace where workers disdain to live. Lousy air causes childhood asthma, reportedly affecting one in four kids in the south San Joaquin Valley.

Water quantity and quality also suffers. State prisons consume an average of more than 13 million gallons of Valley water every day. Water committed to agriculture produces crops, and water to neighborhoods produces healthy families. All investing water in prisons produces is sewage - and sometimes toxins.

A 2003 computer recycling facility fire at Atwater Federal Prison released dioxin, brominated flame retardants and potentially lead and mercury not just into the prison, but into the entire region. Yet prisons aren't governed by the same workplace and environmental standards as outside industry.

More than one Valley resident has called the region "The Other California." It did not boom during the go-go years of the 1990s, and education, health care and transportation budget cuts make Valley life ever more fragile. California's public schools, higher education system, rural district hospitals and human development agencies are being gutted to pay for prison after prison. It's up to all of us to redirect our resources and energy.

Shrinking system

Even George Deukmejian, who bore the moniker "Iron Duke" for his hard-on-crime stance as governor, sees the light. As chairman of last fall's independent review panel, he says we have to shrink the system. He says sentencing must be reformed.

What do we say? We can start with this: When the controversial Delano II prison opens after years of struggle by community organizations throughout the state, the region's disappointment in yet another boondoggle can also bring a golden opportunity.

We can forge a new public safety policy that actually makes us safe. We can make it clear that prisons have not been good to the Valley. We can work for real development options that will take a fraction of the cash thrown away on prisons to revitalize communities. We can, in short, uncage the Valley. And we can make sure they don't build any more.

At Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a statewide grass-roots organization, we are working to shift our limited public resources away from building more prisons and toward real solutions to improve our communities. On Feb. 27, we gathered more than 100 Valley residents to begin the process of making our vision a reality.

Joe Morales lives in Bakersfield and is a CURB commissioner and longtime Valley activist. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is president of the Central California Environmental Justice Network, a CURB commissioner and associate professor at University of Southern California. John Lum is a Sacramento-based CURB commissioner and former chief probation officer for San Luis Obispo County.

© 2005, The Fresno Bee

Posted by lois at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)

GPS Units for Youth

"The GPS units typically consist of a small, lightweight ankle bracelet and a personal transmitter unit, or PTU, worn on a shoulder strap or around an offender's waist. The system sends an alert if the ankle bracelet is not within a prescribed range of the PTU, which is in constant signal contact with a network of Department of Defense navigation satellites orbiting 11,000 miles above the earth."

http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2005/03/07stateexpandingh.ht
ml

News Journal

State expanding high-tech tracking
Global positioning systems to monitor young offenders with greater precision

By RANDALL CHASE / Associated Press
03/07/2005

DOVER -- With an eye toward more efficient law enforcement, the state Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services is expanding its use of global positioning systems that track the movements of juvenile delinquents on probation or under house arrest. The division, which has about 30 GPS units available statewide, recently awarded a bid for a contract worth more than $50,000 to lease several more units, which are gradually replacing older, radio-frequency ankle bracelet systems.
Unlike a radio-frequency unit, a wireless GPS unit does not need to be hooked up to telephone line inside the offender's home. "First of all, you have to have a phone," said Rick Shaw, chief of community services for DYRS. "That often precluded kids from being able to use that system."
Another advantage of GPS is that it can pinpoint a wearer's exact location, rather than just alerting a probation officer that a subject wearing a radio-frequency ankle bracelet has strayed from the base unit. "The [radio-frequency] stuff will not allow you to locate where a person is when they're out of range," said Steve Wesley, regional administrator for juvenile probation and parole in northern New Castle County, which includes the city of Wilmington. "When they leave their home, you have no clue where they're at."
More specific data
With a GPS unit, authorities can determine whether a drug offender on probation is hanging out in a known drug-dealing hot spot, or whether a sex offender is too close to a school, day-care center or his victim's home. In addition to warning of a subject's approach to "exclusion" zones, GPS technology can monitor "inclusion" zones to ensure that an offender is complying with orders to go to school, work, or counseling sessions. "It allows more intensive community-based supervision for kids who have serious offenses," Wesley said. "If every five minutes, the probation officer is showing up where you're not supposed to be or they're calling you ... it modifies behavior." "They're not crazy about them," Wesley said of his clients. "One kid said, 'I'd rather do 72 hours in detention than wear this thing for two weeks.' " The GPS units were introduced about a year ago in Delaware as part of a federally funded after-care program in Dover for offenders released from custody. A second pilot program using state funds began late last year in Wilmington.
Under the new contract being negotiated with Sentinel Offender Services LLC of Irvine, Calif., the number of GPS units might double. In addition to making new units available, Sentinel will assume responsibility for pilot program services now being provided by iSECUREtrac Corp. of Omaha, Neb., and Pro Tech Monitoring Inc. of Odessa, Fla., officials said. Shaw said electronic monitoring can be used as a sanction against an offender for not complying with the terms of his probation or release, or as part of a transition from an institution to a community. GPS technology allows electronic monitoring of more serious offenders who would not be suitable candidates for less precise RF monitoring, he noted. "We're constantly looking to expand our alternatives to secure detention," Shaw said.
Passive and active monitoring
The GPS units typically consist of a small, lightweight ankle bracelet and a personal transmitter unit, or PTU, worn on a shoulder strap or around an offender's waist. The system sends an alert if the ankle bracelet is not within a prescribed range of the PTU, which is in constant signal contact with a network of Department of Defense navigation satellites orbiting 11,000 miles above the earth. GPS monitoring technology comes in two types, active and passive. With a passive system, information on an offender's movements is stored in the PTU and can be reviewed by a probation officer on the Internet after the offender inserts the PTU into a cradle. Active GPS units, such as those used in Delaware, allow real-time tracking of the wearer through a cell-phone modem in the PTU. Using GPS technology, authorities can plot a subject's path, identify the closest street address, retrace a person's movements over several days, and calculate the speed of his movement to determine whether he is walking or using a vehicle.
The state pays about $12 a day to monitor an offender 24 hours a day with GPS, compared to $150 to $200 to keep a person locked up or in a community-based program, Wesley said. "The cost savings potential is tremendous, without really losing anything," he said. "They're still involved with their family, they're still involved in school."

Posted by lois at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Prison for the Elderly and Ill

Pittsburgh, Pa. Monday, March 7, 2005

Pa. prison population growing older, sicker, costlier
Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
Lori Will, a certified nurse assistant, feeds an inmate during lunch at SCI-Laurel Highlands near Somerset. This scene is growing more common as the 1.3 million people behind bars in America grows grayer each year.

SOMERSET -- The State Correctional Institution Laurel Highlands has many of the usual "charms" of a penitentiary: coiled razor wire, steel security doors, guards and metal detectors.

But the inside of this complex in the rolling hills outside of town looks more like a nursing home than a prison.

Elderly men move about the clean hallways in wheelchairs.

In the medical unit, inmates lie hooked up to some of the 15 dialysis machines.

In his dorm-style room in A Unit, Cube 5, a man named Dale is lying in bed, watching Clint Eastwood in "Honkytonk Man," when he sits up to greet a visitor.

Prison policy prohibits him from being identified in the media. He's a sex offender, 62 years old, who came here two years ago from another prison after suffering a stroke that paralyzed his arm.

He spends his days watching TV, playing cards, getting his physical therapy.

So how's life here?

"I like it," he said with a shrug. "In a regular prison, if you get sick, they aren't equipped to handle it."

Dale uses a wheelchair, but he's a lot better off than the guy in the room across the hall -- a Fayette County murderer lying in bed with his mouth hanging open. John Wiser, the corrections officer in charge, nodded in his direction and said quietly, "He's just waiting to die."

Death isn't unusual here. SCI Laurel Highlands is a geriatric prison, one of the first in America when it was converted from a state mental hospital in 1996.

While most of the 900 prisoners are classified as general-population, about 250 are old or sick and housed according to need: geriatric, wheelchair users and long-term care. The waiting list to get in stands at 133, and a new $6 million medical wing is on the way.

"We hope to break ground in the spring," said Superintendent Fredric Rosemeyer, whose staff includes nurses, a health care coordinator and a full-time dentist. "The inmates like being here. The [British Broadcasting Corp.] called it a 'prison with compassion,' and that's pretty accurate."

'Population bulge'

Prisons like this one have become common as the 1.3 million people behind bars in America grow grayer each year.

In 1990, there were 33,499 prisoners in state and federal lockups who were 50 or older; by 2002, that number was about 125,000, according to "Aging
Prisoners: Crisis in American Corrections," a 2003 book by Tennessee college professor Ronald Aday.

In Pennsylvania, the number of inmates 55 and older increased from 1,892 in September 2001 to 2,520 by last December.

Part of the jump is the natural result of the aging baby boom generation, those born between 1946 and 1964.

"That population bulge is a factor," said Alfred Blumstein, a nationally known criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "It's just that there's more of them."

The other major cause, experts say, is the criminal justice system.

Starting in the 1980s, many states reacted to spikes in crime by abolishing parole and passing three-strikes laws. In the federal system, Congress imposed mandatory sentencing guidelines that sent inmates away for decades for such crimes as drug trafficking.

The pendulum may be swinging back the other way now. A recent Supreme Court decision, for example, has made the federal guidelines voluntary, giving judges more discretion in sentencing.

But in the meantime, inmates 50 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population.

"The number of older offenders participating in the criminal justice system will continue to accelerate," Aday wrote, "as the baby boomer population marches toward old age."

Let them out?

As this trend builds momentum, so does the debate both inside the world of corrections and among lawmakers and academics about whether the country should continue to keep so many of its old prisoners locked up.

The cost of taking care of them is high and climbing.

At SCI Laurel Highlands, considered a model facility, the cost for one of the 111 inmates who need 24-hour nursing care is about $62,000 a year, nearly three times the cost for a regular prisoner.

All of which raises the question: Is it time to let at least some of these inmates go?

Many experts say yes.

"My take on it is that we have to have some balance," said Aday, who teaches at Middle Tennessee State University. "We need to use some common sense. How much punishment is enough?"

Pennsylvania has long recognized this problem.

In 2002, state lawmakers asked the Joint State Government Commission, a research agency for the General Assembly, to establish a task force to study the issue and come up with solutions.

"It was clear that we had a growing geriatric population in our prisons at a growing expense," said state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-Montgomery County, chairman of the task force. "Some of these people are no longer a threat to society and maybe we could reduce these costs and find alternative settings for them."

A 47-person advisory committee hopes to have its final report ready by June.

But a draft recommends that the state set up a system to release some old prisoners through the courts or the parole system. Studies have shown that recidivism drops significantly with age, and many geriatric inmates at SCI Laurel Highlands can barely get out of bed, let alone harm anyone.

"Releasing such eligible inmates to private facilities or to the care of their families through a court-sanctioned medical release procedure would reflect both humanitarian and economic concerns," the report says.

There are three main proposals: allow judges the option of granting medical release, create mental health courts to place mentally ill inmates in outside institutions, and reinstate the possibility of parole for murderers serving life terms.

The committee is generally agreed on the first two, although the last has been a point of contention, said Karen Haley, assistant general counsel for the Joint State Government Commission.

"There has been some very strong opposition to that," she said, particularly from the state Office of the Victim Advocate and the angry families of murder victims who sent letters to the committee.

"I know that it is expensive to keep an inmate in prison for the rest of his or her natural life," wrote one family member. "However, has the advisory committee considered what the homicide has cost my family? Do you really think that we would feel compassion for the inmate who killed our son if he became terminally ill? He came very close to destroying our entire family!"

The costs of care

In practical terms, the biggest problem with housing older inmates is that they need a lot of medical care.

Prisoners at SCI Laurel Highlands, for instance, are considered geriatric at 55 because the average inmate that age has the health problems of someone 65 on the outside. Most are poor and didn't have access to health care when they were out. Many abused themselves with drugs and generally lived hard lives on the street.

"I've got some guys who are on 15, 16 different medications," said Rosemeyer, a member of the advisory committee. "A lot of these guys are going to be here until they die."

About 150 inmates at the prison have died since it opened.

Yet releasing prisoners in their final years is a much more complicated issue than it may seem.

For example, who will pay for their care on the outside and how much will it cost?

"Inmates who are released to family obviously are a cost savings," Haley said. "But for those released to public nursing homes, we don't know yet."

About three-quarters of geriatric inmates don't have families who can take them in or resources to pay for their own care. Most would end up in nursing or personal care homes with Medicaid footing the bill.

So while releasing geriatrics will free up prison space for more dangerous offenders and consequently relieve pressure on states to build more prisons, the cost would still be borne by taxpayers. The burden would merely shift from the state to the federal government.

The committee is still trying to collect figures on cost comparisons. But Haley said preliminary estimates indicated that releasing prisoners to other institutions would save only a few hundred dollars per inmate.

She couldn't provide any numbers, but the average Medicaid-eligible nursing home patient in America costs about $50,000 a year. The cost of caring for some geriatric inmates in prison is much higher than that, but for others, it is lower.

Further complicating the economic picture is the fact that SCI Laurel Highlands is becoming more efficient.

Costs have actually dropped over the years because of an economy of scale created by the influx of inmates of all ages being handled by the same-size staff. In 1996, when the prison had 155 inmates, the cost per day per inmate was about $300. Last year there were 882 inmates and the cost per day was down to $104.

In addition, the prison used to farm out dialysis patients to outside hospitals at a cost of $1,800 a week. But with its own dialysis unit, that cost has been slashed to $300.

'We don't get justice?'

Beyond the economics, early release is muddied by politics. No one ever won an election by letting killers and rapists go free.

"I do have the sense that everyone wants to avoid being the guy who makes the call," said Blumstein, who is on the advisory committee. "No one wants to take the rap for releasing these people."

There is also the question of a criminal's debt to society. Some experts, and certainly victims' families, aren't convinced that age or infirmity should be a get-out-of-jail pass.

"Say I do a horrendous crime, maybe rape someone's daughter, and I'm incarcerated, and five years later I develop some terminal illness," said Louis Garzarelli, a former U.S. Bureau of Prisons intelligence officer who teaches criminology at Mount Aloysius College. "Should I be let out? Just because a guy's old, we don't get justice?"

Finding a place to put former inmates is yet another complication.

The task force study says there is a shortage of community care options. Public nursing homes and skilled-care centers, it says, aren't as available as they once were because of the shift in recent years toward "community care" for sick or old patients.

A handful of inmates, for example, have been sent from SCI Laurel Highlands to South Mountain Restoration Center in South Mountain, Franklin County, a skilled-care facility run by the Department of Public Welfare.

But the committee report says there isn't enough staff there to accommodate more inmates, and that the cost is high.

Private nursing homes probably aren't an option, either. The committee report says private homes often can't admit ex-cons because of "resistance" from families of residents who aren't criminals.

Garzarelli said he understood that attitude.

"My father was in a home for three years, God rest his soul," he said. "Now [consider], here come five or six convicted felons into my father's home. If I knew that was happening to my father, I would move him out."

What's more, he says, finding out about inmates in nursing homes would be difficult because of confidentiality laws. Who would know, then, if Mom or Dad is living next to a rapist, child molester or triple-murderer in the old folks' home?

"All these liberal people [advocating release] who might have relatives in a home have to realize that once these inmates are in there, their records are confidential," Garzarelli said. "They don't have a right to know. They give that right up."

But others discount such concerns. Blumstein, who has studied recidivism rates, said he would have no problem with old felons moving in next to a loved one or next to him.

"We can never be sure they won't commit another crime," he said. "But I would take that risk."

'A good experience'

While this debate goes on, life for older men behind bars has never been better.

"Very often in a general prison population, the geriatric inmate becomes a victim," said Rosemeyer, who worked his way up through the ranks at several state prisons and, most recently, oversaw the Allegheny County Jail after the departure of former Warden Calvin Lightfoot. "He lives with his peers here. It's a safer environment for him. It's a morale issue."

Adding to the high morale is the fact that medical care in prisons is generally good, often better than on the outside, because federal courts have forced states to provide it on constitutional grounds.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons, in particular, is known for exceptional care, including such high-cost procedures as open-heart surgery.

"There are some [federal] facilities that would make your head spin," Garzarelli said. "These inmates aren't taking the bus to go to the hospital. They're not waiting in line at a clinic. They have unequivocal coverage every day."

In some cases, the care is so good that Blumstein joked, "I will confess that my plan for my dotage is to commit a felony."

The high standard of care, he said, is one of the factors driving up the costs and another reason to let some inmates go. "Why should these people be treated better than people on the outside?"

In some instances, older inmates don't even want to leave the lockup. They have no one on the outside, no ability to cope with the world after so many years behind bars, and all their medical needs are covered under one roof.

"I had a guy not too long ago who said, 'I don't want parole,' " Rosemeyer said. " 'I want to max out. Where am I going to go?' "

Charles, of Philadelphia, who describes himself as a "chronic burglar" who was more a "nuisance" than a thief, certainly wants out. But he said he'd rather be at SCI Laurel Highlands than any other prison.

He looks fairly strong at 66, but he has trouble walking long distances and suffers from hypertension and hepatitis C. He came to Laurel Highlands two years ago from SCI Graterford, a much tougher environment; he knows he's pretty well off in Somerset.

He's served six years on his nine- to 20-year term and hopes never to return to Graterford or any other facility.

"There's no way I would put myself in that position," he said. "It's still prison [here]. It has its ups and downs, but this has been a really good experience. You couldn't ask for anything else."

Well, you could.

Such as?

He said with a laugh, "A furlough every now and then." http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05065/467032.stm

Posted by lois at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2005

Boston Globe Editorial: The Role of Parole

March 7, 2005
AFTER YEARS in a holding pattern, an encouraging new role for parole in Massachusetts is starting to emerge. A bill filed recently by the Romney administration would mandate postrelease supervision for all of the roughly 20,000 inmates leaving state prisons and county jails each year. The initiative is carefully crafted and deserves the support of people on all sides of the criminal justice debate and both sides of the prison wall.

Prisoners in Massachusetts routinely ''wrap" their sentences, the phrase used for serving the maximum prison term without being released earlier contingent on parole or probation obligations. Several factors lead to this condition, including law enforcement hard-liners who stripped the funding for halfway houses, mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, and misguided prisoners who willingly choose longer sentences to escape supervision. It's a bad deal all around. About half of the former inmates reoffend within the first year. And many find themselves homeless, with no help in finding housing or getting a job.

Last year, a gubernatorial commission wisely called for mandatory postrelease supervision. Like other recommendations in the field of criminal justice, it seemed destined for oblivion. Instead, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, a criminologist, followed up with a bill to require former inmates to remain under supervision for 25 percent of their imposed sentences or a minimum of nine months. Job training, substance abuse counseling, and housing services would be coordinated in regional reentry centers. Healey estimates that a drop of each point in the recidivism rate could save $1 million in prison costs.

Success depends on several factors, not the least of which will be the state's commitment to fund adequate drug rehabilitation programs. The parole and probation departments must avoid turf battles. And officials will need to create a sensible system of graduated sanctions for former inmates who violate the terms of their release. A failed drug test, for example, should not be treated in the same manner as a felony arrest.

The legislation sidesteps the problem of mandatory drug sentencing laws that impose long prison terms on people with no prior convictions for violent offenses. That's politically expedient. But the creation of a system for mandatory postrelease supervision would provide the right opportunity to explore better and cheaper alternatives to this questionable sentencing policy.

Former inmates are hitting the streets without skills or direction. The postrelease supervision bill provides the bearings needed to put both them and the Commonwealth's corrections policy on the proper path.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2005

CA: UNICOR - Toxics May Be Risk for Atwater Recycling Crew

Federal officials are looking into a report that dust at a computer salvaging plant at Atwater poses a danger for inmates and guards

Neither this longer LA Times story nor the AP story Judy posted earlier mentions the crucial work that Silicon Valley Toxics has played in breaking this story and taking on UNICOR's toxic recycling operations.
For more more about SVTC's campaign against UNICOR in Atwater, see:

http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/pubs/prison_sum.htm

SVTC is still looking for organizations to sign their letter to the EPA on labor conditions, environmental justice and prison labor. It was posted to this list Feb. 12 with subject heading "signators needed for letter from Silicon Valley Toxics' Let me know if you would like it re-sent.

Craig Gilmore

***************
Toxics May Be Risk for Prison Recycling Crew
By Catherine Saillant Times Staff Writer

March 6, 2005

Federal occupational safety officials are investigating complaints that prison labor crews and staff are exposed to toxic contaminants in a recycling plant at a U.S. penitentiary near Modesto.

A safety manager at Atwater federal prison alleged in a January complaint that 120 convicts, along with some supervisory staff and correctional officers, are exposed to potentially dangerous dust containing lead, cadmium and barium from a recycling operation on the prison grounds.

Atwater is a high-security men's facility south of Modesto in the San Joaquin Valley.

Convicts use hammers to smash open computers, retrieving internal components that are then reused or sold, said Leroy Smith, the prison safety official who filed the complaint with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in San Francisco.

Dust with hazardous metals found in computers drifts throughout the factory and warehouse, posing a risk to anyone who comes into contact with it or breathes it, Smith said. The EPA and OSHA have found that long-term exposure to the hazardous metals may cause kidney damage and increase the risk of lung and prostate cancer.

Smith and another prison safety official were so concerned after tests on three inmates showed elevated levels of barium that they recommended the plant be shut down temporarily to fix the problems, he said.

So far, however, the prison has agreed only to superficial fixes, playing down the safety risks in its response to OSHA, Smith said. For that reason, he has decided to go public with his concerns.

"They stopped taking my advice and took away my authority," said Smith, who went out on disability leave in October and is being treated for anxiety and depression related to his complaint. "They tried to make it personal by calling into question my job performance. But I don't see this as personal. I see it as my job. It's called protecting the safety of the staff and inmates to the best of my ability."

Atwater's warden, Paul M. Schultz, and other prison officials did not return repeated phone calls last week.

Frank Strasheim, federal OSHA's regional administrator in San Francisco, confirmed the probe into Atwater's computer recycling program. The complaint was lodged with OSHA Jan. 24, and prison officials filed a detailed response Feb. 11. Investigators are reviewing that reply.

No on-site inspection of the prison has been conducted, but Strasheim did not rule out that possibility.

"That is part of the process if we are not satisfied with the results," he said. "What we are after [when problems persist] is corrective action."

Since 1998, Unicor, a division of the federal government that uses prison crews in business ventures, has operated an expanding number of computer recycling plants at prisons nationwide, hoping to become a major player in the emerging business. Inmates can earn up to $1 an hour breaking apart the computers and sorting the parts.

But the program has come under fire in recent years by union and environmental groups that charge prisoners are using crude methods to scavenge parts. Inmates wear jumpsuits and work gloves as they smash the machines apart, but do not have goggles, Smith said. Until Tuesday, they ate their lunches within 25 feet of the factory line, exposing their meals to the contaminants, he said.

By contrast, private recycling firms place computer terminals inside a canister to capture any dust and spills when they are smashed open, Smith said. Workers are also protected by goggles, protective suits, gloves and sophisticated ventilation systems, he said.

Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said he is alarmed by the conditions described at Atwater. But the federal prison system has refused to admit there is a problem, much less implement costly safeguards at its Unicor programs in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, Arizona and California, Ruch said.

"The federal Bureau of Prisons has spent the past three years doing its best to mask the problem," he said. "They have a powerful economic incentive to keep the problem under wraps."

Smith said he became concerned in September when blood tests from three inmates working in the plant revealed elevated levels of barium. Wipe tests on various surfaces in the plant detected the presence of lead, cadmium and barium, though at levels considered acceptable for human health, he said.

Still, Smith and another safety official at the prison believed the problem was serious enough to recommend the operation be shut down while they conducted more testing of workers' blood.

Their recommendations went unheeded, Smith said. His superiors put so much pressure on him to back off, telling him that his actions were "inflammatory and hostile," that he went out on stress leave in October, he said.

In January, he filed his complaint with OSHA. Atwater's written response to the complaint, a copy of which Smith obtained, downplayed the results of blood tests and left out critical recommendations made by Smith and another safety officer, according to Smith and the documents.

Recommendations to remove air hoses that blow the dust around the factory, to provide better protective gear and to perform random testing of inmates' blood for the presence of contaminants were left out, he said. Smith believes that was done out of fear that it would be too costly to implement. "They don't want to admit there are continuing issues," he said. "It just boils down to money."

Smith said inmates are aware of the problem but don't speak up because they know they will lose their jobs if they do. The recycling plant positions are the best paid in the prison system, he said. Even if the convicts complain, few people listen to them, he said. "I'm not a sympathizer by any means," he said. "But they are humans."

*
Times staff writer Fred Alvarez contributed to this report.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-toxic6mar06,1,5792446.story?coll=la-head
lines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true
----------------
Additional Story:
Posted on Sun, Mar. 06, 2005

Officials probe claims of toxic recycling plant at prison

Associated Press

ATWATER, Calif. - Officials have begun investigating complaints that a computer recycling plant at a federal prison in the San Joaquin Valley exposed inmates and guards to toxic contaminants.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration probe followed allegations by a safety manager at Atwater prison that the plant kicks up dust containing lead, cadmium and barium.

The hazardous metals, found in the computers smashed open by prison labor crews as they scavenge reusable parts, posed a health risk to 120 convicts along with staff who breath the contaminated air, said Leroy Smith, the safety official.

Smith lodged a complaint with OSHA on Jan. 24. Investigators were reviewing the prison's Feb. 11 response and could inspect the facility, said Frank Strasheim, an OSHA regional administrator.

"That is part of the process if we are not satisfied with the results," Strasheim said. "What we are after when problems persist is corrective action."

Smith accused prison officials of agreeing to only superficial fixes and playing down the safety risks in their reply to OSHA.

Officials at the prison, located about 30 miles southeast of Modesto, did not return repeated phone calls from the Los Angeles Times.

"I don't see this as personal," Smith said. "I see it as my job. It's called protecting the safety of the staff and inmates to the best of my ability."

Smith was alarmed last September when blood tests showed elevated levels of barium in three inmates working in the plant, he said. Lead, cadmium and barium were also detected on surfaces around the facility, though at levels deemed acceptable for human health, he said.

The findings prompted Smith and another prison safety official to recommend the operation be shut down temporarily to address the problems.

The computer salvaging plant is among a growing number operated by Unicor, a government-run corporation that uses inmate crews for business ventures, at prisons nationwide since 1998. Inmates can earn up to $1 an hour breaking apart the computers and sorting the parts.

Smith said prisoners were hesitant to speak out about their concerns out of fear of losing their recycling jobs, among the best paid in the corrections system.

"I'm not a sympathizer by any means," he said. "But they are humans."
----
Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com
C 2005 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.mercurynews.com http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/nort
hern_california/11066530.htm

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

MT:Prisons overhaul will be scrutinized

..."The committee also approved building a new 240-bed "special needs" prison in the Deer Lodge Valley to house inmates with mental illness, drug addictions, chronic debilitating illness or other conditions that separate them from other prison inmates. A private, nonprofit group, not the state, would likely run that facility itself."

By JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau

HELENA - Lawmakers are expected to take a fine-toothed comb this week to the $249 million Department of Corrections' two-year general fund budget, a document lawmakers and agency officials say takes Montana corrections in a whole, new direction.
The House Appropriations Committee, the 20-member panel evenly split between Democrats and Republicans that divvies out state cash, will begin poring over the budget perhaps as early as Monday.
Already, a separate group of lawmakers has made some tentative suggestions for Corrections, approving roughly $34.8 million in new money for the branch to deal with the steady 5 percent to 6 percent growth in prisoners expected over the next two years.

But where previous Legislatures have approved building new, mostly private prison cells or freezing the agency budget due to money concerns, lawmakers so far have stressed a corrections philosophy that calls for reserving prison for dangerous convicts, but punishing nonviolent offenders in the community, at pre-release centers or with probation.

The Joint Appropriations Subcommittee on Corrections earlier approved new money to expand prerelease in Montana by 287 beds. They approved a new 85-bed sanction center at the state prison in Deer Lodge. This center would be for people on probation who don't follow the rules. Rather than send those people straight to prison for years, authorities could send them to the revocation center for up to 30 days ''to get their attention,'' said Corrections Director Bill Slaughter.

The committee also approved building a new 240-bed "special needs" prison in the Deer Lodge Valley to house inmates with mental illness, drug addictions, chronic debilitating illness or other conditions that separate them from other prison inmates. A private, nonprofit group, not the state, would likely run that facility itself.

They approved displacing 88 beds now leased by the U.S. Marshal's Office in Billings at the private prison in Shelby. Montana has first dibs on all the prison cells in Shelby.

Finally, the panel decided to spend the next two years studying corrections in Montana to chart a philosophy governing how the state punishes people who break our laws.

That budget, which is still far from final, doesn't solve all the agency's long-term needs, Slaughter said, but it gives the agency breathing room for the next two years while lawmakers decide what shape they want corrections to take in the future.

"This is the most forward-looking subcommittee we've had in years,'' said Joe Williams, administrator of the agency's Centralized Services Division.

The panel rejected plans to double the size of the private prison in Shelby, a move that would have resulted in Montana having about 28 percent of its inmates in a private prison, compared with a national average of about 6.8 percent.

More than that, Slaughter said, the committee's focus on pre-release and other community-oriented punishments represents the direction both he and Gov. Brian Schweitzer want to take corrections, given that so many inmates are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes.

''He's going in the right direction,'' Slaughter said about Schweitzer's plans.

Sen. Steve Gallus, D-Butte, a member of the Corrections subcommittee, said he liked that the tentative budget represents a significant investment in the Deer Lodge Valley, the traditional home of Montana Corrections.

First, there's the new 85-bed revocation center which will be housed in a converted wing of the existing prison. Then, the "special needs'' prison will likely be built in Warm Springs by the same nonprofit that runs pre-release and other inmate programs in and around Butte, Community Counseling and Correctional Services Inc.

Gallus said that while he supports the commitment Montana made to the company running the state's only private prison, he wants to see corrections centralized in the Deer Lodge Valley, in part because those are the people he represents and because the area has a long relationship with corrections.

"I'm really happy we're going to be centralizing,'' he said. ''I really think that's historically where every (corrections facility) was located. The people there want to work.''

Plus, locating new correctional facilities in the area cuts down on inmate transportation costs.

The budget, however, is far from certain. Schweitzer recommended spending $27.9 million more than what the agency is spending right now and lawmakers have already suggested an additional $6.9 percent.

Plus, there's the matter of a lockdown treatment center for meth-addicted convicts. Two bills calling for such a center are still alive, although neither is contemplated or paid for in the budget that will go before lawmakers this week.

Sen. Trudi Schmidt, D-Great Falls, a member of the subcommittee and sponsor of one of the bills calling for lockdown meth treatment, said it's possible the "special needs'' facility could include meth treatment.
She also said it's time Montana brings some order to its correction system.
"There's no plan,'' Schmidt said. "It's like we just warehouse people.''

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/03/06/bui
ld/state/45-prisons-overhaul.inc

Posted by lois at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)

Prison Health Services....Again

3rd diabetic inmate says lax jail care imperiled life

By CHRISTIAN BOTTORFF, Staff Writer
Sunday, 03/06/05
http://tennessean.com/government/archives/05/01/66526819.shtml

Inmate Glen Lee uses a walker to make his way gingerly around the Metro Jail in Nashville. He's constantly groggy, weak, uncomfortable.

That's a far cry from the man who walked in without assistance after his November arrest on theft and assault charges.

What happened to Lee during the past three months is the subject of a recent internal review by Metro's Department of Public Health, aimed at determining whether systemic problems are denying diabetic Metro Jail prisoners the medical care they need. City officials said Lee has received appropriate medical treatment.

But in a jailhouse interview last week, Lee claimed that a variety of missteps by jail medical staff left him in a diabetic coma and hospitalized for three weeks, leaving him fragile and concerned for his health.

''Somebody made a mistake,'' he said. ''But I don't know what it was and what was wrong.''

Lee's case marks the third in recent months in which a diabetic Metro Jail inmate or his relatives have alleged that jail staff failed to treat their disease properly.

On Jan. 11, inmate Paul Burton III was hospitalized for three days in what he described as a diabetic coma and accused jail staff of giving him much less insulin than he was receiving on the outside. After his illness, jail staff increased his insulin levels, jail records show.

Eight days after Burton was hospitalized, another diabetic inmate died in January, hours after requesting medical attention that he did not receive. An internal report by Prison Health Services, the private firm that contracts to provide medical care to inmates, found myriad errors with the care given to Ricky Douglas in the days before he died.

Last week, The New York Times published a series detailing widespread problems with the care provided to prisoners in New York by Brentwood-based Prison Health Services, the country's largest provider of health services for prisons and jails.

Prison Health Services is in its final year of a five-year contract with Metro. A new contract is to be awarded this summer.

Lee, who also has a seizure disorder, claims that he fell into a three-day diabetic coma in early January after jail officials refused to give him the correct dosage of insulin and fed him an inappropriate diet. About two weeks after his arrest, he was hospitalized for about three weeks because his blood sugar reached 520, well above the 120 level required to keep him stable.

As he began to fall ill, Lee said he caught the attention of a nurse but was told that he would need to submit a ''sick call'' slip to see a physician.

Under Metro Jail rules, prisoners who can afford to pay are charged $3 per sick call. Lee said he believed he would be unable to see a doctor because he didn't have the money. Jail officials said that indigent inmates will be seen without paying the fee.

When his condition worsened, a cellmate called for help and Lee was taken to the hospital.

''I started getting woozy,'' Lee said. ''I ended up passing out.''

Lee's brother, Thomas Lee Colbert, a church deacon in Greenville, Miss., visited Lee in jail a couple of weeks ago and said he cried when he saw his brother looking extremely ill and in a wheelchair.

''(The jail staff) don't want to do what they are supposed to do,'' Colbert said. ''They don't care.''

Jail medical staffers say they have reviewed the medical records of numerous diabetic prisoners and have found no systemic problems.

Public health officials said Friday that they gave Lee the level of treatment he required, except for a five day window in early January when, they say, Lee refused to have his blood-sugar level checked.

''Until there's an emergency situation that you have to intervene, that's a competent adult that can make his own decisions about medical care,'' said Bob Eadie, spokesman for the Metro Public Health Department.

Since Lee is incarcerated, The Tennessean was unable to ask him to respond to jail officials' claim that he refused treatment.

Even before Lee's case, however, concerns over the cases of inmates Douglas and Burton had caught the attention of federal authorities, health advocacy groups and community organizations, who have contacted jail officials or the prisoner's families in recent weeks.

FBI officials confirmed recently that agents have been talking with the Davidson County Sheriff's Office about the problems. Douglas' relatives said the FBI also has contacted them. Doug Riggin, special agent in charge of the Nashville FBI office, declined to discuss details of the FBI's involvement.

The American Diabetes Association has been in touch with attorneys for Burton and Douglas, seeking information about their medical care at the Metro Jail. In the past, the ADA has been involved in other lawsuits to ensure proper treatment of diabetic prisoners elsewhere.

''What is important in a jail situation is that you need to maintain the management system the person had on the outside, or it is extremely dangerous, such as in the case of Mr. Burton, who did not get enough insulin,'' said Shareen Arent, national director of legal advocacy for the group.

''You can't wait and maintain medications a couple of days later like you could for other chronic diseases,'' she said. ''Medication needs to happen constantly.''

Kelvin Jones, executive director of the Metro Human Relations Commission, said he and a representative of the Nashville NAACP met with Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall discuss their concerns about the care meted out by Prison Health Services.

''While I understand the sheriff's position, and understand the health department's position, you just can't contract away the city's responsibility,'' Jones said.

''Someone needs to stand up and take responsibility, and the party that needs to do that is the city. We need to take affirmative steps and identify if there are issues we should be concerned about relative to medical care within the jail system but also taking a look at the vendor.''

Nashville attorney David Raybin, who is representing Burton, is also reviewing whether to take on Lee's case. As of Friday, jail officials still had not turned over Lee's medical records that were requested Feb. 22, the lawyer said.

Raybin said he also has been contacted by other prisoners alleging similar problems.

''The problem with prisoners suffering from diabetic comas occurs frequently,'' Raybin said. ''It's too easy of a problem to solve. Simply put your arms around it and give them the insulin they need. This is not rocket science.''

Other cases

Glen Lee is the third Metro Jail inmate recently whose case raises cocerns about the qualilty of medical care. The others:

Ricky Douglas

Douglas died in custody Jan. 19. Four hours before that, he had asked a deputy for medical help that never arrived. In a recent report, the jail's health-care provider, Prison Health Services, found a number of mistakes in the care Douglas received. Sheriff's officials and health department officials have not released a final report on his death.

Paul Burton

Paul E. Burton III, 40, was hospitalized in a diabetic coma eight days before Douglas' death.

Burton's Nashville attorney David Raybin says the inmate went into a diabetic coma after the jail's staff failed to give him enough medicine. After he returned, hospital physicians ordered Burton's insulin level increased tenfold.

Posted by lois at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2005

CA: Parole System returns 3/4 for violations

http://www.fresnobee.com/state_wire/story/10052357p-10881953c.html
The Associated Press
(Updated Wednesday, March 2, 2005, 5:20 PM)

California's parole system trails those in most other states, experts say.

Some California statistics:
Number of parolees: 114,000
Number of parolees returned to prison in 2004: 77,000
Roughly a quarter were returned for new offenses, three-quarters for parole violations
Annual cost for supervision: $600 million
Percentage of overall Corrections Department budget: 10
Percentage of prison inmates who are parole violators: 40
Annual cost to incarcerate those parole violators: $1.8 billion
Percentage of parolees who successfully complete their parole:
In California: 20
Nationally: 40

Sources: Legislative Analyst's Office, U.S. Department of Justice

http://www.fresnobee.com/state_wire/story/10052357p-10881953c.html

Posted by lois at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

MN: Sentate unamiouslly OKs meth bill limiting cold medicine sales

BY MARTIGA LOHN
ASSOCIATED PRESS

ST. PAUL - Runny nose? Stuffy head? Need to get your hands on some medicine?

Before cold season is out, you might have to go to the pharmacy counter, present ID and sign a log for certain cold medicines, if a broadly supported bill aimed at getting tough on methamphetamine use in Minnesota becomes law.

All 67 state senators voted for the restrictions Thursday. It's part of a crackdown that includes stricter penalties for making meth and better cleanup of the toxic leftovers from meth labs around the state.

Lawmakers want to clamp down on cold medicines, including Sudafed and Actifed, because meth cooks stockpile the products and distill their active ingredients, psuedoephedrine or ephedrine, to make the drug. The Senate bill would reclassify pseudoephedrine and ephedrine as controlled substances -- changing the landscape of how some widely available products are sold.

"The consumer is going to have access to common cold medicines severely restricted," said Nancy Christensen, executive director of the Minnesota Grocers Association. "Most groceries and all convenience stores that carry this don't have pharmacies. With the exception of some liquid products, it would disappear off the shelves."

The legislation makes exceptions for pediatric products containing the substances and liquid and gel-cap versions. One of the bill's sponsors, Republican Sen. Julie Rosen of Fairmont, passed out a list of 89 over-the-counter medicines -- including Children's Tylenol, Claritin and Dayquil -- that wouldn't be restricted under the bill.

Senators voted 53-12 against an attempt by Sen. Gary Kubly, DFL-Granite Falls, to allow gas stations and convenience stores to sell the products if they were kept in locked cases.

Kubly argued that his proposal would have made life easier for rural Minnesotans living 30 miles or more from the nearest pharmacy.

"We don't want to impose undue restrictions on the public," Kubly said. "This would also help people in the city. During the cold season, you have a lot of people standing in line for other products. It will not only put a burden on our pharmacists but also a burden on the people who will spend more time waiting in line."

But the bill's sponsors said Minnesota needs the tough restrictions on cold medicines -- already being considered by neighboring states -- or the state could face an influx of meth addicts searching for ingredients to make the drug. Already, the state's prisons have seen a steep rise in the number of drug offenders sentenced for meth crimes.

"Our first response should be getting the product that is essential and necessary to this very, very dangerous substance off the shelves and behind the pharmacy counter," said Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis.

Christensen said the restrictions would give an edge to pharmacy chains and retailers such as Target and Cub Foods that have pharmacies, while other stores would be faced with angry customers who can't find familiar products.

"I think people will be shocked," she said.

Grocers and pharmacists are already participating in a campaign to keep better tabs on products used to make meth, she said. She also suggested a statewide electronic database for all retailers to stop people who go from store to store to build up an inventory of medicines containing psuedoephedrine or ephedrine.

The Senate bill directs the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to develop a plan for a statewide pharmacy database tracking purchases of the products by 2006. The bill would also prevent pharmacies from using information from their customer logs for purposes other than law enforcement.

Meanwhile, a House methamphetamine bill containing the restrictions on cold medicines has already won approval from two committees and awaits a third committee hearing next week.
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/local/11046130.htm>
Fri, Mar. 04, 2005

Posted by lois at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2005

NY: He Did Time, So He's Unfit to Do Hair

March 4, 2005, NYTimes
By CLYDE HABERMAN

AS someone who has done time himself, Marc La Cloche is happy for Martha Stewart. She has managed to turn life in federal prison into a nifty career move. Her company's stock is soaring, and she has plans for not one but two television shows. It almost makes you wonder why the Enron types are fighting so hard to stay out of jail. Brava Martha, Mr. La Cloche says. He only wishes that New York State would let him put his own prison experience to decent use. "I wish her the best," he said of Ms. Stewart. "But I think the best is going to come anyway because she's financially sound. She has avenues that one coming from my situation won't have." That's for sure. The avenues open to Mr. La Cloche, 39 and living in the Bronx, might best be described with Joseph Heller's memorable phrase Catch-22. Mr. La Cloche served 11 years in New York prisons for first-degree robbery. While behind bars, he turned his life around. He learned a trade, barbering. He even had the image of a barber's clippers and comb tattooed on his right arm. In 2000, as he prepared to be freed, he applied for a required state license. He was denied it. But that decision was reversed when reviewed by a hearing officer. For a while after his release, Mr. La Cloche worked in a Midtown barber shop. That job did not last long. New York's secretary of state, who has jurisdiction in these matters, appealed the granting of the license and won. Mr. La Cloche's "criminal history," an administrative law judge ruled, "indicates a lack of good moral character and trustworthiness required for licensure." In plain language, the fact that Mr. La Cloche had been in prison proved that he was unworthy for the trade that the state itself taught him in prison. Where is Joseph Heller when we need him? That pretty much summed up the feelings of Justice Herman Cahn of State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Two years ago, he ordered the authorities to give Mr. La Cloche another look. They have every right to expect would-be barbers to prove their "good moral character," Justice Cahn said. But Mr. La Cloche never got the chance. His criminal record alone did him in, and that was unfair, the judge said. So the case went back to an administrative judge. The result was the same, though. Once again, Mr. La Cloche was found to lack the moral character to cut hair for a living. This time, the reason given was his "minimization" of the nature of his crime. It is tempting to note that Ms. Stewart also minimizes her crime; she insists on her innocence. But she gets a television show or two. Mr. La Cloche has his clippers yanked. He is now on public assistance, he says, and receives disability payments for a bad hip. Apparently, state officials believe that New Yorkers are better served having a former convict on welfare rather than in a career. One of his plans were he to get a license, Mr. La Cloche said, would be to team with "a bunch of barbers" to cut the hair of young people living in state institutions. "What I really want is to have this contact with these kids so I can hopefully get to them and change their life around," he said. "I was raised in these institutions. But this barber license is really holding me up." A spokesman for the secretary of state says the agency's position has not changed. In turn, Mr. La Cloche continues to pursue his license in the state courts, aided by Michele Davila, a lawyer with Neighborhood Defenders Service of Harlem. HIS case is hardly isolated, said JoAnne Page, executive director of the Fortune Society, a group in Manhattan that helps former inmates. They keep running into "so many barriers to employment," she said. "The question is how long do you hold that albatross around a person's neck," Ms. Page said. "We're seeing a tightening of the neck because it's so easy now to check records. We're also seeing - some of it is post-9/11 - a greater rigidity about giving people that second chance to rebuild." It is one thing to prevent, say, a child molester from driving a school bus, she said. But to keep a convicted robber from cutting hair? The authorities, she pointed out, trusted Mr. La Cloche enough to wield sharp instruments in a maximum-security prison. Of course, Mr. La Cloche can always look on the bright side. Unable as he is to ply his trade, he will have more time now to catch Martha Stewart on television.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

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

March 03, 2005

Declining Employment among Young Black Less-Educated Men: The Role of Incarceration and Child Support

by
Harry J. Holzer, Paul Offner, and Elaine Sorensen

download at:
http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/dps/dpabs2004.htm#DP1281-04

In this paper, we document the continuing decline in employment and labor force participation of black men between the ages of 16 and 34 who have a high school education or less. We explore the extent to which these trends can be accounted for in recent years by two fairly new developments: (1) the dramatic growth in the number of young black men who have been incarcerated and (2) strengthened enforcement of child support policies. We use micro-level data from the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups, along with state-level data over time on incarceration rates and child support enforcement, to test these hypotheses. Our results indicate that post-incarceration effects and child support policies both contribute to the decline in employment activity among young black less-educated men in the last two decades, especially among those aged 25-34.

Posted by craig at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

Mexico Says NO to Arizona Prison

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0302mex-prison02.html#
Prison bill riles Mexico
Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau Mar. 2, 2005 12:00 AM
MEXICO CITY - Mexico has rejected a proposal by some Arizona lawmakers to move undocumented inmates to a privately run prison south of the border, calling it an "insult" to Mexico's sovereignty.

A bill moving through the Arizona House of Representatives would allow the state to contract a prison in Mexico to hold undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States.

The House Government Affairs Committee approved the bill last week, and a delegation of Arizona lawmakers planned to bring up the idea during a visit to Sonora today.

But the government of President Vicente Fox has said it would be unthinkable for Mexicans to keep fellow citizens imprisoned for crimes that weren't committed in Mexico.

"To build any structure of that type would require authorization of the Mexican government, authorization that we are not going to give," Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez said during a news conference Monday.

"I don't know where that (idea) came from - it had to have been dreamed up by, well, I'm not going to use the word, but some people in the United States," Derbez said, according to a transcript released late Monday.

Arizonans pay $80 million to $100 million a year to house the 4,000 undocumented immigrants in state prisons, said Rep. Russ Jones, R-Yuma, the bill's chief proponent. He said the measure is simply aimed at saving money.

"This (bill) is simply realizing that we have an issue, and trying to resolve the issue in the most reasonable and humanitarian way," Jones said.

But the Mexican government doesn't see it that way, Derbez said.

"I believe that not only is it wrong, it's something that shouldn't even have been brought up," Derbez said. "It's an insult to even have made a suggestion of this nature when it is clear and evident that the government of Mexico, this administration at least, is in no way going to permit this type of activity."

Jones said he and other members of the Arizona House and Senate still intended to pitch the idea to Sonora state officials during a visit today to Hermosillo. "I think we could provide jobs down there. I think it will be a good thing," said state Sen. Robert Blendu, R-Litchfield Park, another member of the delegation. "We should be able to compromise on this."

Posted by lois at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

More On Soros & Lynne Stewart and "Un-American Organizations"

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7814

Political Hay
Funding Terror Foundationally
By David Hogberg
Published 2/25/2005 12:07:12 AM

It appears the George Soros's charitable giving goes a little beyond trying to defeat President Bush. Last week, Byron York of National Review revealed that in September 2002 the Soros-funded Open Society Institute (OSI) gave $20,000 to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee.

Lynne Stewart, you will recall, is the radical lawyer who was recently convicted of aiding one of her clients, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. Also known as the "Blind Sheik," Rahman was sentenced in 1996 to life imprisonment for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. After Rahman's conviction, his terrorist organization, Islamic Group, threatened to attack targets in the United States unless he was released. In response, the U.S. Government forbad Rahman from communicating with his Islamic Group henchmen. He was allowed to communicate only with his spouse and attorneys, who also were forbidden to communicate Rahman's dictates to Islamic Group. Lynne Stewart ignored the prohibition.

You can almost hear Stewart's supporters now: "But everyone, including Stewart, has the right to a defense," they would say. That is true -- and irrelevant. Just because Stewart has a right to a defense does not require Soros to fund it. By contributing to her defense barely a year after September 11, Soros and the OSI sent a message: Funding terrorist enablers is more important than fighting a War on Terror.

The OSI funds hundreds of organizations and individuals. Many belong on the Who's Who of left-liberal advocacy groups and think tanks. Here's a partial list of those that received OSI grants of $100,000 or more:
* Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (1999--$350,000; 2002--$275,000 and
$100,000)
* People for the American Way (1999--$100,000; 2002--$100,000)
* Economic Policy Institute (1999--$184,350)
* Planned Parenthood Federation of America (1999--$200,000; 2002--$500,000)
* American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education
* Human Rights Watch, Inc. (2002--$1,000,000 and $150,000; 2000--$1,000,000 and $179,350; 1999--$1,000,000)
* National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (2000--$100,000)
* Tides Foundation (1999--$700,000 and $200,000; 2002--$595,000, $350,000, $300,000 and $175,000; 2000--$500,000, $212,000 and $100,000)
* National Abortion Rights Action League Foundation (2002--$150,000)
* Sundance Institute for Film and Television (2002--$1,500,000) (For a complete list of OSI $100,000+ grant recipients since 1999, visit the Capital Research Center website.) Now that Stewart is convicted, we might ask the groups that took Soros money the following questions: Are you embarrassed that one of your major donors contributed to the defense of someone accused -- and now convicted -- of helping a convicted terrorist communicate with his followers? Will you consider returning the money you received from the Open Society Institute? Finally, will you accept grants in the future from donors that assist accused terrorists?

I won't hold my breath waiting for the answers. But these Soros-funded groups should not just take the money and run. Instead, they should think seriously about their moral responsibility as grant recipients, and they should look to the example of some of their ideological brethren. Both the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations recently instituted policies requiring their grantees to sign a statement saying that its grantees do not support terrorist groups or activities. At the very least, the morally responsible action for OSI grant recipients is to refuse any further OSI money until OSI adopts a similar policy.

David Hogberg is a senior research analyst at the Capital Research Center. He also hosts his own website, Hog Haven.

Posted by lois at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2005

NY Times: Prison Health Services: Juveniles Incarcerated in NY

March 1, 2005
A Spotty Record of Health Care at Juvenile Sites in New York
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

It was early February 2000, and Judge Paula J. Hepner said she could hardly believe what a doctor in the city's juvenile justice system had done to the girl standing before her in Brooklyn Family Court.

The girl, Tiffany S., was 14, with a history of suicide threats and a set of serious psychological problems well documented by doctors at a psychiatric hospital for children. They had treated her bipolar disorder with powerful medicines and, knowing that she was facing detention, had recommended that she keep receiving them when the Department of Juvenile Justice took her into custody.

But soon after Tiffany entered the system, Dr. Ralph L. Williams - an employee of Prison Health Services and the only full-time doctor for 19 juvenile centers across the city - stopped her medications. Instead, he placed her on Ritalin, a drug meant to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

It took only days for Tiffany to deteriorate. Soon, she said in an interview, she was hallucinating, fighting with other girls and spending hours staring at a wall. As an additional measure, she said, a Prison Health employee asked her to sign a pledge not to kill herself.

Judge Hepner ordered Tiffany back to the hospital, records show, and moved to hold Dr. Williams in criminal contempt. In doing so, Judge Hepner joined at least five other judges who would order more vigorous treatment by Prison Health, a company that cares for hundreds of thousands of inmates in New York State and across the country.

That May, for instance, Judge Philip C. Segal of Brooklyn Family Court held the juvenile justice commissioner - whose agency represented Prison Health in court - in contempt after the company staff neglected to give a 13-year-old boy his H.I.V. medication. Later that month, Harold J. Lynch, a judge in the Bronx, ordered a 13-year-old girl in the agency's custody returned to the Bronx Children's Psychiatric Center. The girl, court records show, had tried to kill herself after a Prison Health doctor discarded her psychiatric medications and gave her Ritalin instead.

"This is not just a single case," Judge Lynch told city lawyers. "It's many cases."

But those cases are only one distressing facet of what would be a four-year effort by Prison Health to provide care to young people in the city's network of juvenile detention centers and group homes - a job that made the company about $15 million in revenue before it was replaced in 2003. Independent investigations have criticized the quality of that care. Questions have also been raised by some city officials about whether the company was forthright with various other city agencies about its work at Juvenile Justice.

Of the roughly 500 youngsters, ages 7 through 16, who were in custody on any given day, some had committed serious crimes. Others had been turned over by parents who could not or would not care for them. Still others were there simply because there was nowhere else to go. One thing is clear about most of them: they were sick and in need of help.

Prison Health, a profit-making corporation with a troubling record in many states, appears to have poorly served many of those youngsters, according to a review of its work, based on court records and audits, as well as interviews with children, judges, Legal Aid Society lawyers and current and former Juvenile Justice employees. The results, those documents and interviews make clear, were often confusion and mistreatment throughout the company's time in the juvenile justice system, from January 1999 to April 2003.

For the 5,000 youngsters who passed through each year, the one full-time doctor Prison Health employed oversaw a staff composed mostly of part-time physician assistants, social workers and nurses. Sometimes, current and former counselors who worked at Juvenile Justice said, the medical staff mistakenly gave children medication that had not been prescribed to them. One counselor said that to avoid further errors, Polaroid photos were stapled to medical files to help nurses match names with faces.

The only independent audit of the company's medical care, commissioned by the Juvenile Justice Department in 2003, six months after Prison Health had already left, found that patient records had been in disarray, and that no doctor had appeared to consult them anyway. Many children with serious illnesses received no follow-up care, the audit said, and most teenagers were not tested for sexually transmitted diseases. The audit was never made public.

"The work was poor and put young people at risk," the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., said in an interview. "I'd almost say deplorable."

Juvenile Justice officials have said they were "generally satisfied" with the company. The agency declined interview requests for this article for five months, until aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered the department's spokesman to answer questions about Prison Health's tenure. Even then, in two interviews, department officials would not discuss the company's record.

Richard D. Wright, the president and chief executive of Prison Health, defended its work and the services it offered youngsters in custody. "There were a lot of professional people dedicated to that contract," he said in an interview. "We thought that they were sufficient to deal with the workload."

Prison Health's performance at Juvenile Justice is the least known aspect of its long and lucrative work in New York. The care the company provided in upstate county jails in recent years has been assailed by state investigators. And its work at the jail complex on Rikers Island has been consistently, if not always diligently monitored by New York City, which awarded the company a new $300 million contract in January.

But the care Prison Health provided children in the juvenile system, the city comptroller now says, should have been examined by the city when the company was seeking the Rikers contract in 2000.

Prison Health took over care at Juvenile Justice in 1999 when it bought EMSA Correctional Care, a smaller competitor that had been doing the job for three years. When it was vying for the Rikers contract, though, Prison Health listed EMSA in disclosure statements as an affiliate and indicated that EMSA was still working at Juvenile Justice.

The city comptroller now says that Prison Health was in charge of providing juvenile care from the time it bought EMSA, and that EMSA existed only on paper. The comptroller says that the company misled the city, and that as a result, the city missed an opportunity to get a hard look at Prison Health's work in its own backyard before it hired the company for its adult jails.

Prison Health says that its filings properly listed EMSA as a separate concern in 2000. The city agencies in charge of awarding the Rikers contract, the Health and Hospitals Corporation and the Mayor's Office of Contract Services, say they found no problem with Prison Health's disclosures.

Over the years, as Prison Health has expanded nationally, followed by accusations of flawed care by regulators, many of its critics have wondered how it kept winning new contracts, sometimes in a county or state next to one it had left under a cloud. In New York City, anger among judges and lawyers in the juvenile justice system did not prevent the company from landing a huge jail contract across town.

Of course, caring for youngsters inside the city's three jail-like detention centers and 16 less restrictive group homes can be as dangerous and frustrating as caring for adult inmates. Few young people entering the system have received consistent health care and, as a result, lack any medical record to guide doctors. Often, there are not even family members to question.

For many of them, as a result, detention offers the only opportunity to get a physical or dental examination, or even talk to an adult willing to listen. Proper medical and mental health care, say experts and the department's own employees, is vital in helping them become productive adults.

That care has improved under the two companies hired to replace Prison Health, say city officials and lawyers working in the Family Court system. It could hardly have gotten worse, said Jennifer Baum, a Legal Aid lawyer who represented many youngsters during Prison Health's tenure.

"I saw troubled and needy children being mistreated by shabby medical care," she said.

Checkups and Warnings

By the time Prison Health Services acquired it, EMSA had been treating the city's incarcerated children since 1996. EMSA had more experience with children than Prison Health, but it had problems, too.

In Westchester County, EMSA had paid $750,000 to settle a lawsuit by the parents of a 17-year-old girl who hanged herself at the jail there in 1996, after a psychiatrist stopped her antidepressant medication. The doctor, Harvey N. Lothringer, had pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter three decades before, admitting that he dismembered the body of a young woman who had died during an illegal abortion he performed, and then flushed her remains down a toilet. He spent four years in prison, but in 1973, the State Board of Regents declared the doctor "rehabilitated" and restored his medical license. He began working for EMSA in 1996.

At Juvenile Justice, counselors and Legal Aid lawyers said they had found EMSA's medical staff too small to properly treat all the children who needed help. But a little less than a year after Prison Health arrived, taking responsibility for the care, that private grumbling turned public.

Prompted by complaints from Ms. Baum, a half-dozen Family Court judges filed at least 12 court orders or contempt motions in 2000 to force Juvenile Justice to fix mistakes in care. In one instance, Dr. Joseph K. Youngerman of the Bronx Children's Psychiatric Center pleaded with Judge Lynch to help the suicidal 13-year-old girl who had been taken off her medication; if he could not, the doctor wrote, the center would take her back - "to spare her (and us all) any repeat" of her breakdown.

For nearly two years, though, those concerns remained buried in court files. Then, in 2002, the city comptroller, during a routine review, uncovered several problems.

He urged Prison Health to re-examine its staffing, which provided only one full-time psychiatrist and one part-time physician for all medical services. The company, the comptroller's office found, did not provide the group counseling required in its contract. There was no system, the comptroller said, to ensure that children taking psychiatric drugs received them on days they were sent to court; unmedicated, they sometimes broke down in front of a judge.

Indeed, several employees said that they sometimes were told that drugs for some of the children were unavailable or simply unnecessary, leaving them to handle the untreated patients.

"If they get disruptive," said one longtime counselor at a group home, "the staff has to put them in a restraining position, and then you end up with a child-abuse charge."

For reasons that its spokesman declined to disclose, the Department of Juvenile Justice commissioned its own review in 2003. It was a rare move, and it came only after Prison Health had left.

This would be the only outside medical audit. Done by IPRO, a well-known nonprofit health-care auditing firm, it found serious deficiencies, showing that things had been even worse than the comptroller's office had thought.

Medical charts had been badly disorganized, the audit said, and "there was little evidence of an oversight physician" reviewing them. Young people who developed medical problems were "almost never" seen by a doctor, but typically examined instead by a nurse, the audit said.

About one in six youngsters with chronic health problems like epilepsy, sickle cell anemia and kidney disease never received follow-up treatment while in custody. Tests critical to running an institution full of troubled young people were so haphazardly administered that fewer than one-third of the eligible girls received a Pap test, and only about 1 in 5 eligible youngsters were tested for gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis.

But Prison Health was by now largely beyond accountability. It had left the previous April, when the Department of Juvenile Justice replaced it with two other companies: Health Star Plus, which now provides medical care, and Forensic Health Services, which handles mental health services. Department officials, who had given Prison Health mostly satisfactory evaluations during its four years, would not discuss the problems raised by the audit.

"At this point, we have new providers," said Scott Trent, a department spokesman. "It's a new contract. It's entirely irrelevant."

One Girl's Tale

Tiffany grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and her early life was a painful one. She was put in her grandmother's care by city child-welfare workers when she was 3 to escape the abuse of two drug-addicted parents. But that did not last long. After her brother sexually abused her sister, Tiffany was moved yet again. When she was 13, she ran away.

On the streets, she was beaten, and she began to hear voices. She found herself telling people, "I'm not crazy!"

Tiffany ended up in the custody of the juvenile justice system after she was accused of a minor nonviolent crime in 1999; she agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the charge not be disclosed. But before she got there, she spent a month in the adolescent psychiatry unit at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn.

The conclusion of doctors there was precise: Tiffany suffered from bipolar disorder and behavioral problems and required psychiatric medication and individual psychotherapy. Without them, her doctors wrote, "Tiffany is at risk for harming herself."

Once in custody, Tiffany was placed in a holding center in Manhattan on Jan. 5, 2000. She was taking Depakote to control her mood swings, and Risperidone, an antipsychotic. The next day, records show, she was examined by Dr. Williams.

Prison Health had hired the doctor several weeks earlier. But Dr. Williams had already made a mostly negative impression on some lawyers working with the youngsters in custody. In interviews, the lawyers said he replaced psychiatric medication with cheaper, less appropriate drugs.

Mr. Wright, the president of Prison Health, said Dr. Williams felt that black children were too frequently put on psychiatric medications they did not need. But Mr. Wright said that the doctor's decisions to withdraw those medications were inappropriate, and that Prison Health forced the doctor to resign in August 2001. Dr. Williams did not return messages left with his lawyer seeking comment for this article.

Records show that Dr. Williams, after one 80-minute exam, concluded that Tiffany suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and despite three court orders discontinued her psychiatric medications in late January. Soon the hallucinations started again, she said in an interview, and her antisocial behavior came roaring back.

"I'd see stuff, shadows, people's faces," Tiffany recalled. "I'll be scared. I'll be crying. I always think people are out to get me."

She eventually threatened to kill herself, she said, setting in motion her return to Judge Hepner's courtroom, and ultimately the psychiatric hospital, where doctors put her back on her previous medication.

"When you have medicine that is working, it seems really irresponsible to alter it," Judge Hepner, in an interview, recalled saying in court. She ordered Dr. Williams to pay a $1,000 fine.

The kind of treatment Tiffany received, records and interviews show, began before Prison Health took over EMSA, but judges and lawyers said the pattern grew increasingly familiar afterward.

In July 2000, a suicidal 15-year-old girl was taken off Depakote - prescribed by doctors at Craig House, an upstate psychiatric clinic - and placed on Ritalin, according to court filings and lawyers and judges involved in her case. It would take five weeks to have her medication restored.

In March of that year, a 15-year-old boy at Bridges Juvenile Center, a secure center in the Bronx, went days without his psychiatric medications because Dr. Williams visited the center only twice a week. Prison Health's policy, according to court transcripts and interviews, was to discontinue youngsters' medications until a company doctor could complete his own evaluation.

But rather than wait for Dr. Williams to show up days later at Bridges, a Manhattan Family Court judge, alerted by the boy's lawyer, ordered the boy sent to Bellevue Hospital Center. "They can't say there's no psychiatrist on staff at the hospital," the judge, Sheldon M. Rand, said in a hearing.

The company's strategy for treatment, when it went beyond drugs, included the unusual approach of asking a youngster to write up and sign a pledge not to commit suicide. Such pledges, experts in mental health treatment say, accomplish little.

"It's an awful tool," said a former Prison Health mental health supervisor in the juvenile system. "It's designed to make the clinician go home and sleep better at night."

Tiffany said the whole exercise was stupid. "I just wrote it so they would stop following me," she said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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NY Times: Part 2: Prison Healht Service: City Jails Disregarded Signals lead to Suicides

February 28, 2005
In City's Jails, Missed Signals Open Way to Season of Suicides
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

The warnings were right there in her medical file: a childhood of sexual abuse, a diagnosis of manic depression, a suicide attempt at age 13 - all noted when Carina Montes arrived at Rikers Island in September 2002.

But none of them, state investigators said, were ever seen by the mental health specialist caring for her. He could never track down the file, which by December included another troubling fact: Ms. Montes had been placed on suicide watch by a jail social worker. Not that the suicide watch was terribly reliable; it depended in part on inmates paid 39 cents an hour to check on their suicidal peers.

In her five months at Rikers, investigators later discovered, Ms. Montes never saw a psychiatrist.

It did not, however, take a psychiatrist to pick up on the alarms she sounded near the end, when another inmate saw her tearing bedsheets and threatening to kill herself. But the guard who was called had no idea she was on suicide watch, did not notice the sheets and never reported the incident. Six hours later Ms. Montes was dead, hanging from a sheet tied to a ventilation grate.

She was 29. Her offense: shoplifting 30 lipsticks.

The death of Carina Montes was one in a spate of suicides in New York City jails in 2003 - six in just six months, more than in any similar stretch since 1985. None of these people had been convicted of the charges that put them in jail. But in Ms. Montes's death and four of the five others, government investigators reached a stinging judgment about one or both of the authorities responsible for their safety: Prison Health Services, the nation's largest for-profit provider of inmate medical care, and the city correction system.

In their reports, investigators faulted a system in which patients' charts were missing, alerts about despondent inmates were lost or unheeded, and neither medical personnel nor correction officers were properly trained in preventing suicide, the leading cause of deaths in American jails.

Prison Health came to Rikers in 2001 after signing a three-year, $254 million contract and promising to deliver the health care that, compared with jails around the country, had helped make New York something of a model. And it spoke confidently about tackling the jails' biggest problem: how to handle their vast and volatile population of the mentally ill.

The rash of suicides, and nine more during Prison Health's tenure, is one measure of the company's uneven and at times troubling record in meeting that challenge. But there are others.

Ten psychiatrists with foreign medical degrees were allowed to practice without state certification for more than a year after they were supposed to have been fired for failing to pass the necessary test. When it finally dismissed them on the city's orders in 2003, Prison Health was left with about one-third of its full-time psychiatrist positions empty, according to city health department figures.

The company has employed five doctors with criminal convictions, including one who had been jailed for selling human blood for phony tests to be billed to Medicaid. In all, at least 14 doctors who have worked for Prison Health have state or federal disciplinary records, among them a psychiatrist forbidden to practice in New Jersey after state officials blamed him for a patient's fatal drug overdose.

The city's Board of Correction, an oversight agency that sets minimum standards for jails, has complained that the company shuffles doctors from jail to jail - regardless of where they are needed - to avoid city fines and create the illusion that each building is properly staffed.

Many of the 30 current or former Prison Health employees interviewed for this article described an effort that, whatever its good intentions, frequently fails to adequately treat the mental illnesses that inmates take into jail and that follow them back out.

Dr. Douglas Cooper, a psychiatrist who helped supervise mental health treatment at the nine Rikers jails until, he says, he quit in frustration in 2003, summed up the care as triage, buffeted by a sense of nonstop crisis. "The staff does the best they can," he said, "and what's left they sweep under the rug."

Prison Health Services, a Nashville-area corporation that bills itself as the gold standard of jail health care, says it has done a solid job at Rikers and a 10th jail, in Lower Manhattan, caring for more than 100,000 inmates a year as part of its largest contract among scores across the nation.

The company says it has worked hard to find qualified mental health specialists, held increases in medical expenses below the national average, and saved the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There is little dispute that New York City has long insisted on more generous jail care than most other places; the suicide rate, even under Prison Health, is about half the national average for jails.

Then again, the rate was lower before Prison Health arrived. And in the four years since, the rate of suicides at Rikers has been higher than in the Los Angeles jail system, the largest and one of the most violent in the nation.

Suicides - "hang-ups" in the cold vernacular of the cellblock - have always been a jailhouse reality. Because inmates can be resourceful when they set out to kill themselves, few people believe that hang-ups can be prevented entirely.

Yet they can be a critical barometer of how well medical and correction workers are performing an essential task: protecting the vulnerable people in their care. In 2003, something broke in the city's jail system, and inmates slipped through a bewildering series of cracks.

The first, Jose Cruz, a 48-year-old with H.I.V. and hepatitis, hanged himself with a torn bedsheet in January. Even though he had been put on suicide watch, correction officers placed him at the end of a cellblock where they could not see him from their post, said the State Commission of Correction, a panel appointed by the governor to investigate every death in jail. The medical staff, the commission noted, had inadequate training in preventing suicides.

Thirteen days later, Joseph Hughes, a severely disturbed 24-year-old charged with murder, was found hanged four hours after a jail psychiatrist wrote that he was no danger to himself. The commission criticized the Prison Health staff, saying that Mr. Hughes's history of hallucinations and suicidal gestures required closer observation.

Ten days after that, guards cut down Ms. Montes - whose increasing desperation had gone unnoticed because her medical file was missing, a failing the state commission had already criticized in three other deaths during Prison Health's time at Rikers.

After two more suicides, an inmate found James Davis, 43, in his cell in June with a bootlace tied around his neck. A doctor, two nurses and two guards spent 15 minutes vainly administering C.P.R., unaware that oxygen tanks and cardiac medication were nearby, the commission said.

No one thought to unknot the bootlace.

Sixteen days later in a jail-clinic waiting room, a 19-year-old who had just returned from a psychiatric evaluation unit managed to hang himself from a metal stud in the ceiling, according to the city's Board of Correction. Another inmate rescued him while he was still semiconscious.

The city's health department, which now oversees Prison Health's work at Rikers, did not contest many of the commission's findings, though it defended the work of the psychiatrist who evaluated Mr. Hughes as "not inappropriate." Company executives did not respond to the commission's reports, saying that they had never read them because city officials did not give them copies.Promising Vigilance

The catalog of missteps and missed signals could not have come as a complete shock to city officials. Prison Health, after all, had attracted criticism around the country for faulty care. And by the time of the suicides, the state commission was busy investigating - and blaming - Prison Health for inmate deaths in county jails upstate.

The city, though, has insisted that it has the tools to strictly monitor the company's performance. The state commission, too, concedes that city health officials are more vigilant than any county sheriff.

In fact, soon after the city hired Prison Health in 2001 to salvage jail medical services after three tumultuous years under the direction of St. Barnabas Hospital, New York City officials battled the company over its failure to meet many of the city's most basic clinical standards, and threatened to cancel the contract. Now, after a series of changes the city ordered - including suicide prevention and oversight measures prompted by the 2003 deaths - the health department says care has improved. On Jan. 1, it granted the company a $300 million contract for another three years.

"They were the most qualified bidder and they were the most cost effective," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the health commissioner, who described Prison Health as willing to make improvements when asked. "I don't think they're angels."

Others are more skeptical. The city comptroller's office, prompted by Prison Health's record and questions raised by The New York Times, asked the health department to delay signing the new contract until the department addressed concerns, including the Board of Correction's complaints of staff shortages at Rikers. Dr. Frieden replied that he saw no reason to wait.

But the new contract, according to two state officials, appears to violate a state law intended to keep business interests from influencing medical care. For example, it fails to ensure that doctors are the ultimate overseers of all medical treatment, policy and records. And the contract makes the doctors who are actually doing the work at Rikers subcontractors to Prison Health, the reverse of what the law requires.

The health department and the company say the contract is legal.

For those who work in the jails, though, the larger issue is the quality of the care. Figures provided by the city and St. Barnabas show that the clinical staff at Rikers has shrunk by 20 percent since the hospital was in charge, despite only a modest decline in the jail population. And several doctors and other employees said that mental health care is worse than before.

Forever unable to find enough psychiatrists, the company plugs the gap by hiring part-timers, as well as psychiatrists from temporary agencies, some of whom may never have treated inmates. More than one-third of the mental health staff is part time.

Doctors rely on medical charts that have often been out of date or simply unavailable because of a shortage of clerks, according to the Board of Correction. Psychiatric evaluations and medications have been delayed for days or weeks, while inmates sometimes turn violent or suicidal, say the board and Prison Health employees.

Of course, the demands on Prison Health and the correction system are tremendous. The mentally ill have flooded New York's jails ever since the city cracked down a decade ago on lesser crimes like vagrancy. As many as one in four of the 14,000 prisoners in city jails on an average day have psychological ills, which need close supervision and expensive medicines. Often they fake symptoms or attempt suicide as a way of getting special treatment. In those ways, a mentally ill inmate jailed on a minor charge usually requires closer attention than a career criminal.

"If you asked every jail administrator in the country what kind of criminal they want in their jails, everyone would say murderers," said Michael P. Jacobson, who was city correction commissioner from 1995 to 1997. " 'Give me a nice murderer.' "

Just what society owes these troubled inmates is open to debate. But the guilt or innocence of most of them have not been settled. Many are in jail on minor charges or because they are unable to make bail. And though most leave within a week, many remain for months, and jail is the only place where they are likely to get any treatment or medication. The city, in fact, is required to create treatment plans for the most seriously disturbed upon their release.

Since The Times began last year to request information on the suicides, examining jail records and details of the Prison Health contract, city and company officials have made changes to prevent more deaths. The rate of suicides has slowed; in the 20 months since the spate of six suicides, there have been four.

Still, there are lapses. One of those four, David Pennington, 27, killed himself in July. Over three days in which he became increasingly irrational, correction officers went to the mental health staff for help three times, and a doctor even sent him to a psychiatrist, yet Mr. Pennington was never examined, state records say.

In a letter, a health department official disputed that finding and defended the care Mr. Pennington received. The official said the inmate was seen by a psychiatrist the day he died and was not clearly suicidal. The psychiatrist was fired three months later, Prison Health said, for reasons unrelated to the death.

In the end, though, Prison Health is just the latest partner of a bureaucracy with its own blemished history: the correction system, which was unable to deal decisively with suicides for decades, as recommendations from state and local authorities were ignored, and fitful attempts at change failed.

A Moment of Opportunity

The company's arrival at Rikers in January 2001 was a milestone for New York. The contract, negotiated with the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was a linchpin in the city's effort to privatize government programs, and made New York's jail system the largest in the nation to entrust its health care to a commercial enterprise.

The deal was driven in great part by a determination to save money, and dovetailed with efforts to get the city out of the business of everything from job training to welfare enforcement. For years the city had used public hospitals to provide care in its jails, only to face skyrocketing costs and plenty of embarrassments. Prison Health, with its already shaky reputation, marked a calculated gamble.

The contract, though, was an even bigger deal for Prison Health. It raised the company's $382 million yearly revenue by 21 percent, and pushed Prison Health to the forefront of a booming correctional health care industry. It also made the company responsible for treating more mentally ill people than anyone else in the nation except the Los Angeles County Jail.

Yet Prison Health had not told its new employer the whole nature of its operations, records and officials in the city comptroller's office suggest. In 1999, the company bought EMSA Correctional Care, which had been working for the city's Department of Juvenile Justice for three years. Prison Health, according to documents and interviews with city officials, subsequently became responsible for providing care to the 5,000 youngsters in the juvenile system every year.

That care, during 2000, would come under fire by a half-dozen Family Court judges in the city, who found that children were often receiving inadequate treatment.

But when negotiating the Rikers contract later that year, Prison Health filed papers with the city saying the company had "no N.Y.C. presence." The comptroller's office, which was not obligated to review the Rikers contract at the time, now says that Prison Health's filings were incomplete and misleading.

The company rejects that claim, and says the papers were accurate and honest, and had properly listed EMSA as an affiliate doing the work at juvenile justice. City health officials say they have no problems with Prison Health's representations.

Prison Health not only won the Rikers contract, but also benefited from an added bonus: an easy act to follow. St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx had just been fired after a striking number of jail deaths - 34 in its final year, including 2 suicides - prompted a criminal investigation. Though no charges resulted, the Board of Correction, an eight-member watchdog panel, complained about the cost-cutting it saw as a root cause.

But under Prison Health, the rates of inmate deaths and suicides have risen slightly. In a foreshadowing of the spurt of suicides to come, six inmates killed themselves from May 2001 to January 2002.

In a string of memos to city health officials, the Board of Correction told of missing medical records, delayed psychiatric medications and minimal, inexperienced staffs. Correction officers, it said, sometimes had to pitch in, referring inmates for mental evaluations.

It was not supposed to be that way. Stung by the St. Barnabas experience, city health officials had set up elaborate ways of measuring Prison Health's performance, including a beefed-up quarterly report card with 35 standards. But during its first year, the company met those standards only 39 percent of the time. Its overseer at the time, the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation, threatened in July 2001 to scuttle the contract, and fined the company $568,000.

Company executives say that the transition from St. Barnabas was rocky, but that their performance has improved, and they have managed some significant achievements: speeding distribution of medicine, creating a program to monitor inmates with hypertension and installing a computer system for appointment scheduling.

Yet the company has not made good on several requirements in its contract. For example, it frequently sends inmates to hospitals without performing tests or providing information on their medical history and treatment, according to reports by the State Commission of Correction. And Prison Health never came up with the rigorous suicide-prevention plan it promised the city in 2000.

"I had no training as to what we do when a patient becomes depressed and becomes suicidal," said Michele Garden, a psychologist who was treating Mr. Cruz, the first to kill himself in 2003. She quit later that year.

The correction system had its own problems, having failed to tackle the issue of suicides despite a series of detailed studies that began in the late 1960's.

The city hired a suicide-prevention coordinator in 1980, but gave him only a paltry budget. John Rakis, who got the job, recalls having doubts about the assignment while interviewing his first patient in the only spot available in the Bronx House of Detention: the barbershop.

"He was hallucinating, and at some point got up and started screaming and threw over the barber chair," said Mr. Rakis, who now advises the state and city on jail health care. "I went upstairs and thought, 'I don't think this is going to work.' "

He was right. When he quit in 1984, the Correction Department eliminated the job. A rash of suicides followed in 1985 - 11 for the year, with 3 in one week.

In the early 1980's, the city created a Prison Death Review Board, including members from the mayor's office and the Health and Hospitals Corporation, to investigate and prevent deaths. But fearing that the board's inquiries could fuel lawsuits, Health and Hospitals representatives began refusing to discuss the deaths, said Board of Correction officials. The review board has not met since 1997.

When Prison Health arrived in 2001, the entire machinery for monitoring suicidal inmates remained lethally porous. The system depended, as it still does, on "suicide prevention aides," inmates paid pennies an hour to make checks every 10 minutes. In an investigation last year, the state commission found that one of these aides was responsible for watching troubled or newly admitted inmates in 34 separate cells.

Guards were supposed to help, too, looking in on suicidal inmates every 15 minutes. But that often became a half-hour, said the correction commissioner, Martin F. Horn.

"You could pick and choose which rules you wanted to follow," said Mr. Horn, who arrived in January 2003.

Inmates continued to kill themselves, and in its reports on the deaths, the state commission insisted repeatedly that those on suicide watch be observed at all times. In late 1999, it sent all jails and prisons a directive to make that the rule. City correction officials ignored it.

Not until four years later, after the spate of six suicides, did the city follow the directive. Two weeks after the sixth suicide, in July 2003, the health department replaced the Health and Hospitals Corporation as Prison Health's direct overseer, and took action to tighten suicide watches.

The Correction Department ordered a flurry of other changes to ensure closer monitoring, and hired Lindsay M. Hayes, a nationally known expert on jail suicides, to recommend improvements. But it gave The Times only an edited version of his report, stripped of his analysis and recommendations, and would not allow Mr. Hayes to discuss his findings publicly. The health department also refused to disclose its own investigations of the 2003 suicides.

Yet Mr. Horn, who became correction commissioner the month the six suicides began, said they were a jarring sign that something was dangerously wrong.

"I found it personally distressing," he said. "I was shellshocked."'

A Scramble for Help

On any given day, a psychiatrist walking the halls at Rikers could be a doctor from a temp agency who had never practiced there before. He could be a doctor who had never treated prisoners at all.

Or he could be someone like Dr. Edward M. Berkelhammer, whose work the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners called "a danger to the public" in 1986. It suspended his medical license for two years, fined him and ordered him to see a psychiatrist himself after a patient died in his care.

Dr. Berkelhammer was putting a 26-year-old woman through drug detoxification when his mistake in administering drugs resulted in her overdose, the board ruled. He was working with an expired license, and he continued to compound his troubles. In 1989, New York suspended him for two months for lying about his record in applications for a license. And in 1990, New Jersey revoked his license for failing to obey its orders.

In an interview, Dr. Berkelhammer said that the girl's death was a single incident long ago, and that he was "very well thought of" at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, where he worked for several years afterward, treating psychotic inmates. "Of all the people at Rikers, I'm the last person anyone has to worry about," he said.

Indeed, there are doctors at Rikers with checkered pasts, including criminal convictions.

Dr. Ammaji Manyam, for instance, was sentenced to a year in jail in 1990 on charges of conspiracy and attempted grand larceny, for selling blood in a scheme to charge the state for bogus tests. Her medical license was revoked in New York, New Jersey and California, but restored in New York in 1997, after she said she wanted to work in a jail clinic because she knew from experience how poor the medical services were. Dr. Manyam did not return calls seeking comment for this article.

Others have had their medical credentials called into question. New York officials revoked the license of a Prison Health psychiatrist, Joseph S. Kleinplatz, in 2003 after Illinois officials concluded that his diploma from a Mexican medical school had been forged. The company then fired him. His lawyer, Karen S. Burstein, said he was a good doctor with a real diploma; a state appellate court has ordered that his case be reconsidered.

The health department is now reviewing Prison Health's system for checking doctors' credentials.

Becky Pinney, the vice president in charge of Prison Health operations in New York City, said the company had done its best to weed out doctors with disciplinary records. Most of them, she said, had first been hired by St. Barnabas Hospital - though Prison Health rehired them, as it did most of the hospital's staff at Rikers. She said the company was thorough in investigating job candidates, running names through state and federal databanks, and rechecking credentials every two years.

Finding qualified doctors, particularly psychiatrists, is a fundamental challenge for any jail medical operation. While Prison Health says it pays competitive salaries, doctors who have left for other jobs said they made much more working fewer hours.

"You have so many people vying for psychiatrists in a city this size, it makes it even more difficult," Ms. Pinney said. The company has responded aggressively, she said, recruiting at Columbia University's medical school and mailing solicitations to every psychiatrist in the city and North Jersey.

The company, then, often takes what it can get - witness the 10 unlicensed psychiatrists who Prison Health was supposed to fire by the end of 2001 because they had failed to pass state medical tests. The city allowed the company to keep them on for another 16 months, but when the doctors failed even then to obtain certification, it had them dismissed.

Prison Health soon rehired three of the psychiatrists, at reduced salaries, as social workers and mental health specialists.

"There's a reason these people have failed to demonstrate to the board that they are qualified," said Dr. Robert L. Cohen, who was medical director at Rikers from 1982 to 1986, when Montefiore Medical Center ran health care.

But if hiring doctors is hard, keeping them is tougher, say many who have worked at Rikers. "They cannot get psychiatrists to stay there," said Roberta Posner, a psychologist who headed a mental health unit when she was fired in 2001 after 12 years at Rikers. The company would not say why it dismissed her; Ms. Posner said it was for complaining. "The staff is so stressed and so spread out that they can barely manage," she said.

There are only 10 full-time psychiatrists working with inmates at Rikers, the company said. It employs 30 part-timers, and 8 others from two temporary agencies, including one in Atlanta called Psychiatrists Only.

Some current and former workers at Rikers said the reliance on such help disrupts treatment. A deputy health commissioner, James L. Capoziello, conceded, "It's not the optimal way of doing things."

When doctors cannot be found, the company has filled in with less skilled workers, say city officials and Prison Health employees. Since 2002, the city has allowed more than one-third of the psychiatrist positions to be filled by nurse practitioners or physician assistants, who are licensed to diagnose medical problems and prescribe medications. The health department says that the company is now using only seven of those workers to substitute for psychiatrists, and that it plans to end the practice.

Cathy Potler, deputy director of the Board of Correction, said that some of those nurses and physician assistants had little or no background in psychiatry.

"The result," she told city officials in a May 2003 letter, "is that the least experienced mental health staff are assigned to the facility with patients who are in need of the highest level of care."

'Juggling Hand Grenades'

As soon as Dr. Douglas Cooper arrived at work in the summer of 2003, the phone would ring and, he said, his heart would sink. He was facing another day of too few employees, too many psychotic inmates and a corporate boss that he says was more interested in paperwork than patients.

As the assistant supervising psychiatrist for all nine Rikers jails, he would have to figure out how to handle more than 300 patients at the island's largest mental health unit, in the largest jail at Rikers, where he worked. On the line was Prison Health's Rikers office, ordering him to send one or two of his four or five psychiatrists - each of whom might already have 30 patients to see - to jails that could not meet their city-mandated staffing quotas that day.

Rikers had a lyrical name for the practice: floating. But Dr. Cooper likened it to a bumpy ride on a unicycle with three punctures and only one patch. "They move the patch around to whichever hole is leaking air the fastest," he said.

Mental health care, he said, was merely damage control, and the inmates treated first were the many who knew they could get attention by threatening violence to themselves or others. Meanwhile, the staff tried to keep tabs on the patients who were quieter but often in more peril.

"You were juggling hand grenades, and one of them was going to go off, hopefully not in your hands," said Dr. Cooper, 52, who quit that August after nine years at Rikers.

His experience goes to the heart of what many employees say is the reality of daily medicine at Rikers. In interviews, more than two dozen current and former Prison Health doctors, physician assistants, psychologists and social workers said they were spread so thin that most mental health care was minimal. Most spoke on the condition that their names not be printed, saying they feared losing their jobs.

The numbers do not lie, they say. In 2000, the last year under St. Barnabas, the jails had about 830 full-time clinical employees, according to the hospital. Today, Prison Health has a clinical staff of about 670, the health department said.

That figure, set by the city, is inadequate, Dr. Cooper said - "designed to ration health care to cut costs as close to the bone as possible, and to provide a semblance of health care when one doesn't really exist." Prison Health, or P.H.S. as it is commonly known, goes along, more concerned with pleasing the city than with serving patients, he said.

The company's approach, he said, is essentially this: "Put your best face forward, hide as many problems as you can and hang on to the contract for as long as you can."

As a case in point, he and others cited the way the company regards different kinds of paperwork. Medical records, on one hand, are often outdated or unavailable, they said. Senior clinicians said they commonly had to sign off on treatment without seeing a medical history, a practice they said could jeopardize their licenses, and inmates' health.

But at the same time, employees said, Prison Health uses doctors and other highly trained specialists to produce and double-check another set of papers: the blizzard of documents that city bureaucrats use to gauge the company's performance. The paper chase actually appears to have grown out of an effort by the city to prevent a reprise of the St. Barnabas years. In its first contract with Prison Health, the city listed the numbers of doctors, nurses, clerks and other staff required at each jail. Failure to document compliance with that list, known as the staffing matrix, for a single day, or even a shift, could result in a $5,000 fine.

But Prison Health has turned the matrix into a meaningless yardstick, several doctors and physician assistants said. Some mental health clinicians said that a number of their most experienced colleagues - the clinical supervisors helping run the medical programs in each jail - work full time reviewing reports for the city, making sure boxes are marked and evaluations signed. Even those working with inmates said they were overwhelmed.

"It became impossible to have a therapeutic conversation with a patient - it was just checking off boxes," said Dr. Daniel Selling, a clinical psychologist who quit in March after about eight months at Rikers. "The P.H.S. administration could care less what I do with a patient."

In the practice known as floating, the company has often sent a doctor or nurse with a backlog of patients at one jail to another where there are fewer inmates to treat, simply to avoid fines, the Board of Correction said. The city has repeatedly fined Prison Health for incomplete filings, but never for treatment that resulted in injury or death.

"The constant shuffling of mental health providers from one facility to the next keeps them from being able to see his/her patient caseload," Ms. Potler, the board's deputy director, complained to city officials in her May 2003 memo. The company says it has greatly reduced that problem.

Floating, in turn, led to fudging, said several current and former employees. To sidestep a fine, they said, Prison Health has had employees sign in at one jail but then work at another. When there have been too few doctors to float, medical administrators have signed in - but without seeing any patients, said three senior clinicians. One added, "The practice is clearly fraudulent."

Health department officials said they were not aware of any deception by Prison Health. But they said the staffing matrix had been changed in the new contract to ensure that a core group of mental health workers at each jail cannot be floated. The fines have been eliminated, officials said, and the company will be graded more on treatment than on paperwork.

Company officials denied that any employees had been forced to sign in at jails falsely. Ms. Pinney said that she tried to avoid moving employees between jails, but that it was sometimes necessary to meet patients' needs. The complaints about short-staffing, she said, were untrue, if expected.

"We've set a very high standard of performance for our employees," she said. "Some people like that and some people don't like that."

Several doctors said that an overextended and discouraged medical staff would not pick up on suicidal behavior.

"People lose touch, because the pressure is on," one mental health supervisor said in exasperation. "And if patients are not the priority," he added, "the consequence is those six suicides."

Alone at the End

From the first days she spent at Rikers Island, charged with shoplifting 30 tubes of Revlon lipstick from a Rite-Aid in the Bronx, it was obvious that Carina Montes was carrying around something a lot weightier than stolen merchandise.

A 29-year-old former gang member with a gunshot scar on her stomach and a teardrop tattooed under her right eye, Ms. Montes was sexually abused as a child. She was 8 when she began seeing a psychiatrist for depression, medical records show. She tried to kill herself three times, at ages 13, 18 and 25, and arrived at Rikers severely depressed.

She told some of this in her intake exam, to a physician who diagnosed manic depression and prescribed antipsychotic medication, state investigators said. But little of the information would follow Ms. Montes, they said, as Prison Health passed her from one staff member to another, losing track of her records and even seeming for months to lose track of the young woman herself.

Over the five months she had left, she would never be seen by a doctor again, the State Commission of Correction found. At the end, she would have no one to help her but other inmates and a rookie jail guard.

Isolation was nothing new for Ms. Montes. Born in Puerto Rico, she dropped out after the ninth grade into a different sort of education, selling crack on the Grand Concourse, then paying for it in city jails and upstate prisons. Paroled from a drug sentence in March 2002, she had no family to turn to - just Ana Torres, a lover who took her in from a women's shelter.

That Sept. 13, the day after Ms. Montes landed at Rikers, the doctor recommended an immediate mental health examination. But nearly three months passed before Prison Health performed the exam, which took place only because a guard had noticed Ms. Montes acting strangely, records show.

The social worker who finally examined her on Dec. 7 was a "floater" who rarely worked in the women's jail. Learning of Ms. Montes's three attempts to kill herself, he placed her on suicide watch.

It took another 23 days before Ms. Montes was seen by a mental health specialist, Brett Bergman. But he did not know his patient was on suicide watch, he later told investigators, because he could not find her medical file. "Patient appears to be doing well and was stable," Mr. Bergman wrote. Although he saw her twice more in the next month, he still could not locate the file.

No other clinician had a chance to help her; on Dec. 2, after she fought with another inmate, the correction staff placed her in a protective-custody cellblock that had no regular mental health services.

On Feb. 6, her isolation proved deadly. Although she was on suicide watch, Ms. Montes had not been seen by any mental health worker for nine days, records show. No one noticed that Ms. Montes, a diabetic, had refused her insulin injections for two days.

But another inmate, Linda Vega, saw her weeping in her cell that morning, distraught over a quarrel with a new lover four cells away. "Everything I love don't love me," she lamented, according to Ms. Vega, and said she would hang herself. "I then noticed sheets torn apart between her legs," Ms. Vega told city investigators.

At 11 a.m., alerted by inmates, a newly hired guard, Kje Demas, stood outside Ms. Montes's open cell door and asked if she was all right. "I'm O.K., I'm just going through something," she said, the guard told investigators. Officer Demas said he had never been told she was on suicide watch. He did not see the bedsheets or any cause for alarm.

Shortly before 5 p.m., another guard heard inmates screaming and found Ms. Montes hanging from an air vent.

The Correction Department fired Officer Demas for failing to notify a superior. The health department said it "counseled" Mr. Bergman and his supervisor for not reviewing the medical charts they could not find, and imposed a rule that inmates on suicide watch be interviewed every two days.

There was no penalty for Prison Health.

Ms. Montes's body was shipped a few miles northeast of Rikers - to Hart Island, where the city buries its unclaimed dead.
Joseph Plambeck contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

Supreme Court Strikes Down Death Penalty for Juveniles

washingtonpost.com
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 1, 2005

The Supreme Court abolished capital punishment for juvenile offenders today, ruling 5 to 4 that it is unconstitutional to sentence anyone to death for a crime he or she committed under the age of 18.

In concluding that the death penalty for minors is cruel and unusual punishment, the court cited a "national consensus" against the practice, along with medical and social-science evidence that teenagers are too immature to be held accountable for their crimes to the same extent as adults.

The court said its judgment, which overturned a 1989 ruling that had upheld the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-old offenders, was also influenced by a desire to end the United States' international isolation on the issue.

"From a moral standpoint, it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion for the court.

"Our determination," Kennedy added, "finds confirmation in the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty."

Kennedy was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

By striking down the death sentence a Missouri jury had imposed on Christopher Simmons -- who was 17 on Sept. 8, 1993, when he broke into Shirley Crook's house, kidnapped her and threw her, bound and gagged, into a river -- the court also canceled out the death sentences of 72 other offenders who are on death row for crimes they committed while under age 18.

One of those inmates, Shermaine Ali Johnson, 26, had been awaiting execution in Virginia for a rape and murder he committed in 1994 at the age of 16. Virginia law set a minimum death-penalty eligibility age at 16, but that is now unconstitutional. Maryland law already bars the death penalty for those who commit crimes when they are younger than 18; there is no death penalty in the District.

The decision also almost certainly means that Washington area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, who received a life sentence in Fairfax County after a jury declined to impose the death penalty, cannot be sentenced to death elsewhere.

By far the largest impact of today's ruling will be felt in Texas, where there are 29 juvenile offenders on death row, and Alabama, where there are 14. No other state has more than five. As of today, 20 of 38 death penalty states permitted the death penalty for people under 18.

There have been 22 executions of juvenile offenders since 1976, 13 of them in Texas.

Apart from these direct effects, the ruling could shift the balance of power between prosecutors and defense attorneys in those states because the state may no longer even threaten juvenile suspects with capital punishment.

Kennedy's opinion rested in large part on the fact that 30 states, including the 12 states that have no capital punishment, forbid the death penalty for offenders under 18. That number represented an increase of five since the court upheld the juvenile death penalty in 1989.

Such considerations are relevant because the court weighs death penalty laws according to what a 1958 ruling called the "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and looks to state legislation and jury verdicts to decide whether a "national consensus" has developed against a practice that was previously accepted.

In 2002, the court voted 6 to 3 to strike down the death penalty for the moderately mentally retarded, which it had upheld 5 to 4 in 1989. In the 2002 case, Atkins v. Virginia, the court noted that the number of death penalty states banning that practice had grown from two in 1989 to 13 in 2002, while none had gone the other way.

The recent shift of states against the juvenile death penalty, although less dramatic than the evidence the court found sufficient in the mental-retardation case, was enough to carry the day, Kennedy concluded.

For the Supreme Court itself, perhaps the most significant effect of today's decision is to reaffirm the relevance of international law to its interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

The European Union, human right lawyers from the United Kingdom and a group of former Nobel Peace Prize winners had urged the court in friend-of-the-court briefs to strike down the juvenile death penalty.

In saying that this strong expression of international sentiment "provide[s] respected and significant confirmation for our own conclusions," Kennedy lengthened the recent string of decisions in which the court has incorporated foreign views -- and decisively rejected the arguments of those on the court, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, who say the court should consider U.S. law exclusively.

There were actually six votes in Kennedy's favor on that point today, because in her dissenting opinion, O'Connor said that she agreed with Kennedy that international trends should be considered when determining the meaning of "cruel and unusual punishment" in modern times.

O'Connor's opinion suggested that she came fairly close to joining the majority entirely. If she were a legislator, O'Connor wrote, "I, too, would be inclined to support legislation setting a minimum age of 18 in this context."

But, O'Connor wrote, too few states had recently enacted such laws to convince her that the country generally had "set its face" against the juvenile death penalty.

Scalia, in a separate dissent that was joined by Rehnquist and Thomas, took the majority to task for "proclaim[ing] itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards -- and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purport[ing] to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures."

Noting that the vast majority of countries in the world have more restrictive abortion laws than the United States does, Scalia accused the court of "invok[ing] alien law when it agrees with one's own thinking, and ignor[ing] it otherwise." He read his opinion from the bench, a sign of especially strong disapproval for the court's decision.

Scalia also pointed out that the 18 death-penalty states that limit capital punishment to offenders 18 and over amount to only 47 percent of the 38 death penalty states.

"Words have no meaning if the views of less than 50 percent of death penalty States can constitute a national consensus," he wrote.

For Kennedy, today's opinion appeared to represent a distance traveled since the 1989 case, in which he voted with Scalia in the majority.

As recently as April 2003, the court -- with Kennedy's support -- granted Oklahoma's request to reinstate the death sentence of a 17-year-old offender after a federal appeals court had been blocked it.

In 2002, the court refused to hear two appeals from under-18 offenders asking it to reconsider their penalties in light of Atkins. Again, Kennedy was in the majority.

Even at the Oct. 12 oral argument in the case decided today, Kennedy seemed reluctant to overturn the juvenile death penalty, saying he was "very concerned" that gangs might use juveniles as "hit men."

But today's packet of opinions contained a brief writing by Stevens, co-signed by Ginsburg, that delivered a pat on the back to Kennedy for coming around to their point of view.

If the "great lawyers" of the early republic were on the court today, Stevens wrote, "I would expect them to join Justice Kennedy's opinion for the court."

Lawyers in Virginia had joined Missouri in the court case, arguing that the death penalty for teenagers is appropriate in some cases.

In recent years, Virginia has executed three men who were minors when they killed. In October 1998, Dwayne Allen Wright, who was 17 when he fatally shot an Annandale mother of three, died by lethal injection and became the first Virginia inmate since 1924 to be executed for a crime committed as a minor.

The killing was part of a five-day rampage during which Wright shot two other people, one fatally, in Prince George's County. Two other Virginia men who committed murder as minors were executed within three days of each other in January 2000.

Virginia officials this morning did not immediately return calls for comment about the decision.

Malvo was 17 at the time of the 2002 sniper shootings that terrorized the Washington region. Before the ruling, he still had faced death penalty trials in Prince William County and in Alabama. After the ruling was announced today, Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert said he was dropping his prosecution of Malvo. "I see no need to go to the expense and the trouble, especially since" Malvo already faces life without parole, Ebert said.

He was convicted of capital murder in a Fairfax County sniper slaying, but a jury spared his life.

The case is Roper v. Simmons, No 03-633.

Washington Post staff writers Fred Barbash and Mike Semel contributed to this story. © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted by lois at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)

Thank you George Soros for helping to Fund Lynne Stewart's Defense

February 17, 2005, The National Review (!)
Soros Funded Stewart Defense
The anti-Bush billionaire supported lawyer who aided terrorists.

Billionaire financier George Soros, whose opposition to President Bush's conduct of the war on terror caused him to pour millions of dollars into the effort to defeat the president, made a substantial donation to the defense fund for radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, who last week was found guilty of giving aid to Islamic terrorists.

According to records filed with the Internal Revenue Service, Soros's foundation, the Open Society Institute, or OSI, gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee.

In filings with the IRS, foundation officials wrote that the purpose of the contribution was "to conduct a public education campaign around the broad civil rights implications of Lynne Stewart's indictment."

Answering questions by e-mail, Amy Weil, a spokeswoman for the Open Society Institute, said the foundation contributed to Stewart's fund because "it appeared to us at that time that there was a right-to-counsel issue worthy of our support."

Stewart's legal troubles stemmed from her defense of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, sometimes known as the Blind Sheikh. Rahman led an Egyptian-based terrorist organization known as the Islamic Group.

In 1996, Rahman was sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, and for his part in failed plots to blow up the United Nations building and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York.

After his conviction, Rahman's followers threatened a series of terrorist attacks against American targets unless he were released. In 1998, the U.S. government reportedly had intelligence that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were plotting to hijack aircraft in the United States in order to demand freedom for Rahman and other convicted terrorists.

Because of those threats, the government issued a special order that the imprisoned Rahman not be allowed to communicate with his followers, to prevent his inciting them to further violence. He was allowed to communicate only with his wife and with his lawyers, who were not allowed to relay his wishes to his followers.

Stewart promised to abide by those rules. But at her trial, the government produced evidence showing that Stewart and two codefendants on a number of occasions used their privileged access to Rahman to help transmit Rahman's orders to his followers in the Islamic Group.

On February 10, Stewart was convicted on two counts of providing material aid to terrorists and three counts of lying to federal investigators. She is planning to appeal.

Before the verdict, officials of the Open Society Institute characterized Stewart's work as that of a "human rights defender." In an October 2004 speech in Norway, Gara LaMarche, head of OSI programs in the United States, said, "The right to counsel, and its erosion in the United States since September 11, strikes with particular force at the role of human rights defenders. One troubling trend has been the arrest and prosecution of lawyers and other defenders as 'material witnesses' to terrorism. These include Lynne Stewart, attorney for Sheik Abdel Rahman..."

At one point, Stewart's Defense Committee website, lynnestewart.org, bore the notation, "This website is made possible by the generous support of the Open Society Institute."

Amy Weil told National Review that while the Institute initially underwrote Stewart's defense, the foundation's commitment was not open-ended. "More recently, OSI was asked for additional funding and we turned down that request," she said.

http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200502170843.asp

Posted by lois at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

National Commission Established to Examine U.S. Prison Conditions

NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Jennifer Trone
March 1, 2005 NATIONAL COMMISSION TO EXAMINE U.S. PRISON CONDITIONS

Post-Abu Ghraib, panel to study U.S. prisons and their impact on prisoners, corrections officers and society at large

New York, NY – Today marks the launch of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, a national panel that will work for one year to explore the most serious problems inside U.S. correctional facilities and their impact on the incarcerated, the people who guard them and society at large.

The panel is co-chaired by former United States Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, who was appointed by President Johnson, and the Honorable John J. Gibbons, former Chief Judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, who was appointed by President Nixon. The 21-member, nonpartisan panel includes other respected civic leaders with experience in the administration of justice and law enforcement, seasoned corrections professionals, advocates for the rights of prisoners, former prisoners, and members of the religious community.

“The United States correctional system costs more than 60 billion dollars annually. This year, an estimated 13.5 million people will spend time in prison or jail, and, on any given day, 750,000 men and women work in correctional facilities,” said Katzenbach. “Despite these numbers and some compelling evidence of abuse and safety failures inside prisons and jails, there is little public knowledge about the nature and extent of the problems and how to solve them. Instead, we seem to have a gap between our cherished ideals about justice and the realities of the prison environment.”

“The time is right for this Commission,” said Gibbons. “There is strong bi-partisan support for a more effective and humane approach to corrections. Recent federal legislation aimed at eliminating rape in prison is one important example, and there’s increasing activity at the state level. We have an unusual opportunity to change our prisons and jails so they come closer to reflecting America’s values and serving our best interests.”

The Commission will explore the most serious problems inside correctional facilities today: violence, sexual abuse, degradation, severe overcrowding, inhumane treatment for the mentally-ill, and insufficient support for the men and women who staff facilities. Over the course of a year, the Commission will hold four public hearings, with the first in Tampa, Florida, on April 19 and 20. Following a thorough examination of the issues, the Commission will produce a report including practical recommendations that local, state, and federal policy makers can act on. The Commission also intends to encourage, support and build on related efforts that will outlive it and sustain both the dialogue and the reform process.

The Commission is staffed by and funded through the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization that has worked closely with leaders in government and civil society for more than 40 years to improve the administration of justice.
For more information about the Commission and its members, visit www.prisoncommission.org.

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Posted by lois at 07:18 PM | Comments (0)

An Arizona Prison in Mexico

Jailhouse Crock
By Dan Frosch, AlterNet
February 24, 2005

..."Facing severe and costly prison overcrowding and a growing population of undocumented immigrant prisoners, state lawmakers are considering controversial legislation which would set the stage for a prison located in Mexico, built and operated by a private corrections company, to house Mexican nationals arrested
in Arizona. "

It has all the trappings of a late night, futuristic action movie: A prison facility tucked away somewhere in Mexico, thousands of inmates, and of course,
the prison¹s private operators, which run the place in a legal and international netherworld. For Arizona officials, however, that scenario is more than
just a bad cable TV movie. If some members of the state legislature have their
way, it could all become quite real.

Facing severe and costly prison overcrowding and a growing population of undocumented immigrant prisoners, state lawmakers are considering controversial
legislation which would set the stage for a prison located in Mexico, built and
operated by a private corrections company, to house Mexican nationals arrested
in Arizona.

Specifically, the bill calls for the establishment of a ³foreign private prison commission² to hire a contractor and oversee the building and administration of a private prison, which would be under the purview of the state despite
its location across the border. The bill also stipulates that the entire process would not begin until the existing U.S. prison-transfer treaty with Mexico
is changed; the bill sets a deadline of 2010 for the legal path to be cleared.

Supporters of the measure say it would save Arizona taxpayers up to $100 million a year ‹ money which pays for the approximately 4,000 Mexican nationals
currently in Arizona prisons ‹ because it¹s cheaper to build and operate a prison in Mexico than in the U.S. ³We¹re getting stuck with a high volume of illegal felons and having to pay for it,² says Republican State Rep. Russell Jones, the bill¹s sponsor. ³If the federal government is not going to reimburse
us, then they should at least put us in a position where we can mitigate some of
the costs to Arizona taxpayers.²

Jones also believes the bill will ultimately create a healthier situation for
Mexican nationals because, he says, a prison in Mexico would be more sensitive to the language and cultural needs of Mexican inmates, and it would be
easier for their families to visit. Currently, Mexican nationals are segregated
from the general population in many Arizona correctional facilities because of a
variety of factors, including the potential for violence.

Prison reform advocates and immigrant rights groups, however, counter that Jones¹ bill is a dangerous legal and jurisdictional nightmare and that the state
has enough trouble overseeing prisons within its borders, let alone a private
facility in another country. They also worry it could further stoke anti-immigrant tensions in a state which recently voted for Proposition 200, a new law
which denies basic government services to undocumented immigrants and punishes
state employees who don¹t report them to the authorities.

³This is about the state legislature wanting to send people to another country to save money,² says Caroline Isaacs, criminal justice coordinator for the
Tucson chapter of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). ³If you want
to deal with prison overcrowding and costs, we need to take a look at our sentencing policies and modify those.²

Arizona¹s Republican-dominated legislature has a ³tough on crime² reputation which some say has created draconian sentencing policies, like the state¹s mandate that criminals serve out 85 percent of their sentences, regardless of
the charge or of their progress in rehabilitation.

As a result, says the AFSC, Arizona¹s prison population has exploded over the
past 25 years ‹ from 4,360 in 1980, to 35,000. The group also says Arizona incarcerates Latinos at a considerably higher rate than other border states. Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) numbers show that Mexican nationals make
up nearly 12 percent of its prison population, more than any other state except California and New York, which both incarcerate approximately the same
percentage of foreign nationals.

³These are people who have committed very low-level crimes for economic reasons and are not very threatening,² says Jennifer Allen, executive director for
Border Action Network, a local immigrant rights group which opposes the bill. ³ This is only a piecemeal band-aid which attempts to cover the inherent problems in this country¹s immigration laws. Once they finish serving time in
Mexico, they¹ll just cross the border again.²

The issue of adequate oversight also worries the bill¹s critics. Although the
legislation stipulates that any private prison contractor would be subject to
at least the same standards which apply to the ADC, the idea of trying to enforce regulations on a facility in a different country is ³preposterous,² says
Judy Greene, director of Justice Strategies, a prison reform consulting group.

³It seems unworkable. Being able to closely monitor and control conditions and contract performance is paramount to avoiding serious human rights violations and riots and escapes,² Greene says. ³How they would manage to maintain
sufficient control and constant, careful monitoring is beyond me.²

Historically, Arizona has struggled with overseeing its own facilities. In 1997, the Department of Justice sued the ADC for failing to protect its female
inmates from sexually abusive guards. The ADC also came under fire in 2004, after a hostage situation in which prisoners took over a guard tower and raped a
female guard. While the state has contracted out some of its facilities to private companies in an effort to save money and gain space ­ ADC is currently
2,500 beds short and is forced to ship prisoners out of state ­ it¹s unclear whether those efforts have helped. A new report published by Justice Strategies,
AFSC and the Private Corrections Institute, a non-profit group which advocates against privatizing prisons, questions whether privatizing in Arizona has
actually shifted more of the financial burden onto the ADC.

Prison reform and oversight issues notwithstanding, the enormous legal hurdles the legislation would have to clear first appear to be its heaviest albatross. Similar bills have surfaced in Arizona since the mid-90's but have been
shot down because of legal concerns. If passed, this latest version allows five
years to hammer out logistics, but it still does not specifically address the
legal and jurisdictional tangle likely to ensue among various U.S. and Mexican
government agencies. Further, the prospect of amending the current federal prisoner transfer treaty between the U.S. and Mexico is clearly a daunting undertaking.

Since 1977, the U.S. and 63 other countries, including Mexico, have abided by
an international agreement to allows prison transfers, but only if the inmate
requests the transfer and only after it clears a potentially time-consuming approval process by the Justice Department, the appropriate state correctional
system and the receiving country.

³There¹s still a lot of homework that needs to be done because we¹re dealing with international and treaty issues. We don¹t know if this can legally occur, ² says ADC spokeswoman Cam Hunter, who says ADC, at this point, is not supporting the legislation. ³We also want to find a solution for what is a desperate
problem, but we have to live within the guidelines of our treaty with Mexico.²

Indeed, Jones¹ bill is not the only local effort to tackle the issue of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes and are subsequently imprisoned.

On Feb. 3, Gov. Janet Napolitano sent a letter to U.S Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding approximately $118 million owed to the state for incarcerating undocumented immigrants over the past fiscal year and a half. Under the
State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), the federal government is supposed to help states pay for locking up immigrants who commit crimes after
entering the country illegally. The idea is that the federal government should
have prevented undocumented immigrants from entering the country in the first
place and should thus house them in federal facilities if they¹re criminals. But
federal prisons are overcrowded, and states are rarely fully reimbursed for their services because there simply isn¹t enough cash to go around. In 2004, for example, Arizona was only reimbursed $6.8 million for what Napolitano claims
was a $71 million price-tag.

Napolitano¹s spokeswoman, Jeanine L¹Ecuyer, says the governor had yet to receive a response. Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller says the Justice
Department does not comment publicly on such requests.

Ironically, the Bush administration is seeking to eliminate SCAAP from the federal budget, although a new bill introduced by Sens. Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.) and John Kyl (R-Ariz.) hopes to keep the program breathing. For the last
few years, officials in both Arizona and California have voiced concern that their states unfairly bear the burden of the federal government¹s inefficient
immigration laws and enforcement policies.

Given that it¹s highly unlikely the Justice Department will acquiesce to Napolitano¹s request, however, state Republicans see this legislation as a more
viable answer, or at least a way to force the federal government¹s hand. Indeed,
regardless of the powerful legal and ethical concerns, the bill has managed to clear two committees. Some Democrats have openly opposed it. Rep. Ted Downing voted in vain against the bill on Feb. 9 while it was debated in the Government Reform and Finance Accountability committee. But they¹re outnumbered by 22
seats in an increasingly conservative state body.

Napolitano, also a Democrat, does not weigh in on pending legislation, says spokeswoman L¹Ecuyer, and is focusing on getting reimbursed from the Justice Department. She¹ll be in Washington next week for a meeting of the National Association of Governors and is hoping to meet with the attorney general at that
time, L¹Ecuyer says.

Still, with the bill slated for debate by the full legislature early next week, the reimbursement approach might end up taking a back seat, at least for
now.

³We¹d rather be reimbursed, but the federal government won¹t reimburse us and won¹t let us deport the inmates,² says Republican Rep. Bill Konopnicki, a
co-sponsor of the bill. ³This has the potential to save us quite a bit of money. ²

Meanwhile, opponents are lining up for a battle.

Says Caroline Isaacs: ³Our state legislature wants to bury their heads in the
sand and continue to incarcerate everyone for minor offenses without having to pay the bill. If they manage to find a way around the international law barriers, I think they¹ll pass it in a heartbeat.²

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21342/

Posted by lois at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

Bush Adm. to Require U.S. AIDS Groups to Take Pledge Opposing Commercial Sex Work to Gain Funding

Bush Administration To Require U.S. AIDS Groups Take Pledge Opposing Commercial Sex Work To Gain Funding

The Bush administration is requiring that U.S. HIV/AIDS organizations seeking funding to provide services in other countries make a pledge opposing commercial sex work, and some Republican lawmakers and administration officials are pushing for a similar policy for needle-exchange programs, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Under the new policy, even groups whose HIV/AIDS work in other countries has "nothing to do" with commercial sex workers will have to make a written pledge opposing commercial sex work or risk losing federal funding, according to the Journal. In addition, the Bush administration might refuse to fund HIV/AIDS groups that do not accept Bush's "social agenda" on issues such as sexual abstinence and drug use, according to the Journal.

The new policy stems from two 2003 laws, one involving HIV/AIDS funding and another regarding sex trafficking (Phillips, Wall Street Journal, 2/28). One measure was included as an amendment, sponsored by Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), in the legislation (HR 1298) that authorized the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the five-year, $15 billion program that directs funding for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to 15 focus countries. The measure prohibits funds from going to any group or organization that does not have a policy "explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking" (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 4/3/03). The U.S. Department of Justice initially told the administration that the requirement should be applied to overseas groups only because of constitutional free speech concerns in applying it to U.S. organizations, according to the Journal. However, DOJ in 2004 "reversed itself" and said that the administration could apply the rule to U.S. groups, according to the Journal.

'Harm Reduction'

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said that although there is "conservative support" for U.S. HIV/AIDS programs overseas, "there are areas of concern ... that risk the continued support from a number of conservative members and conservative groups." Many U.S. HIV/AIDS organizations providing services in other countries are "reluctant" to make a pledge opposing commercial sex work because the groups often work with commercial sex workers to distribute condoms and say that such pledges could lead to "official stigmatization" of commercial sex workers that could lead to their further isolation, according to the Journal. Some HIV/AIDS groups favor a strategy of "harm reduction" that acknowledges that some people will engage in high-risk behaviors -- including commercial sex work and injection drug use -- and that the best way to prevent the spread of HIV is to make those behaviors less dangerous. U.S. officials said that some HIV/AIDS groups that have applied for grants have agreed to sign the pledge, but they would not identify the groups by name, according to the Journal. Janice Crouse, a senior fellow at Concerned Women for America, said that federal funding for international aid programs often has gone to "left-leaning groups" and that the new Bush administration policy would "redress that imbalance," according to the Journal. Susan Cohen, director of government affairs for the Alan Guttmacher Institute, said that the Bush administration's new policy is "another salvo in the campaign that the administration and its fellow conservatives are undertaking to create more and more litmus tests and blacklists of those they're willing to do business with."

Needle Exchange

Some congressional Republicans have been working to prevent federal funding from going to groups that advocate needle-exchange programs to reduce the spread of HIV among injection drug users, with Reps. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and Tom Davis (R-Va.) leading the effort, according to the Journal. Brownback earlier this month in a memo to his political allies outlined a strategy seeking a ban on USAID grants going to any organizations that do not "fully support" Bush's views on issues, including drug use and sexual abstinence, the Journal reports. A "major target" of the congressional Republican attempts to ban funding from going to groups supporting needle exchange is the Open Society Institute, which was founded by billionaire financier George Soros, according to the Journal. OSI supports needle-exchange programs to reduce the spread of HIV in former Soviet Union countries. Although Soros' aides say that no federal funding goes to OSI's needle-exchange programs, Souder began investigating OSI after Soros spent "millions of dollars" during the 2004 election campaign to oppose Bush's re-election, the Journal reports. USAID policy prohibits federal funding from going to needle-exchange efforts, according to the Journal (Wall Street Journal, 2/28/05).

Daily Reports. http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=28358 POLITICS AND POLICY

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

RI: Central Falls Detention Facility Corp. to Expand

03/01/2005, Pawtucket Times
C.F. prison expansion outlined
David Casey
CENTRAL FALLS -- When the prison makes money, the city makes money, and that's exactly what the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation, the quasi-city entity which owns the prison, intends to do.

That was prison consultant Anthony Ventetuolo's message to the City Council Monday night, in a 15-minute presentation which outlined the timetable for the prison's long-awaited expansion, its projected impact on the community and the prospect of securing a lucrative contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly Immigration and Naturalization Services).

Wyatt, one of two facilities in the Northeast designed, licensed and accredited to accommodate large numbers of federal inmates, paid the city more than $200,000 for impact fees last calendar year, the amount of which depends, in part, on its annual revenues.

The prison has contributed $6 million in impact fees since its inception, said Ventetuolo.

By more than doubling the existing building's footprint, the corporation plans to add 336 beds to the 310-bed, 85,531-square-foot facility, at a total cost of about $35 million.

The expansion project, which will be funded entirely with revenue bonds, was first posited five years ago, when the U.S. Marshal's Services of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island --the prison's best customers -- decried the prison's lack of space for federal inmates. A market needs analysis conducted before 9/11 indicated the Northeast market could support an additional 250 to 380 beds over the next five years, said Ventetuolo, and while Wyatt's profits took a hit in the post-9/11 federal reorganization, an updated analysis is even more bullish on the prison's future.

The corporation has increasingly dealt with the U.S. Marshal's Services of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, and is poised to take advantage of ICE's efforts to consolidate federal detainees by striking a 200-bed deal with the agency.

Although the federal government is not in the business of making guarantees, he said, money --that is investors' money -- talks.

"No one is more skeptical than the people buying revenue bonds," said Ventetuolo, "and they've got to the point where they feel pretty comfortable (with our prospects)."

"We've been at or above capacity since we've been open," he said.

Ventetuolo also stressed the expanded prison's fringe benefits, which include the corporation's pledge to replace the sidewalks and street lighting on Blackstone Street (in front of Macomber Stadium), share its planned 8,000-square-foot training facility with the city's Public Safety Department, its parking lot with parents, players and coaches, and part of its newly acquired riverfront property with a 24-hour Blackstone Valley Bike Path rest stop -- supervised by prison security personnel -- and 60 new full-time jobs (with local hiring preferences).

The Corporation also plans to donate two 12-seat vans to the city and $1,500 to the Ralph J. Holden Scholarship Fund. The prison's for-profit operator, Cornell Corrections, plans to donate $4,000 to the Ralph J. Holden Community Center and will again sponsor a youth softball team, said Ventetuolo.

As far as security is concerned, said Ventetuolo, every precaution has been taken.

The prison has recently hired a second full-time deputy warden whose job it will be to oversee security before, during and after construction. The deputy warden will work closely with contractors on a day-to-day basis, said Ventetuolo, "we need to cover ourselves."

The idea, he said, is to maintain the prison's current Average Daily Population (ADP), a major factor in determining the city's piece of the pie.

Ventetuolo said the Corporation expects to have awarded the design/bid contract by March 23 and break-ground - hopefully - by early May. While the design/build contractor will ultimately determine the construction schedule, final completion is slated for June 20, 2007.

http://www.pawtuckettimes.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14055281&BRD=1713&PAG=461
&dept_id=24491&rfi=6

Posted by lois at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)