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August 31, 2005

Center for Constitutional Rights: Fed. Judge Rules on Kickback in Contract betweeen NY State and MCI

Center for Constitutional Rights Press Release

FEDERAL JUDGE RULES ON CONSTITUTIONALITY OF KICKBACK IN CONTRACT BETWEEN NEW YORK STATE PRISONS AND MCI

August 30, 2005, New York, NY – Attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights today announced a major victory for the families and friends of people incarcerated in New York State prisons. The federal trial court in Byrd v. Goord issued an opinion upholding the constitutional challenge lodged by inmates’ families, ministers, friends, and counselors to the inmate telephone system in New York, which is designed to provide the Department of Correctional Services with millions of dollars in “commissions” or “kickbacks.” MCI and the New York State Department of Correctional Services entered a monopoly contract that charges family members hugely inflated rates to speak with their loved ones in prison and gives a 60 percent commission on the profits back to the State. The same system has been implemented in most states across the country, and has made it extremely difficult for families to speak with their loved ones in prison.

“The decision,” according to CCR Deputy Legal Director Barbara Olshansky, “is an important victory for inmates’ families seeking to maintain ties with their loved ones in prison. It is also a resounding confirmation by the court of the principle that inmates do not lose their constitutional rights when they enter the prison gates, and that no person may be penalized or taxed for seeking to maintain their relationship with a loved one in prison.”

CCR cooperating attorney Moshe Maimon of Levy, Phillips & Konigsberg, stated that “based on this decision and our evidence in this case, we are confident that the court will find that the surcharges imposed by the Department of Correctional Services on inmate calls are an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of prisoners and their families to keep in touch.”

Annette Dickerson, CCR’s statewide coordinator of the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice, said, “The victory sends a signal that this unjust and unlawful practice is nearing the end of its days. The fewer impediments to prisoners speaking with family, the better for all of us: maintaining contact with family is one of the most important factors in staying out of trouble and out of prison when a person is released.”

Robert Perry, CCR Cooperating counsel concluded that “the Court’s decision today – that families have the right to stay connected, and that the loved ones of prisoners cannot be singled out to fund correctional services – is a big success, and we are expecting many more.”

On October 27, 2000, Ms. Olshansky and Mr. Maimon argued on behalf of New York State inmates and their families to oppose the State=s and MCI=s motions to dismiss the case. After the motions were argued before the Honorable George B. Daniels, MCI filed for bankruptcy and the entire matter was referred to bankruptcy court, causing much of the delay in getting a resolution to the dismissal motions. Since that time, the State has received approximately $125 million from inmate telephone calls, in what has essentially been an unlegislated tax on inmates’ families and friends.

Although the Byrd v. Goord lawsuit challenged the restriction of calls to collect only, the limitation of statewide service to one provider only, and the 60% commission/kickback taken by the State, the federal court upheld only the constitutional challenges to the State’s kickback. The court gave approval for the First Amendment, due process, and equal protection claims to go forward.

The decision comes shortly after CCR filed an appeal earlier this month in Walton v. MCI and NYSDOCS, a lawsuit challenging the prison telephone contract in State court. The New York State Assembly recently passed the Family Connections Bill to end the State’s kickback and reform the contract at the end of its session, while the companion Senate Bill remains in committee.

Currently, the only way for families to speak with their loved ones in most state prisons is for prisoners to call collect, and family members who accept the calls must accept the terms dictated by the phone company. Since states receive kickback commissions from the phone companies who receive the contract, there is no incentive to seek competitive bids. The contract goes to the company that provides the highest kickback, not the lowest fees. Rates for such calls are set well above market rates: in New York State, families pay a $3 connection fee and 16¢ per minute a 630 percent mark up over regular residential consumer rates. Current rates at Federal prisons are as low as 7¢ a minute. Meanwhile, those who accept these calls face staggering bills and must often choose between basic necessities and the chance to speak with their loved ones. Since prisoners come disproportionately from poor communities, the burden of staying in touch falls heaviest on those with the least ability to pay.

The New York Campaign for Telephone Justice works to end the kickback contract between MCI and the New York State Department of Correctional Services, and deliver choice, affordability, and equitable service to the families and friends of those incarcerated in New York State. The campaign is a project of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in partnership with Prison Families Community Forum and Prison Families of New York, Inc.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a non-profit legal and educational organization dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Posted by lois at 06:41 PM | Comments (0)

Poverty Rate Continues to Climb

washingtonpost.com
Poverty Rate Continues To Climb
2004 Census Data Show Labor Market Is Still Struggling
By Jonathan Weisman and Ceci Connolly
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; A03

Despite robust economic growth last year, 1.1 million more Americans slipped into poverty in 2004, while household incomes stagnated and earnings fell, the Census Bureau reported yesterday. The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 800,000, to 45.8 million.

The Census Bureau's annual report on income, poverty and health insurance sheds light on voter discontent with the economy in the face of seemingly strong economic data. The broad data draw a picture of a labor market still struggling to find its footing, three years after the 2001 recession.

"The poverty rate seems to be the last lonely lagging indicator of the business cycle," said E.R. Anderson, chief of staff in the Commerce Department's economic directorate, which oversees the Census Bureau.

The median household income stood at $44,389 last year, down slightly from the 2003 level of $44,482. But that level was propped up by more people going to work for lower earnings. A full-time male worker earned a median income of $40,798 last year, down $963 in inflation-adjusted dollars from 2003. Women's median earnings fell $327, to $31,223.

The poverty rate climbed in 2004 to 12.7 percent, from 12.5 percent in 2003 -- the fourth year in a row that poverty has risen. The increase was borne completely by non-Hispanic whites, the only ethnic group that saw its poverty rate rise. The percentage of whites in poverty rose from 8.2 percent in 2003 to 8.6 percent. African Americans saw no change in their poverty rate, which remained at 24.7 percent. The poverty rate for Hispanics remained at 21.9 percent, while Asian Americans' poverty levels dropped by two percentage points, to 9.8 percent.

The Midwest was the only region that saw both the poverty rate rise and median household income fall, a "double whammy," said Ron Haskins, a welfare economist at the Brookings Institution.

The percentage without health insurance -- 15.7 percent -- did not change, but only because the expanding federal insurance programs compensated for a continuing decline in employer-provided health care. Last year, 27.2 percent of the population received medical care through the government, up from 26.6 percent in 2003.

The findings on poverty and health insurance are directly linked, said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, noting that "more people are falling into the low-income groups that qualify" for Medicaid.

From the start of President Bush's first term in 2001 to 2004, the number of Americans without health insurance increased from 41.2 million to 45.8 million. Last year's uninsured rate was the highest it has been since 1998.

Two-thirds of the growth came from the Hispanic community, where the number of people without health coverage rose from 13.2 million in 2003 to 13.7 million last year.

Hispanic workers "are much less likely to have health insurance offers with jobs than they were 10 years ago," said Len Nichols, a health economist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation.

Michael J. O'Grady, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, said Bush's effort to expand the nation's network of community health centers will help bring care to more immigrants.

Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said more people are choosing Medicaid because it is a better deal than private coverage. "Medicaid has been expanded so much it includes a lot of people who could afford private coverage," he said.

But independent research suggests fewer companies are offering health insurance, Rowland said. "If Medicaid had not been offsetting some losses in the employer-based coverage, you would be seeing potentially another 1 million or 1.5 million more uninsured," she said.

In recent years, a growing chorus of economists and politicians have questioned the veracity of the poverty rates, median income level and number of uninsured. The Census Bureau's own alternative measurements of poverty -- which consider regional differences in cost of living, out-of-pocket medical expenses and more sophisticated inflation measures -- have consistently indicated that the official poverty level understates the problem. Conservatives object that the numbers do not capture assistance from food stamps, government insurance programs, housing aid or the earned-income tax credit.

The poverty data "are fundamentally flawed in measuring whether people are actually in some impoverished state of being," said Steven J. Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.

Charles Nelson, the Census Bureau's assistant division chief for income, poverty and health statistics, said the annual report does accurately capture the trends in poverty, income and insurance rates.

Locally, the picture was brighter. At $57,424, Maryland's median household income was above the national median, as was Virginia's, at $51,689, and the District's, at $46,574. With a median household income of $88,133, Fairfax County was the richest county in the nation in 2004. Of the five most affluent counties, three were in the Washington area -- Montgomery County was the fourth richest, with a median household income of $82,971; Howard County was just behind, with a median household income of $82,065.

Anderson said the new poverty numbers, while disappointing, were expected.

Poverty rates peaked years after the end of the recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s as well, she said.

"We're not happy about it, but going forward the trends are going the way we want them to go," she said.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted by lois at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Court to Hear Lawsuit AGainst MCI

Court to hear lawsuit on cost of inmate calls

By MARK JOHNSON, Associated Press
First published: Wednesday, August 31, 2005

ALBANY -- A court will hear a challenge to the telephone rates that relatives of prisoners face under a state contract for collect calls from prisons, a federal judge ruled.
Advertisement

The suit filed in 2000 accuses MCI Inc. and the state Correctional Services Department with charging hugely inflated prices that make it unaffordable for many families to talk to their loved ones behind bars.

"It's really distressing to see the effect this has on families," said Barbara Olshansky on Tuesday.

She is deputy legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the suit on behalf of inmates' families and others.

The Aug. 26 decision by U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan throws out challenges to the state's policy of allowing inmates to only make collect calls and of limiting service to one provider.

But the judge did allow the challenge to the billing system -- in which the state takes 60 percent of the profits -- to proceed.

Department of Correctional Services spokeswoman Linda Foglia said Tuesday that it was department policy not to comment on pending litigation.

Under a billing plan revised in July 2003, recipients of inmate calls pay a $3 access charge and 16 cents a minute, whether local or long distance.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press.

All Times Union materials copyright 1996-2005, Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation, Albany, N.Y.

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times--MCI price gouging--"Please Deposit All Your Money"

August 31, 2005
Please Deposit All Your Money
Faced with high prison costs, the states have been desperately seeking ways to make sure that people who are released from prison will forge viable lives outside - and not end up right back behind bars. Part of the solution is to help former inmates find training, jobs and places to live. In this context, the increasingly common practice of jacking up the costs of inmates' telephone calls to bankrupting levels, and then using the profits to pay for some prison activities, is self-defeating and inhumane. It also amounts to a hidden tax on prisoners' families, who tend to be among the poorest in American society.

A vast majority of the state prison systems have telephone setups that allow only collect calls. The person who accepts the call pays a premium that is sometimes as much as six times the going rate. Part of the money goes to the state itself in the form of a "commission" - or, more simply put, a legal kickback.

While such commissions are common throughout the country, the one in New York is particularly high: the state takes a commission of nearly 60 percent. Faced with telephone bills of $400 or more a month, the inmates' families must often choose between paying phone bills or paying the rent. This billing strategy erodes fragile family ties by discouraging prisoners from keeping in touch with loved ones - especially small children - who often have difficulty visiting because they live hundreds of miles away. Inmates who lack family ties are less likely to make a successful transition once released, and more likely to end up back inside.

While most states use collect-calls-only phone systems for prisons, federal prisons use a less expensive and less onerous debit-calling system. Federal inmates are allowed to use money that is accumulated in computer-controlled accounts to call a limited number of phone numbers. Prison rights groups have long urged the states to adopt the debit-calling system. Lawsuits pending in several states, including in New York, could eventually force prison authorities to abandon their policies of allowing only collect calls. And the New York State Assembly has passed a bill that, if it becomes law, will put an end to this system.

New York state corrections officials argue that the current system is good thing because the money goes to pay for AIDS treatments, cable television for inmates and other prison programs that benefit the inmates. But the inmates' families already support the prison system through their taxes. Dunning the poor to run the prisons where so many of the poor wind up may have been acceptable in Dickens's time, but no longer.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2005

West Virginia- The Prison State

By BILL STRAUB
Scripps Howard News Service
August 29, 2005

- Wild, wonderful West Virginia, a land of steep mountains and untamed waters, has gained some publicity over the years as a pleasant place for hunters, coal miners and, more recently, federal convicts.

While most states tend to shy away from inviting notorious felons into the neighborhood, West Virginia has taken to welcoming federal inmates with open arms.

The Mountain State has five federal prisons, including the just-opened $148 million correctional facility in Hazleton. Nearby, construction of a 512-bed women's prison, at a cost of $76 million, is under way. And the federal Bureau of Prisons has announced plans to build another medium-security prison in McDowell County in the southern portion of the state that will house 1,300 inmates.

Once the projects are completed, the state will host seven federal prisons. Total population, currently at 6,789, will eventually mount to 9,429. At that point, federal prisoners collectively would constitute the 17th-largest city in West Virginia.

Recently, the minimum-security camp in Alderson hosted one of the nation's most famous jailbirds, domestic maven Martha Stewart, who served several months for her part in lying to federal investigators about a stock sale.

Four states - California, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania - feature more federal prisons than West Virginia. But they dwarf West Virginia in both geographic size and population. West Virginia is 41st in size and its 1.8 million residents make it 37th in population.

Prisoners have become the equivalent of a cash crop in West Virginia. The state's enthusiasm for housing some of America's worst criminals can be traced to two factors - a sluggish economy and the indefatigable efforts of Sen. Robert Byrd.

West Virginia is, and historically has been, a poor state. Its economy long was based on coal mining - 26 of the state's 55 counties produce coal. But mining jobs have dropped off drastically over the past several decades, and state officials have been searching for ways to replace them. West Virginia's median income in 2003 was a little more than $46,000, placing it ahead of only Mississippi and New Mexico.

The federal prisons serve as economic development tools. The Bureau of Prisons reports that the Hazleton facility will employ 350 people when it becomes fully operational in 2006 and pump $39 million a year into the economy. The women's prison under construction will provide another 100 jobs, and the reformatory planned for McDowell County - to be built atop an abandoned surface mine - will mean 330 jobs and $35 million in annual economic benefit.

Heading the campaign to transform West Virginia into the world's largest penal colony is the 87-year-old Byrd, who has spent 47 years in the Senate. As ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Byrd over the years has established that he isn't shy about funneling federal largesse to his home state. In 1990 he declared, "I want to be West Virginia's billion-dollar industry." He has proved successful in that endeavor, and much of his attention over the past few years has been directed at bringing federal prisons and their accompanying jobs to the Mountain State.

Byrd said the new facility in Hazleton will "provide hundreds of jobs for local residents while also playing an important role in the nation's justice system."

"The Bureau of Prisons needs more capacity and West Virginia needs more jobs," he said. "I think that adds up to a mutually beneficial partnership."

Unlike some politicians, Byrd displays no reluctance about filling his home state with lawbreakers.

"Even for those who have gone very far astray, there is hope," he said. "Forgiveness is possible."

Still, there is something ironic about situating federal prisons in West Virginia, a rustically beautiful state whose high mountains, green forests and whitewater would seem to make it more attractive to hunters and other outdoorsmen than hardened criminals.

In 2003, the FBI reported that the state suffered a violent-crime rate of 257.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. Only Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont and Wisconsin came in lower. That means not too many native sons and daughters are being kept behind West Virginia's prison walls.

http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=WVAPRISONS-08-29-05&cat=AN>

Posted by lois at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

NY: Plattsburgh Proves There Can be Life After Base Closure

"As the development council was getting its feet on the ground, several quick-fix proposals were put forward. One group of Mohawk Native Americans began talking about a resort and casino. Others in the area favored a prison, which offered good-paying jobs and no environmental issues, on the site. But the community quickly decided it would not take that route. "A community facing closure has to decide if it wants the quick fix like a prison or another military operation and they have to decide firmly," Douglas said. "We decided that we weren't going for the quick fix because it precluded a lot of other things that may be better."

Published in the Asbury Park Press 08/28/05
BY JOE LO TEMPLIO
SPECIAL TO THE PRESS

PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. ‹ When leaders in Plattsburgh first heard the local Air Force base would be closing, they felt physically ill. "It was like getting punched right in the stomach. It was a sick feeling," said Mark L. Barie, who was chairman of the Plattsburgh Chamber of Commerce when the base was slated for closure in 1993.

It was a situation with which municipal leaders from the towns surrounding Fort Monmouth, targeted last week by the Base Realignment and Closure commission for closure, can now sympathize. And as officials in Eatontown, Oceanport and Tinton Falls prepare for an uncertain future, officials near the former Plattsburgh Air Force Base have some words of advice: "Don't waste time thinking you are going to fight the decision, because it just isn't going to happen," said Garry Douglas, President and CEO of the Plattsburgh-North Country Chamber of Commerce.

With more than 10 years of post-BRAC experience, Plattsburgh provides a glimpse into the do's and don't's of base redevelopment. Among the most practical suggestions: Get over the shock, keep politics out of the process, decide what you want the base to be in the future and make sure your decision-making agency is small enough to be efficient.

A surprise decision

Plattsburgh advocates had carefully promoted the base as a viable and relevant facility to Air Force generals. Built in the mid-1950s as a Strategic Air Command base, with nuclear bombers poised to fly against targets in the Soviet Union, the base needed a new mission after the Cold War ended. By early 1993, the hope in Plattsburgh was that the base was going to become the major hub for the Air Force's East Coast airlift and air refueling operations ‹ with many of its new aircraft coming from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.

At its peak, Plattsburgh, sitting on Lake Champlain a short drive from the Canadian border, was home to about 4,400 military personnel and their families. More aircraft and more personnel were to be on their way, ensuring more years of economic benefit to the area.

But in the weeks leading up to the final decision, the communities around Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, N.Y., and McGuire in New Jersey rallied to save their bases, which were proposed targets for closure.

Plattsburgh leaders were hoping then New York Gov. Mario Cuomo would provide the political clout needed to stave off closure. But Cuomo would not pick between the two bases in his state. He would describe the dilemma as that of a father having to pick one of two children.

Meanwhile, New Jersey officials led by Rep. H. James Saxton, R-N.J., mounted a well-financed campaign to point out shortcomings at Plattsburgh and burnish McGuire's attributes. In the end, McGuire came away with all the riches and both Plattsburgh and Griffiss were closed.

"For us, dealing with the base closure was different than many communities because most of them were on the list for closure and were kind of expecting it," Douglas said. "We weren't expecting it at all, so there was the initial stun factor."

"No clear mission"

In the summer of 1993, the Air Force announced Plattsburgh would officially close on Sept. 30, 1995, giving the community about two years to prepare a team to take over the property and begin the redevelopment process. Leaders were warned about letting politics bog down the efforts and not to make the transition team too big.

But that's exactly what happened.

The Plattsburgh Intermunicipal Development Council was created, featuring 15 members from government, education and business. "It was an unmitigated disaster," Barie recalled. "It was too big and had no clear mission or purpose."

For a while there was talk of suing the federal government over the BRAC decision or seeking an alternative military use for the base property. Douglas warns that such efforts are futile.

"You can't dwell on the past. You need to see it as the loss of a friend. You mourn, you grieve, you say your farewells but then you move on," he said.

Assemblyman Chris Ortloff, a member of the development council, wanted to fight the BRAC move. He sees it differently now. "Don't spend a lot of time in mourning," he said. "Get yourself prepared to negotiate the best deal you can with the Army for the property. Don't let them give you a bunch of buildings with asbestos and lead paint."

Many proposals

As the development council was getting its feet on the ground, several quick-fix proposals were put forward. One group of Mohawk Native Americans began talking about a resort and casino. Others in the area favored a prison, which offered good-paying jobs and no environmental issues, on the site. But the community quickly decided it would not take that route. "A community facing closure has to decide if it wants the quick fix like a prison or another military operation and they have to decide firmly," Douglas said. "We decided that we weren't going for the quick fix because it precluded a lot of other things that may be better."

Political squabbles

By the time the Air Force was ready to send off the final KC-135 Stratotanker in the fall of 1995, the Plattsburgh Intermunicipal Development Council had evolved into the Plattsburgh Airbase Redevelopment Corporation. The redevelopment corporation was a smaller group (seven members) with more business representation. David Holmes, an out-of-state businessman, was hired to lead the redevelopment effort. But less than a year into his contract, Holmes left amid political squabbles.

Plattsburgh Mayor Daniel Stewart, who was a city councillor in 1995, said the political in-fighting was a distraction. "Regardless of what party you are, you have to learn how to play in the same sandbox because nothing will kill redevelopment quicker than combative local politics," Stewart said.

Phish and bottle caps

Barie took over in early 1996, and the main goal was to find something for the massive flight line. But he first had to deal with hosting a concert for the immensely popular rock group Phish.

Under a deal made with Holmes, Phish, natives of Vermont, a short ferry ride across Lake Champlain, would hold a three-day music festival called the Clifford Ball on the flight line of Plattsburgh in August 1996. About 100,000 people showed up, and officials estimated nearly $25 million was pumped into the local economy.

And since the event was held at the base, a base designed to be secluded for security measures, the local community hardly even knew the concert was going on.

But when redevelopment officials took a look at the monstrous amount of debris left behind on their flight line (cracks in the cement were filled with beer-bottle caps, an absolute no-no for jet engines) they decided that would be the end of concerts.

"I spent about six months dealing with that alone," Barie said. "Here I am trying to talk to the Pratt & Whitneys of the world and we're having this concert."

Courting big business

With Phish gone, Barie and the redevelopment board began to get serious about bringing in business. They came close in 1997 with TAG Aero Group and a few other smaller aviation companies. But Barie, like Holmes, became a victim of the political wars and he left after 23 months on the job. "It will be the rare community that divorces itself from the politics in the aftermath of a base closure," Barie said. He was replaced by Daniel Wieneke, who served as Barie's assistant. Under Wieneke's leadership, base redevelopment eventually began to flourish. Pratt & Whitney set up an engine-testing facility on the flight line and several other companies bought or rented space on it, creating more than 1,000 jobs.

A base reborn

More than a decade after the closure of Plattsburgh was announced, the base is being transformed, with the help of a clear vision and a focused redevelopment board. The base housing was turned into successful private neighborhoods and the Clinton County Legislature recently broke ground on a new airport at the base site. The base oval, or parade ground, is now home to six soccer fields, and three baseball fields will be soon be added. "We are seen as one of the shining examples of base redevelopment," Mayor Stewart, who served at the base as an enlisted man from 1984 to 1988, said. "There is light at the end of the tunnel, and, personally, even though I loved the base and was sad to see it go, I think it was the best thing that ever happened."

Staff writer Kirk Moore contributed to this article.
http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050828/NEWS/508280414

Posted by lois at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

DC: Vincent Schiraldi- Juvenile Reform Official Quickly Shakes Up Attitudes

By Lindsay Ryan, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 29, 2005; Page B01

Vincent Schiraldi made the rounds, forgoing the handshake in favor of the chest bump, a greeting not in the standard repertoire of most city officials.

Then again, Schiraldi is not most city officials. As director of the District's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, he manages the care of about 200 detained youngsters and nearly 400 more in foster care, group homes or other living arrangements. Many of the confined youths were arrested for car theft or drug offenses, but others include runaways and rapists.

Student council members at the Oak Hill juvenile detention facility in Laurel pulled out copies of Schiraldi's plan for the department, which they had already read, to offer their reactions. With family therapy and outreach, activity and job opportunities, as well as intensive case management, he proposes to return many young people to their families or place them in supervised independent living, group homes or monitored foster care.

"You get more freedom, and you also get to make decisions on your own," said one teenager, excited by the prospect of independent living.

Right now, "if you screw up, the choice is between locking you down or nothing," said another.

Increasingly talkative, the young people asked for larger meals, less time kept in their rooms and more soap. They praised photography workshops the department organized but requested better job opportunities. "How about assistant to Schiraldi?" one joked. Schiraldi did not laugh. He nodded, then said, "That's not a bad idea."

Schiraldi later said, "It's amazing how simple their requests are. Soap. Think about what their demands were. They were asking about tutoring. It's counterintuitive."

For Schiraldi, who for years pressed for juvenile justice reform, running a system he once vocally protested is a dream come true -- but also a challenge.

Growing up in a working-class Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood, Schiraldi saw friends jailed for drug-dealing, car theft and murder. "They always came out worse, and we always looked up to them more," he recalled. During college, he worked in group homes. When he returned to Brooklyn, he was horrified to see and hear of childhood friends sleeping on benches or dying of AIDS in prison, no better off for their years in and out of youth facilities.

After getting a master's degree in social work, he spent the 1980s and '90s with criminal justice reform nonprofit groups, becoming executive director of the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. In 1996, he started the Justice Policy Institute in the District.

During that time, Oak Hill was deteriorating. Over two decades, there was a new youth services administrator almost yearly. Mismanagement, abuse, overcrowding, escapes, violence and lack of rehabilitation made it notorious. The Youth Services Administration, then part of the Department of Human Services, failed to comply with a consent decree and faced the possibility of being placed under court receivership.

One solution to the problems and "chronic lack of leadership," said Todd Cox of the Public Defender Service for the District, was to create a Cabinet-level department run by someone with a "deep commitment to and expertise in juvenile justice." Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) chose Schiraldi. He was confirmed by the D.C. Council in February.å

Schiraldi said he is still adjusting to his role, learning to use "a little more honey and a little less vinegar." He firmly believes that large, locked institutions, like Oak Hill, worsen negative behaviors, he said. In the District, 32 percent of juvenile offenders end up in adult prison within three years, Schiraldi said. In Missouri, that figure is 8 percent. By the 1980s, Missouri had replaced all large institutions with rehabilitation homes of about 20 beds each and many programs, group sessions and high staff-youth ratios. Missouri's per-capita cost is lower than the District's.

A wealth of evidence suggests that such systems as Missouri's substantially lower recidivism with little risk to the community, said Barry C. Feld, a University of Minnesota law professor and juvenile justice scholar.
Discipline isn't enough, says Vincent Schiraldi, head of the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services since February. "You ain't gonna punish the badness out of them." (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

"When you have large numbers of inmates, there is a primary influence placed on security and authoritarian controls, and that produces the most violent, negative and hostile inmate subcultures. . . . Staff, themselves, end up resorting to violence . . . to control it," he said. In smaller settings, staff workers can cultivate positive behavior, he said.

Schiraldi has reduced the confined population by 23 percent in seven months, even as serious crime by juveniles in the District fell. He appointed a new director at Oak Hill and shut the worst units to improve the facility until it is replaced, slated for fall 2006.

Schiraldi's new employment opportunities for youths include 30 UPS jobs this fall and jobs in the juvenile facilities. He is working to create entrepreneurial programs that put abilities to legal uses. "These kids learn a certain skill set when they sell drugs," he explained. "They can use that. You buy an ounce of pot, you divide it into nickel bags, you mark it up. . . You gotta make a profit."

In one innovation, some juvenile offenders in the community are taken to a supervised center from 3 to 9 p.m. for sports, academic help and dinner and then taken home, said Mai Fernandez of the Latin American Youth Center, which Schiraldi chose for the pilot program.

Not everything has gone smoothly during Schiraldi's tenure. Warehouse glitches and hoarding have prevented such necessities as underwear and soap from reaching some young people. On a visit to Oak Hill in July, Schiraldi could thrust his arm through gaping holes in the dirty drywall of some units.

Although a broad spectrum of people in community groups praise Schiraldi's philosophy of more incentives and less punishment, it still meets some skepticism -- at times in the juvenile facilities.

"It's always about rewarding. There's enough rewarding. They need discipline," one officer said during a lively staff discussion about the direction Oak Hill is headed. Schiraldi replied that discipline alone is not the answer: "You ain't gonna punish the badness out of them."

An hour later, he left Oak Hill's razor-wire enclosed compound for the Youth Services Center. Photos of people who have succeeded despite incarceration during their youth cover the walls near his office.

Creating models in the District that bring more success stories seemed to weigh heavily on him. "We have a hangover from our incarceration binge," he remarked.

His enthusiasm quickly resumed. "Hopefully we'll drink some tomato juice and get better," he quipped.

Then he went back to work.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/28/AR2005082801112.html

Posted by lois at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

TX: Priosoner ID Gets You a Drivers License

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2005/08/few-new-laws-i-like.html

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Prisoner ID Gets You A Drivers License: Astonishingly, for years one of the big barriers to prisoners' successful re-entry into society has been acquiring a drivers license. The Texas Department of Public Safety wouldn't accept photo ID cards from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which runs the prison system, as valid. So ex-prisoners had to run around looking for their birth certificate or other forms of identification, which at a minimum causes delays. In other cases, they just wouldn't get a drivers license, or would use falsified documents to get a fake one. So the lapse not only harmed reintegration efforts, it created new security risks -- a double dipper. New legislation forces Texas DPS to accept TDCJ identification cards as valid ID to get a drivers license. It's about time.

Posted by lois at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

"Incarceration as a Failed Policy" by Alvin Bronstein

Incarceration as a Failed Policy

Alvin J. Bronstein*
August 26, 2005

Jim Gondles has invited me to write a guest editorial on “why US policies on incarceration are ineffective in terms of crime control, costly and counter productive,” something I had said to him in an email in another context. I was glad to receive this invitation and I should point out at the outset that my criticisms would apply to almost any country’s policies on incarceration and not just the United States. This is not intended as an attack on United States’ prisons but rather prisons generally. There are better, less damaging prisons than those in the United States, for example in the Scandinavian countries. And there are far more that are far worse than the United States. I have been in prisons in some countries, Russia and Brazil, that make ours really look like country clubs. The point is not how new or modern or well equipped prisons are but rather the fact of incarceration itself that is, in my opinion, a complete failure.

In his marvelous 1974 book, The Future of Imprisonment, Norval Morris, the distinguished criminologist and long-time consultant to the Federal Bureau of Prisons wrote:

The criminal law’s reach has been extended in this country far beyond its competence, invading the spheres of private morality and social welfare proving ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic. This overreach of the criminal law has made hypocrites of us all and has cluttered the courts and filled the jails and prisons, the detention centers and reformatories, with people who should not be there.

When that was written, we had about 350,000 men, women and children in our nation’s jails and prisons. Today we have over 2,200,000 and prisons here and throughout most of the world are still ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic.

It is widely recognized that we have locked up too many social nuisances who are not real threats, too many petty offenders and minor thieves, severing such few social ties as they have and pushing them further toward more serious criminal behavior. In the US, we inappropriately incarcerate the mentally ill and the alcohol and drug addicted. Prisons generally make people worse.

The 1973 national commission, The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, recommended that “the institution should be the last resort for correctional problems.” They gave their reasons – failure to reduce crime, success in punishing but not in deterring, providing only a temporary protection to the community, changing the offender but mostly for the worst – and concluded that “the prison has persisted partly because a civilized nation could neither turn back to the barbarism of an earlier time nor find a satisfactory alternative.” Today, over 30 years later, we have a new national commission that is looking at the abuses in and the problems of prisons in America.

Again, nothing has changed except that there are many more people in prison, our prisons are now larger and more destructive of the human personality with fewer programs and harsher regimes. Many years of studies have revealed that only three possible changes in the life of the prisoner during his or her incarceration are correlated with later conformity to the conditions of release and with the avoidance of new criminal behavior – the availability of a family or other supportive group to join on release, the availability of a reasonably supportive job, and the process and duration of aging itself. Getting a job and preserving or creating social relationships are exactly what prison most interferes with although time for aging it does provide. We cage people, it is clear, not to treat them but for a variety of other reasons. Increasingly prisons are places of punishment and have nothing to do with rehabilitation.

One of the great prison reformers in the world, Baroness Vivien Stern, Secretary General of Penal Reform International, in her 1998 book A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World, wrote:

It is a great strength of the reform movement that the people in the system know that what is going on is wrong. They say so through the associations to which they belong. They need to be reinforced in their conviction that whilst they are contracted to carry out their instructions and follow their rule book, they have a higher loyalty to a set of values and principles. It will not be an excuse for the perpetrator of a clear human rights abuse to say, “I was just obeying orders”. Prison staff need to be given the confidence and courage to keep on pointing out what is wrong. Perhaps they should require that the international norms and instruments governing the treatment of prisoners should be written not just into prisoners’ rights, but into their rights too, as staff. There are rules governing how prisoners should be treated. So also should there be equivalent rules governing what prison staff can be asked to do, and making it clear what they cannot be asked to do.

As Nelson Mandela once said, “Prison not only robs you of your freedom, it attempts to take away your identity. Everyone wears a uniform, eats the same food, follows the same schedule. It is by definition a purely authoritarian state that tolerates no independence and individuality.”

In 1999, a large group of criminal justice professionals, academics and officials from 50 different countries in all five continents met for five days in Egham, England, to consider “a new approach for penal reform in a new century.” At the end of the five day meeting they drafted without any dissents an agenda for that new approach which included among them the following:

The understanding that penal reform is an essential part of good governance.The awareness that penal reform cannot proceed without changes to the criminal justice system as a whole and that crime prevention in and by civil society is essential to the success of penal reform.The determination to make sure that everyone, especially the poor and marginalized, has equal access to the justice system.
The recognition that drug abuse is usually better dealt with inside the health or social welfare care system rather than the criminal justice system, especially when there is no violence involved.
The need to enrich the formal judicial system with informal, locally based, dispute resolution mechanisms which meet human rights standards.

During the past 40 years I have visited hundreds of prisons and jails in the United States and many prisons in Asia, Latin America and Eastern and Western Europe. The best, least destructive, prison that I have ever been to was a maximum security prison in the city of Ringe, in Denmark, which I visited on a number of occasions.

This was a small maximum security prison which housed men and women prisoners together, all of them recidivists, in which every prisoner worked at a productive job every day, where correctional officers wore no uniforms and worked side-by-side with the prisoners and had many other marvelous features. Every time I left the prison and walked out through the main entry way I was accompanied by the prison governor, Eric Andersen. Each time I left, I would say, “Eric, this really is a marvelous prison.” And his answer each time was, “But remember, Al, all prisons damage people.”

* Alvin J. Bronstein is Director-Emeritus of The National Prison Project of the ACLU; US Board Member, Penal Reform International (London). This editorial originally appeared in the August 2005 edition of Corrections Today magazine.

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

August 26, 2005

More on the Bureau of Justice Statistics & Bob Herbert Op-Ed

August 26, 2005

Democrats Want Official to Be Reinstated Over Report on Profiling

By ERIC LICHTBLAU, NY Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 - Democrats in Congress called Thursday for the reinstatement of a Justice Department official who objected to his supervisors' effort to play down the findings of a federal report on racial profiling.
The White House is replacing the official, Lawrence A. Greenfeld, who is director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, months after he complained that senior political officials at the department were seeking to distort publicly the findings of the statistical report by his agency.

The report found that while drivers from different racial or ethnic groups were stopped by the police at essentially the same rate, blacks and Hispanics were much more likely to have their vehicles searched or be subjected to the use of force once they were stopped.

Mr. Greenfeld objected to efforts by his superiors at the Justice Department to delete references to the racial or ethnic disparities from a planned news release on the study. After he refused to delete the material, the study was posted online in April, unchanged, but no public announcement was made. The White House has now told Mr. Greenfeld he is being replaced.

In a letter sent Thursday to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, six Democrats in Congress called for Mr. Greenfeld's immediate reinstatement. Citing the importance of the racial profiling issue, the letter said that the Justice Department must "be forthcoming about these troubling statistics" from the April report and that it was "essential that all data and statistical conclusions be free from political manipulation."

Senator Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey, one of the Democrats signing the letter, added in a statement that "no government official should be removed from his or her position because they dare to tell the truth." Racial profiling has been a particularly divisive issue in New Jersey, where a pattern of racial profiling by state troopers in the late 1990's led to a state ban and a federal order to end the practice.

Justice Department officials said they had not yet seen the Democrats' letter and could not comment publicly on an internal personnel matter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/politics/26profiling.html

August 25, 2005

Truth-Telling on Race? Not in Bush's Fantasyland

By BOB HERBERT

The Bush administration has punished a Justice Department official who dared to tell even a mild truth about racial profiling by law enforcement officers in this country.

In 2001 President Bush selected Lawrence Greenfeld to head the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which tracks crime patterns and police tactics, among other things. But as Eric Lichtblau of The Times reported in a front-page article yesterday, Mr. Greenfeld is being demoted because he complained that senior political officials were seeking to play down newly compiled data about the aggressive treatment of black and Hispanic drivers by police officers.

My first thought when I read the story was that burying the messenger who tells uncomfortable truths has always been a favorite tactic of this administration, which seems to exist largely in a world of fantasy. (Grown-ups don't do well in the Bush playtime environment. Remember Gen. Eric Shinseki? And former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill?)

My second thought was of a couple of stories from several years ago that dramatically illustrated the differences in the ways that white and black drivers can be treated.

Rachel Ellen Ondersma was a 17-year-old high school senior when she was stopped by the police in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Nov. 14, 1998. She had been driving erratically, the police said, and when she failed a Breathalyzer test, she was placed under arrest.

An officer cuffed Ms. Ondersma's hands behind her and left her alone in the back seat of a police cruiser. What happened after that was captured on a video camera mounted inside the vehicle. And while it would eventually be shown on the Fox television program "World's Wackiest Police Videos," it was not funny.

The camera offered a clear view through the cruiser's windshield. The microphone picked up the sound of Ms. Ondersma sobbing, then the clink of the handcuffs as she began maneuvering to free herself. She apparently stepped through her arms so her hands, still cuffed, were in front of her. Then she climbed into the front seat, started the engine and roared off. With the car hurtling along, tires squealing, Ms. Ondersma could be heard moaning, "What am I doing?" and, "They are going to have to kill me."

She roared onto a freeway, where she was clocked by pursuing officers at speeds up to 80 miles per hour. She crashed into a concrete barrier, and officers, thinking they had her boxed in, jumped out of their vehicles. But Ms. Ondersma backed up, then lurched forward and plowed into one of the police cars.

Gunfire could be heard as the police began shooting out her tires. The teenager backed up, lurched forward and crashed into the cop car again. An officer had to leap out of the way to keep from being struck.

Ms. Ondersma tried to speed away once more, but by then at least two of her tires were flat and she could no longer control the vehicle. She crashed into another concrete divider and was finally surrounded.

As I watched the videotape, I was amazed at the way she was treated when she was pulled from the cruiser. The police did not seem particularly upset. They were not rough with her, and no one could be heard cursing. One officer said: "Calm down, all right? I think you've caused enough trouble for one day."

Ms. Ondersma is white. As I watched the video, I kept thinking about an incident on the New Jersey Turnpike in April 1998 in which four young men in a van were pulled over by state troopers. Three of the men were black and one was Hispanic. They were neither drunk nor abusive. But their van did roll slowly backward, accidentally bumping the leg of one of the troopers and striking the police vehicle.

The troopers drew their weapons and opened fire. When the shooting stopped, three of the four young men had been shot and seriously wounded.

The beginning of the end of Lawrence Greenfeld's tenure as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics came a few months ago, as his agency was completing a major study showing that black and Hispanic drivers were treated more aggressively than whites when stopped by the police.

Mr. Greenfeld was overruled when he tried to include references to these disparities in a news release announcing the findings of the study. The study was then buried in the bowels of the Bush bureaucracy.

Mr. Greenfeld obviously failed to understand that the preferred methods of dealing with uncomfortable facts in the fantasyland of the Bush administration are to ignore them, or simply wish them away.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/opinion/25herbert.html?pagewanted=print

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2005

Florence, AZ- Commission Supports Re-Zoning for New Prison

Florence News
P&Z Commission supports rezoning for new U.S. prison
Staff reports, Florence Reminder August 25, 2005

Breaking their previous deadlock, a majority of Planning & Zoning commissioners voted in favor of rezoning approximately 24 acres on Arizona 79 opposite Florence Heights Drive to I-1 Industrial Park.

The new zoning would allow the land to be sold to Correctional Services Corp., which is bidding on a contract to build a new federal detention facility for illegal immigrants. The land is currently zoned for agriculture. The current landowner, Nancy Patterson, testified at last week's commission meeting that she wants the industrial zoning regardless of whether CSC wins the prison contract.

CSC has won contracts for two other federal prisons of this type, now operating in Tacoma, Wash., and Pearsall, Texas, Senior Vice President Russell S. Rau told the commissioners last week.

The commission's positive vote is a recommendation to the Town Council, which will have the final say on the matter next month.

If the rezoning is approved and CSC wins the contract, the prison would create more than 300 jobs paying approximately $20 per hour. The facility must pay its employees the wage specified by the U.S. Dept. of Labor for this area, Rau said. He presented the commissioners a list of Dept. of Labor wages that currently specify $19.77 per hour for a detention officer. By the time the facility actually opens, the going rate could be $22, Rau said.

The facility will take about a year to build, but it's unknown when that year might begin. Rau couldn't say how soon CSC will know if it's the successful bidder.

He said after the meeting adjourned that the bids are now going through environmental studies as required by the National Environmental Protection Act.

If CSC's bid is successful, it will be its third prison in Florence.

CSC, based in Florida, has operated the medium security Arizona State Prison-Florence West at Arizona 79 and Diversion Dam Road for approximately eight years. The company recently won a state contract to build a second prison next door to house sex offenders. That prison should break ground in mid-October, Rau said.

"Florence has been a good community to business with," Rau said after the meeting.

Appearance of prison

He told the commission the new immigrant detention center would be "as far off the road as possible," buffered by trees as well as parking.

If CSC wins the contract, it will be a 1,000-bed facility for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly INS).

In response to questions from commissioner Jeff Wooley, Rau said the prison would be built for low security. "These individuals are detainees; they're only offense is their immigration status." But he also said the facility would be adaptable to other uses.

As for security around the building, Rau said it won't "have a real heavy appearance from the exterior." It will be fenced and the parking area will be secure. There won't be a large recreation yard. The average detainee's stay there will be short.

The facility would bring all immigration processing activities under one roof.

Assuming this third federal contract is similar to the first two CSC has built, it will probably complement and replace some of the functions at the current immigrant detention facility in Florence, which is full, Rau said.

Three Planning & Zoning commission members, one who was present by phone, heard testimony on the matter Aug. 17 before unanimously approving the rezoning. The fourth commissioner was absent and the fifth seat is vacant.

The commission previously deadlocked on the issue in May, when both a motion to approve, and a motion to deny, died for lack of a second. The issue proceeded in June to the Town Council, which held a public hearing and heard testimony, but ultimately sent it back to the Planning & Zoning Commission.

Town Planning Director Larry Quick told the commissioners one reason for the earlier indecision is a petition, which stated inaccurately that the prison would house sex offenders, was circulated against the rezoning. "Whether they would have signed knowing the actual facts is unknown."

He noted the town has encouraged prison growth on Arizona 79 and "private prisons have been good neighbors and contributed to the local economy."

He added the property owner to the north has recently applied to rezone his entire property commercial, but wants his objection to the industrial zone to remain on the record.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15098661&BRD=1817&PAG=461& amp;dept_id=222076&rfi=6

©Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc. 2005

Posted by lois at 07:55 PM | Comments (0)

SF Reaching out to people who are incarcerated to vote

Suzanne Herel, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 23, 2005

(08-23) 10:18 PDT San Francisco (SF Chronicle) -- The San Francisco Department of Elections is reaching out to a class of city residents who may not be aware they can register to vote — jail inmates and former convicts who have completed their prison sentences and parole.

Elections director John Arntz said he sees the new outreach program as a way to increase voter registration while honoring inmates’ right to vote.

“As far as the law is concerned, they have as much right to vote as anyone else,” Arntz said. State law prohibits only those serving time in prison or on parole for a felony conviction from voting, and cancels their voter registration when they are convicted. However, those who have served their sentences and completed parole can re-register.

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“Many ex-offenders do not realize that,” Arntz said. “I hope to create a program in San Francisco that can be a model for the rest of the state.”

The Elections Department’s program will supply registration cards and absentee ballot applications to San Francisco’s jails so those who are awaiting trial or serving time for misdemeanor offenses can vote. Arntz hopes to reach those who are no longer in prison by coordinating with organizations that work with ex-offenders.

The program comes at a time when civil rights advocates around the country are challenging laws that prevent people convicted of felonies from voting, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

According to the Sentencing Project, a prisoner rights advocacy group, such laws deny the vote to more than 4 million felons. Laws preventing felons from voting recently have been lifted in Nebraska, New Mexico and Iowa. They are under legal challenge in New York.

More information about the program is available at www.sfgov.org/site/elections.

E-mail Suzanne Herel at sherel@sfchronicle.com.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/23/BAvote23.DTL

Posted by lois at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2005

Bureau of Justice Statistic: Profiling Report Leads to Demotion

August 24, 2005

By ERIC LICHTBLAU, NY Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 - The Bush administration is replacing the director of a small but critical branch of the Justice Department, months after he complained that senior political officials at the department were seeking to play down newly compiled data on the aggressive police treatment of black and Hispanic drivers.

The demotion of the official, Lawrence A. Greenfeld, whom President Bush named in 2001 to lead the Bureau of Justice Statistics, caps more than three years of simmering tensions over charges of political interference at the agency. And it has stirred anger and tumult among many Justice Department statisticians, who say their independence in analyzing important law enforcement data has been compromised.

Officials at the White House and the Justice Department said no political pressure had been exerted over the statistics branch. But they declined to discuss the job status of Mr. Greenfeld, who told his staff several weeks ago that he had been asked to move on after 23 years of generally high marks as a statistician and supervisor at the agency. Mr. Greenfeld, who was initially threatened with dismissal and the possible loss of some pension benefits, is expected to leave the agency soon for a lesser position at another agency.

With some 50 employees, the Bureau of Justice Statistics is a low-profile agency within the sprawling Justice Department. But it produces dozens of reports a year on issues like crime patterns, drug use, police tactics and prison populations and is widely cited by law enforcement officials, policy makers, social scientists and the news media. Located in an office separate from the Justice Department, it strives to be largely independent to avoid any taint of political influence.

The flashpoint in the tensions between Mr. Greenfeld and his political supervisors came four months ago, when statisticians at the agency were preparing to announce the results of a major study on traffic stops and racial profiling, which found disparities in how racial groups were treated once they were stopped by the police.

Political supervisors within the Office of Justice Programs ordered Mr. Greenfeld to delete certain references to the disparities from a news release that was drafted to announce the findings, according to more than a half-dozen Justice Department officials with knowledge of the situation. The officials, most of whom said they were supporters of Mr. Greenfeld, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters.

Mr. Greenfeld refused to delete the racial references, arguing to his supervisors that the omissions would make the public announcement incomplete and misleading. Instead, the Justice Department opted not to issue a news release on the findings and posted the report online.

Some statisticians said that decision all but assured the report would get lost amid the avalanche of studies issued by the government. A computer search of news articles found no mentions of the study.

Congressional opponents of racial profiling, who have criticized what they see as an ambivalent stance on the issue by the Bush administration, said they were frustrated to learn that the Justice Department had completed the Congressionally mandated study without announcing its findings or briefing members of Congress on it. They accused the Justice Department of effectively burying the findings to play down new data that would add grist to the debate over using racial and ethnic data in law enforcement and terrorism investigations.

"My suspicions always go up if a report like this is just deep-sixed," said Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, who is dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and plans to introduce legislation this fall that would ban the use of racial or ethnic police profiling.

The April study by the Justice Department, based on interviews with 80,000 people in 2002, found that white, black and Hispanic drivers nationwide were stopped by the police that year at about the same rate, roughly 9 percent. But, in findings that were more detailed than past studies on the topic, the Justice Department report also found that what happened once the police made a stop differed markedly depending on race and ethnicity.

Once they were stopped, Hispanic drivers were searched or had their vehicles searched by the police 11.4 percent of the time and blacks 10.2 percent of the time, compared with 3.5 percent for white drivers. Blacks and Hispanics were also subjected to force or the threat of force more often than whites, and the police were much more likely to issue tickets to Hispanics rather than simply giving them a warning, the study found.

The authors of the study said they were not able to draw any conclusions about the reason for the differing rates, but they said the gaps were notable. The research "uncovered evidence of black drivers having worse experiences - more likely to be arrested, more likely to be searched, more likely to be have force used against them - during traffic stops than white drivers," the report concluded.

In April, as the report was being completed, Mr. Greenfeld's office drafted a news release to announce the findings and submitted it for review to the office of Tracy A. Henke, who was then the acting assistant attorney general who oversaw the statistics branch.

The planned announcement noted that the rate at which whites, blacks and Hispanics were stopped was "about the same," and that finding was left intact by Ms. Henke's office, according to a copy of the draft obtained by The New York Times.

But the references in the draft to higher rates of searches and use of force for blacks and Hispanics were crossed out by hand, with a notation in the margin that read, "Do we need this?" A note affixed to the edited draft, which the officials said was written by Ms. Henke, read "Make the changes," and it was signed "Tracy." That led to a fierce dispute after Mr. Greenfeld refused to delete the references, officials said.

Ms. Henke, who was nominated by Mr. Bush last month to a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a brief telephone interview that she did not recall the episode.

Brian Rohrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to discuss Mr. Greenfeld's job status, citing confidential personnel matters, but said that "there was no effort to suppress information since the report was released in its entirety." Mr. Rohrkasse said the department had also posted on its Web site a number of other statistical reports without issuing news releases.

Mr. Greenfeld declined to discuss the handling of the traffic report or his departure from the statistics agency. But he emphasized in an interview that his agency's data had never been changed because of political pressure and added that "all our statistics are produced under the highest quality standards."

As a political appointee named to his post by Mr. Bush in 2001, "I serve at the pleasure of the president and can be replaced at any time," Mr. Greenfeld said. "There's always a natural and healthy tension between the people who make the policy and the people who do the statistics. That's there every day of the week, because some days you're going to have good news, and some days you're going to have bad news."

When asked if those political pressures had grown worse for his agency lately, as many of his employees asserted in interviews, he said: "I don't want to comment on that. It's just a fact of life."

Disputes between statisticians and policy makers at the Justice Department have flared occasionally over the years, particularly over the question of what credit if any the administration in power could take for dips in national crime rates. But a senior statistician, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that "in this administration, those tensions have been even greater, and the struggles have been harder."

Another veteran statistician said: "Larry wanted to ensure that the integrity of the data was not compromised, and that's what's causing a lot of anxiety. We've seen a desire for more control over B.J.S. from the powers that be, and that's what seemed to get Larry in trouble."

Amid the debate over the traffic stop study, Mr. Greenfeld was called to the office of Robert D. McCallum Jr., then the third-ranking Justice Department official, and questioned about his handling of the matter, people involved in the episode said. Some weeks later, he was called to the White House, where personnel officials told him he was being replaced as director and was urged to resign, six months before he was scheduled to retire with full pension benefits, the officials said.

After Mr. Greenfeld invoked his right as a former senior executive to move to a lesser position, the administration agreed to allow him to seek another job, and he is likely to be detailed to the Bureau of Prisons, the officials said.

The administration has already offered the director's job at the statistics agency to a former official there, Joseph M. Bessette, but he turned it down, officials said. In an interview, Mr. Bessette declined to discuss his conversations with the administration but was quick to praise Mr. Greenfeld's work.

"I've never met a finer public servant," Mr. Bessette said, "and I think the agency has been taken to new heights by Larry."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/politics/24profiling.html

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2005

West Virginia--Money, Energy all go toward new Federal Prison

August 23, 2005

Construction of prison will bring 300 jobs
By Mary Catherine Brooks/Wyoming County Bureau Chief

Monday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) issued the final Record of Decision for the medium-security facility to be built in the Indian Ridge Industrial Park near the McDowell County-Wyoming County line, according to U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va.

The Record of Decision is the final step in the environmental review process and the BOP can now proceed with the project.

Construction of the 1,280-bed facility is expected to begin in the spring and will infuse $35 million annually into the local economy, Byrd said. "This is an exciting day for southern West Virginia, and for McDowell County and Wyoming County in particular," Byrd said. "This announcement caps many years of work by me and by other state and local officials. It is so satisfying to know that, because of our efforts, the wait is over. The jobs are coming."

"We're so excited it is unreal," added Gordon Lambert, who has served as McDowell County Commission president for the past decade. "This is the best news I've heard since I've been on the commission."

House Majority Leader Rick Staton, D-Wyoming, was excited as well. "This is a Christmas present that is going to last for generations to come," he emphasized.

"This is the culmination of a lot of work by a lot of people," added Coalfields Expressway Authority Director and Wyoming County Delegate Richard Browning.

"The prison is the flagship of the economic development project of the Coalfields Expressway and shows the benefits of working with a three-county area.

"There were some dark days early in the evolution of this project, but because we had some good people -- Byrd and U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, and others -- working along the way, they have seen it through," Browning emphasized.

"This will create jobs for all of southern West Virginia -- not just McDowell and Wyoming counties," Browning noted. "McDowell County doesn't have enough people to fill all these jobs. There will be enough jobs for a five-county area."

"It is a great day, but I look at this with mixed feelings," added Mike Goode, Wyoming County clerk and chairman of the Coalfields Expressway Authority. "I wish we had the money to build the road to this prison. It's a shame the money isn't there for the Coalfields Expressway."

The Coalfields Expressway is earmarked to receive about $16 million in federal monies in the latest six-year transportation bill, which will only build about 5 miles of road, officials note. With the prison coming, however, more federal dollars are expected, they believe.

"This federal prison project truly represents the fruits of a community-based vision," said Rahall, D-W.Va. "The prison will be a huge economic generator for the region by creating new jobs and it will serve as a catalyst for future economic development and expansion."

The prison project has been in the making for more than five years, Lambert said.

"The first time we took the Bureau of Prison (representatives) to Indian Ridge, they couldn't believe we could do it," Lambert said. Five years ago, the 500-acre industrial park was no more than a series of deep valleys edged by looming mountain tops. Today those valleys have been filled, creating a huge stretch of flat, mountain-top land awaiting the development of the prison and other businesses, as well as the interchange for the Coalfields Expressway and the King Coal Highway.

"This shows what happens when you use persistence and methodical planning," Staton said. Staton also pointed out the by-products of the prison will include highway construction, new infrastructure, service industry jobs, new housing and improvements to the education system.

"The cake is going to be as delicious as the icing," he emphasized. "We've been working for years -- getting ready for this day," Browning said. "We've been improving our housing, education system, health care, social needs. It's not like we've been caught off guard -- unlike some other areas of the country.

"We're ready to reap the economic benefits of the location of the prison here," Browning said. "We started talking a long time ago about the possibility of prison number two. Somewhere along the way, I hope to see that happen, maybe in Wyoming County. "My hope is this will accelerate the construction of the Coalfields Expressway from Beckley to Welch." McDowell County has already seen the opening of a new cinema in Welch and a new Wal-Mart is set to open in September, Lambert said. The new Stevens Correctional Facility, located in the former Stevens Clinic building, will hire 60 people Sept. 5 and an additional 60 people will be hired Oct. 18, Lambert noted.

On at least four separate occasions between March 1997 and June 1998, at Byrd's direction, BOP officials visited McDowell County looking for a site for a federal prison. Subsequently, with Byrd's encouragement, BOP officials conducted additional visits to the Indian Ridge Industrial Park and met with local officials regarding criteria for a prison site.

To help move the site forward, Byrd added $5 million to legislation in 1999 for a water/sewer line extension at the Indian Ridge site. He also included $1.25 million in legislation in 2004 for infrastructure and site development at the Indian Ridge Industrial Park.

In addition, through the federal appropriations process, Byrd, who serves as the top Democratic member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has been working to obtain construction funding for the new facility.

"I want to make sure that there are no delays in this project. This new facility has been a hope for so many of us for so long. Now, our hopes have turned to reality," Byrd said.
http://www.register-herald.com/articles/2005/08/22/news/bprison23.txt

Posted by lois at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

LA: Bayou Betterment--a New Juvenile Justice System is Emerging

Bayou Betterment
T@P In Louisiana, a new juvenile justice system is emerging, with the governor's strong support. If reform can happen here, it can succeed anywhere.
By Katy Reckdahl
Issue Date: 09.10.05

The former correctional officer mops sweat off his brow as he plays two-on-one basketball against kids he would have once called offenders. Michael Gaines gestures toward the man who's trying to block a layup by one of the kids. "In the old days, he would have just stood here in his uniform and watched while the kids played ball with each other," says Gaines. In those "old days" -- about six months ago -- Gaines was a deputy warden, overseeing a staff of lieutenants, captains, and officers. Today he's called deputy director, and his staffers, called youth-care workers, are newly trained at managing adolescent behavior. Their charges are the 70 delinquent children, ages 13 to 20, who reside at the crown jewel of Louisiana's juvenile-justice-reform program, the Bridge City Center for Youth.

Gaines and his boss, director (and former warden) John Anderson, point out signs of reform as they walk among the mossy live oaks that create a canopy over the yards of this onetime Catholic orphanage, a cluster of red-brick buildings across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. This summer, the state pulled back the razor wire surrounding the former Bridge City Correctional Center for Youth, plucked the word "correctional" from its name, and relaxed the staff dress code from blue uniforms to polo shirts and khakis. The goal? To remake Bridge City into a model, "Missouri-style" facility that will serve juveniles from the New Orleans region.

Currently, only about 40 percent of Bridge City's kids hail from the New Orleans metropolitan area. The state's pilot program is also still small; by the end of August, about 24 young men will be living in three Missouri-style dorm areas, remodeled at about $8,000 a pop. In place of military-style bunks and blankets, metal footlockers, concrete floors, and open group showers, the new areas offer a softer, homier environment. That means carpeted floors, windows hung with curtains and fronted with houseplants, and showers divided by bright curtains (they'll soon have permanent individual stalls). In the living area, unlocked wooden wardrobes stand next to wooden bunk beds, covered with colorful quilts. Across the room is a group of comfy couches arranged around an end table. It's here, on these couches, that a lot of the dorm's work is accomplished -- through peer-group meetings called "circles."

"When we wake up, we check in, call a circle," says Joe, a young man from New Orleans who lives in the first remodeled Bridge City dorm, called Ujima after the Kwanzaa principle for collective work and responsibility. The group also holds routine circles after lunch and at the end of the day, and as necessary, to discuss concerns or complaints with the other kids and the dorm's manager, youth-care worker, and counselor. Additional, impromptu circles are conducted standing together outside or wherever they're needed.

The difference between this dorm and those at other Louisiana juvenile facilities is most apparent during free time. At Bridge City, the young men giggle and joke, work on art projects, write in journals, put an arm on another youth's shoulder when helping him with homework. Gone are the tough poses, the tense jostling, the strictly enforced personal-safety distances.

Getting to this point took some adjustment. Eight teenagers moved into this dorm in June. But by late July, three of those residents had transferred out and been replaced by three other kids, all of them new to the juvenile system. "[Circles] weren't being called consistently. The group was at a standstill," explains dorm manager Patrick Riley. Bo, one of the original eight residents, nods his head. "It was the same thing everyday," he says. "[The circles] were dragging us down more than bringing us up." Eventually, participating in the process will be mandatory for everyone. "We wouldn't do this as a rule," says Gaines. But in this pilot stage, the young men are allowed to opt out, which one teen did, saying "it wasn't for him." The other two were asked to leave because they were verbally aggressive.

In July, the state officially opened Ujima with a press conference and a visit from Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. During the 2003 governor's race, Blanco, a former schoolteacher and the sitting lieutenant governor, was the first gubernatorial contender to sign on to a juvenile-justice-reform platform. The young men in Ujima say that she spent a long time talking with them, about circles, their dorm's new look, their faith, and their families. "You can tell she's a mom," says Joe. "She talked that mother talk."

The governor laughs at the assessment. "I did ask them what they hoped to do when they were released," she says.

* * *
"You've got some things going for you in Louisiana," says Molly Armstrong of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, who's spent the last year in Louisiana and the last decade working with a wide range of governments and their juvenile systems. For instance, she says, in Louisiana, juvenile-justice reform has an unusually high profile. "I think it's amazing you get the level of attention to the issue [here]," she says, crediting advocates for pushing it into the public forum and keeping it there. To Armstrong, the state's biggest advantage is Blanco. "The governor actually cares about juvenile-justice issues," she says. "That's unbelievably rare."

In 2003, while Blanco was still running for office, the Louisiana Legislature passed the Juvenile Justice Reform Act, prodded by exposés, litigation, and the death of a child at the hands of a Bridge City guard. The statute, Act 1225, specifically condemns large correctional facilities and "declares it to be the policy of the state of Louisiana to assist in the development and establishment of a community-based, school-based, and regionally based system."

Blanco won election later that year and took office in January 2004. Soon afterward, she took reform a step forward by signing an executive order separating the juvenile system from the adult corrections system and bringing in consultants from the Casey Foundation and from the highly successful Missouri juvenile system. "Juvenile justice has a new face in Louisiana," she declared, "and a strong advocate in the governor's office."

"We have a duty to the children," said Blanco in an interview, explaining why she had kept her eye on the state's juvenile recidivism even while she was lieutenant governor. In Louisiana, the governor and the lieutenant governor are elected separately, and at the time, Blanco, a Democrat, sat underneath a Republican governor. Her power to act was thus fairly limited, but she did have access to data and expert personnel, and so she simply gathered information and waited until she could follow through.

This was not a new interest. In prior years, Blanco had served in the state Legislature and had toured juvenile lockups during that time. "I remember the first time I entered the local detention center," she says. "It felt rough to me, and I was going in there as an adult." She resolved to change that.

Mark Steward, now one of Governor Blanco's key advisers on reform, sees a strong link between Blanco's interest in juvenile justice and her sense of compassion and understanding of loss. (In 1997, her youngest son, Ben, then 19, was crushed beneath a weight from an industrial crane and died instantly.) When asked about it, Blanco gets quiet for a moment. "You can lose children in a number of different ways," she says. "Some die, some are lost to the streets, and others are lost to the state's prison system. And families really suffer, no matter how their kids are lost."

This summer, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation selected Louisiana as one of three states to participate in its program "Models for Change: Systems Reform in Juvenile Justice." With the grant comes more outside expertise and up to $1.5 million annually for the next five years. Steward believes that Blanco's staunch support of the issue is responsible not only for the MacArthur Foundation award but for the momentum of reform in general. "To change one of the worst juvenile systems in the nation, you have to have the leadership at the top and all the way down," he explains.

Blanco, in turn, praises Steward, her advisers from the Casey Foundation, and Simon Gonsoulin, head of the Office of Youth Development, which runs the state's juvenile system. "Right now, Louisiana has the best minds in the country working on this issue," she says.

* * *
The recent history of juvenile-justice reform in Louisiana begins with the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth, by common agreement one of the most notorious children's prisons in America. Tallulah opened in 1994, on the edge of a sleepy northeastern Louisiana delta town.

Before 16-year-old Christopher Simms was sent there in the summer of 2002, neighborhood friends in New Orleans warned him: He'd be raped for sure, he was told, unless he fought his way to respect. "So I wouldn't back down," says Simms. "If you show a sign of weakness, they are going to take advantage of that. You'll be a punk." Fellow New Orleans inmates taught him other essential skills: how to blackmail officers, have sex with young female guards, and keep a hidden stash of Camel straights in a world where half a cigarette was worth four bars of soap or four bags of potato chips.

Even the guards scrapped, says Simms: "Any time a guard can come out of his uniform and fight, we loved that. We respected that." Other times guards put a "hit" on a kid and paid the aggressor in cigarettes, lighters, fast food, or weed. Once, during a suspected hit, a group of kids broke Simms' upper and lower jaw. "I was lying in a big ol' puddle of blood, half of my body in blood," he recalls. "I blacked out."

Tallulah was "cutthroat," concludes Simms, who was released in 2003. "That's why the kids called it Little Angola." Cecile Guin, who directs social-service research at Louisiana State University, was the first person to study recidivism within the state's juvenile population. Because Tallulah was so violent, she says, many of its inmates left to commit worse crimes and wound up in adult prisons, like the state's infamous prison farm at Angola. While the state's official statistics show that 45 percent of its released juveniles are re-convicted within five years, Guin estimates that statistics for Tallulah alone would be much more grim -- more in the 90-percent range, she says.

For a decade, says juvenile-justice reformer and state Senator Donald Cravins, a Democrat from the Lafayette area, "Nothing stood out clearer than the atrocities at the facility in Tallulah." Not that the state's other juvenile prisons weren't awful. Mark Soler, president of the Washington, D.C.–based Youth Law Center, recalls touring them in the late 1990s. "Conditions in Louisiana's facilities were really horrible, as bad as any I've seen in 27 years of looking at juvenile facilities," he says.

"In this state," says defense attorney Tom Lorenzi, "when you get involved in a capital case, your client has almost always been through Louisiana's juvenile-prison system." Still, he can't recall one defendant helped by that system. "It made their lives living hells," he says. "They were brutalized and brutalized and brutalized." Seeing this, in case after case, motivated Lorenzi to work for juvenile-system reform as president of the board for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL). It's no coincidence, he says, that the JJPL's founders -- Shannon Wight, Gabriella Celeste, and David Utter -- all did death-penalty work before forming the group in 1997.

Utter made his first trip to Tallulah in April 1998. As a defense attorney and as a prisons litigator for the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, he had toured bleak prisons and jails for years. But, he says, "I had never seen anything like this. It had never occurred to me that we would see young people treated this way. The most shocking thing was the black eyes, broken jaws, hands in casts, bruises, and cuts. On some trips, half of my clients would be injured."

Within a few months, the JJPL filed a civil-rights lawsuit on behalf of 12 youths imprisoned in Tallulah. The U.S. Department of Justice also brought suit under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, making Louisiana the first state it had sued over conditions in juvenile facilities. Around the same time, New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield visited and wrote a front-page story referring to Tallulah as a place "so rife with brutality that many legal experts say it is the worst in the nation."

Still, Tallulah remained open for six more years. But in June 2004, parents, former Tallulah inmates, and key legislators celebrated its last day. Reform leaders made speeches and sang hymns on a lawn across the street from the facility, which provided a backdrop of gleaming razor wire. There, the townspeople of Tallulah unveiled a model of the learning center they'd been working toward for more than a year, which they hope to build on the prison's grounds. If they succeed, it will be the first prison in the United States replaced by a school.

"It was one of the greatest moments of my life," says Cravins, the state senator. "To me, it symbolized that our state was closing an ugly chapter in its history."

* * *
One morning in early June, Robin Brunker pulled on a red T-shirt bearing a logo for FFLIC (Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children) and joined a caravan of other red-shirted parents, grandparents, and children headed toward Louisiana's Capitol in Baton Rouge. There, they testified on behalf of a state Senate bill that they had dubbed one of two "Bring Our Children Home Acts of 2005." The proposed statutes would have closed the state's two large correctional-style facilities for juveniles and shifted their funding to community-based programs.

Brunker told state senators how her 17-year-old son had lost four of his teeth after a guard at the Swanson Correctional Center for Youth in northern Louisiana shoved him into a locker room with another kid and then stood outside the door. Other FFLIC members testified about brutal rapes, attacks, and suicide attempts, all at the two big facilities, all within the previous several months. The bill failed to make it out of committee.

In May, the JJPL had issued a report showing that the facilities' violence was on the rise. At Swanson, the group's monitors found that, on average, two young men per day were hurt due to self-inflicted injuries, fights, and assaults. As a result, some juvenile judges are reluctant to order incarceration. But often there are few alternatives. "Judges' hands are tied," says Utter. "If they have a kid who's a threat to public safety, the only place they can put him is going to hurt him more than help."

Agreed, says Simon Gonsoulin. A former special-education teacher and high-school principal, Gonsoulin landed his first job in the juvenile system courtesy of a federal settlement agreement (he oversaw the state's compliance with the education portion of that agreement). Since taking this job in early 2004, he has met with judges on a regular basis and has heard their concerns -- the same ones that Utter voices -- "constantly and continuously." Gonsoulin promises that many of these issues will be addressed in the Office of Youth Development's five-year strategic plan, which is currently in an information-gathering stage. For most of the summer, Gonsoulin and other juvenile-system administrators have been driving around the state, asking audiences gathered in school gyms and city halls for input on that plan, which will be finalized in October.

In the meantime, the department is addressing concerns one by one through its new family ombudsman, Prince Gray, who was hired in mid-June and immediately given an 800 number of his own. "We want parents and family members to know that their voices are being heard, and we want to make it easier for them to communicate with us," says Gonsoulin.

So far, Gray, a former principal at schools for at-risk kids, has devoted time to every complaint lodged by family or youth. He has, for instance, investigated a few accusations about "children treated roughly" and has ironed out smaller disputes between staff and youth. FFLIC members also met with Gray about a list of specific reforms, including a less stringent visiting-day dress code that won't bar parents from seeing their children if mothers are wearing, for instance, open-toed shoes or sleeveless blouses. Gray says that he found that request and others "reasonable," and that he is currently working to change department policy.

* * *
More than anything else, says Mark Steward, the success of this reform depends on well-trained personnel. He appreciates all the nice furnishings -- the carpet, the wooden furniture, the curtains, and the pillows -- that are rejuvenating the new dorms at Bridge City. But day-to-day decisions will be the real test, he says, "Because a pillow with a mean staff is going to be a weapon."

This past summer, Bridge City's staff went through intensive "human-dignity training." Coaches imported from Missouri spent time at the facility, Steward says, observing staff members at work and asking key questions -- questions such as: "Why did you do that? How could you have handled it differently? Was that treating with dignity and respect or was that punitive?" The intensive work continues until one group is fully trained, because only then can the pilot program expand "group by group by group," says Steward, who learned by trial and error that retraining an entire campus at once doesn't work.

Bridge City was always slotted as the first pilot. But at first, Gonsoulin had talked about closing the two big facilities, Swanson and the Jetson Center for Youth near Baton Rouge, which currently house about 175 kids apiece. Somehow, that plan changed. This summer, Gonsoulin announced that Swanson and Jetson would stay open but be "transformed."

To advocates, that decision defied the tenets of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act, flew in the face of the JJPL's violence tallies, and deviated from the well-documented Missouri model, which relies upon many small-scale, regional facilities. "Big facilities are inherently dangerous and are going to lead to abuses and cannot possibly provide an appropriate atmosphere for children who are locked up," says the Youth Law Center's Mark Soler. The state plans to divide each facility into a day-treatment area and groupings of small cottages, but that won't change a big prison's essential nature, he says. "You can dress it up and put nice paint on it and make it look a little bit different," says Soler. "But a pig is a pig is a pig."

State Senator Cravins says that, without a doubt, he would like to see reform move at a faster pace. But Cravins, the man who for a decade has been the chief legislative critic of Louisiana's juvenile system, confesses that he now finds himself "somewhat optimistic." That's largely because he trusts the people who head up the state's efforts. He calls Gonsoulin "a good guy" and says he has "a tremendous amount of confidence in" Steward.

Steward is also hopeful, although he admits that revamping the two big juvenile prisons is not ideal, especially because those facilities' histories include what he calls "decades of punitive, horrible treatment." But decisions have to be made, he says. "There's the perfect world and there's the realistic world," he explains, "and Louisiana has to figure out what it can afford, how small it can go, and how and when it will regionalize." Transitional steps -- like utilizing the facilities at hand -- are necessary when revamping a system this large. "You cannot flip a switch," says Steward. "It cannot happen overnight." tap

Katy Reckdahl is a news reporter for the New Orleans alternative weekly Gambit. She has been writing about Louisiana's juvenile-justice system since 2001.

Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Katy Reckdahl, "Bayou Betterment", The American Prospect Online, Aug 15, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

Posted by lois at 07:18 PM | Comments (0)

Michigan: State Says Men Can't Guard Female Prisoners

Corrections officers are being pulled from living quarters to curb sexual abuse of prisoners.

By Norman Sinclair and Ronald J. Hansen / The Detroit News

LANSING -- State officials have begun removing male correctional officers from living units in the state's women's prisons, placing Michigan among a handful of states that have such a gender policy.

The Detroit News reported in May that despite reforms the state promised federal officials six years ago, the number of sexual abuse complaints are about the same as a decade ago, when the U.S .Justice Department first said Michigan had a problem.

Pat Caruso, director of the Department of Corrections, told concerned state lawmakers in May that she would not remove the men until a legal challenge to the gender policy was resolved, which could stretch into October. In an interview with The News last week, Caruso said she had moved up the timetable to shift her male employees at Scott Correctional Facility in Plymouth Township to other jobs because there are so few remaining in the inmates' living quarters anyway.

"To do this overnight would put the facilities in turmoil," she said. "We are implementing it in a way we think is least disruptive to the 50,000 prisoners and 18,000 employees," she said.

Even as these changes are carried out, The News has learned that authorities are investigating at least four additional reports of sexual abuse of female inmates this year.

In one case, an inmate produced semen-stained clothing as evidence of an unwanted sexual encounter. In another case, prison officials found sexually suggestive pictures of inmates taken with a camera allegedly smuggled into the prison by a staff member.

These new cases follow Caruso's public declaration in May that the department had long ago reined in the sexual abuse of the 1990s and that sexual abuse in prison is rare.

On Aug. 15, Caruso in a letter froze all personnel moves at all three women's prisons to accommodate the shifting of male officers.

In a second letter sent to all other state prisons, Caruso asked for female volunteers to staff the living quarters at the Scott facility, the Huron Valley Center in Ypsilanti and at Camp Brighton in Chelsea.

She plans to have the last 15 of 44 positions assigned to women only at the Scott facility by Sunday. In the next fiscal year, which begins in October, an academy will begin training women to fill all shift slots at female prisons.

Camp Brighton is expected to be the last facility to adopt the gender policy and the most difficult to implement it because nearly all the jobs include supervising the women's living area, Caruso said.

Deborah Labelle, an Ann Arbor lawyer who is suing Caruso's department over sexual abuse cases, welcomed the moves, but said more reform is needed.

"We're relieved the department is finally removing males from the housing units, but it's clear to me that this alone will not stop the assaults," she said, adding that some abuse cases have involved supervisory staff and other men outside the inmates' living quarters.

Days after Caruso told two legislative committees in May that sexual abuse of female inmates was an old story, a prisoner produced semen-stained shorts to prove what she said was an unwanted encounter with an officer in March.

That guard has been reassigned since a second inmate complained of improper conduct involving him. In that case, an inmate reported in April that he touched her genitals through her cell door.The Michigan State Police are investigating both cases. Caruso said this shows that the department takes such complaints seriously.

While stressing that the complaints are only allegations, Caruso said her staff warns employees daily about avoiding such problems.

"One (case) is too many," she said. "Every day we talk about issues of over familiarity (with prisoners), we talk about contraband. I tell them, 'You will be fired.' We stress that. The union tells them that. We feel strongly about that." The second case also raises another issue that has cost taxpayers in the past: retaliation against those who make a complaint.

Five days after the woman complained about the officer, she received two major misconduct tickets on the same day, one of them involving him. A week later, she said he wrote her a third ticket. Such tickets may be considered by the parole board and can prolong prison stays for inmates.

In June, a 21-year-old prisoner accused a different officer of forcing her to perform a sex act in her cell. She is at least the fourth woman in three years to make a sexual complaint against him. The allegations haven't resulted in criminal charges against the guard.

In a grievance filed with the Corrections Department, she said that in late January or early February, the officer entered her cell and forced her to perform a sex act. Not wanting to endanger her release from prison, she said she did not report it until her parole was approved in June.

Corrections officials said the guard was found guilty of rules violations and disciplined in one of the three earlier cases. He was transferred to a men's prison on Aug. 14 while the State Police investigate the latest complaint.

The three women who filed complaints this year have joined more than 460 current and former prisoners who are suing the state and the Corrections Department, claiming sexual abuse while they were behind bars.

A fourth case under investigation by authorities involves pictures of a 24-year-old inmate in her underwear. The inmate has told investigators that the prison's special activities director took pictures of her and let her take pictures of other prisoners.

Officials only learned of the matter after an officer in the prison's mailroom opened a package for the inmate and found enlargements of pictures taken inside the prison. Prison officials still have not found the camera, raising security concerns at the institution.

In a five-page statement to investigators on June 29, the inmate said the activities director grabbed and kissed her and asked her to pose nude for him. She refused, but did pose in her underwear.

Caruso defended her employees as hard-working professionals who do their jobs faithfully every day. She said both men and women guards have begged her not to reassign the men, but she has no choice because of the agreement entered six years ago with the U.S. Justice Department.

"This is part of the settlement," she said. After widespread complaints, the Justice Department began examining the state's female prisons in 1995. Two years later, and after state officials had vehemently denied there even was a problem, federal authorities sued Michigan over rampant sexual abuse behind bars.

Michigan settled the case in May 1999 by promising several reforms, including removing men from women's living quarters. Prison employees -- including women -- sued to block the state from limiting their job opportunities.

In 2002 a federal judge sided with the employees, but last year the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling.

In June, the employees appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could decide by October whether to hear the case.

http://www.detnews.com/2005/metro/0508/22/A01-288231.htm
additional stories in series at this link.

Posted by lois at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2005

Letter to Editor: Re--"Expensive" MA Jails from Lois Ahrens

August 22, 2005

Editor
Springfield Republican
Springfield, MA

To the Editor:

According to the June 2004 Governor’s Commission on Corrections Reform Report, the average cost of incarcerating someone in Massachusetts is $43,000. And, as you reported the 2004 for the budget for the MA Department of Corrections is $428 million. 73% of the DOC budget goes to salaries. While Steven Kenneway, of the MA Correction Officers Federated Union blames the high cost of prisons on overtime, he fails to mention that without overtime salaries of MA CO’s in 2003, excluding benefits and overtime range from $59,919 to $71,946. Perhaps the number of overtime hours could be reduced if CO’s didn’t receive 52 paid days off per year. Is MA getting its money’s worth? In western MA alone, more than $81 million dollars a year is spent on jailing people who are incarcerated because they can’t make bail and mostly for non-violent drug-related convictions. The $81 million is the cost before the yearly expenses of supporting the proposed controversial jail for women in Chicopee.

Of the close to half a billion dollars the state spends every year to imprison people, only 3% goes to programs ($14.2 million). Since 2001 that is a 43% decrease in programs. 4,000 or 47% of people incarcerated in 2002 did not have a high school diploma or a GED. In that same year, the DOC was able to allocate enough money to enroll only 321 in GED programs. 65% of women who are incarcerated have an open mental health case yet the money for mental health and addiction services decreases yearly. People with little or no formal education and no job training are released from prison in worse shape than when they entered.

The reality is that interest groups such as the Correction Officer Federated Union and others so many others who directly benefit from tax payers largess continue to push for costly punishment over cost-effective rehabilitation. These powerful interests will keep at it, until those of us who pay their salaries and the bills say “NO!”

Lois Ahrens, Director
Real Cost of Prisons Project
Northampton, MA

Posted by lois at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)

MA Jails Expensive

Monday, August 22, 2005
By JO-ANN MORIARTY

WASHINGTON - Massachusetts has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the nation but spends about the national average on its prison system, according to a new report.
"Massachusetts is spending a lot on relatively few people," said Marcia Howard, the author of State Policy Reports, a Washington newsletter affiliated with the National Governors' Association. "You would expect a state with one of the lowest incarceration rate (Massachusetts also has the 13th lowest crime rate) to spend well below the national average compared to other states in terms of the share of its budget."

Her study shows that for every 100,000 people in Massachusetts, the state has 233 inmates. In comparison, Louisiana's rate is 801 people for every 100,000 in population, Mississippi's rate is 768 and Texas incarcerates 702 people for 100,000 in population. Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Nebraska have lower incarceration rates.
The lowest incarceration rate in the country is Maine which incarcerates 149 inmates for every 100,000. Maine spends 2 percent of its budget on the correction system, Massachusetts spends 3.4 percent while the national average is 3.5 percent of state spending. Nebraska, which incarcerates 228 people for every 100,000, spends 2.5 percent on its corrections system.
The national incarceration average is 482 people for every 100,000 in population, based on the latest statistics available at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Texas spends 6.1 percent of its state funds on prisons, Mississippi spends 2.3 percent and Louisiana spends 4.2 percent.
New Hamsphire spends 1.9 percent of its state spending on corrections,, Connecticut - which incarcerates 389 people for every 100,000 in population, spends 2.9 percent; Rhode Island spends 2.6 percent; and Vermont spends 3.3 percent.
Francis Carney, the executive director of the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, said that the rate for Massachusetts is consistent with its history and that of the region.
"Massachusetts has had a longstanding tradition along with other New England states of having low incarceration rates. It is not a new phenomenon," Carney said.
"Judges tend to explore alternatives to incarceration that will hold offenders accountable maybe more so than other states," Carney said.
Howard agreed that the report doesn't hold any surprises.
"It says that Massachusetts is a state with a relatively low crime rate in a region of the country with low crime rates and that it is a state that incarcerates very few people in a region of the country that incarcerates very few people."
"What is out of line with Massachusetts is that it spends as much as a typical state that has both a higher crime rate and a higher incarceration rate," Howard said. "It seems to be spending relatively more."
Diane Wiffin, the spokesperson for the state Department of Corrections, said that 73 percent of the money the state spends on its correctional system goes for staff salaries, 15 percent pay for healthcare costs and the remaining 12 percent is spent on utilities, food, programs and other smaller items.
In fiscal 2004, the Department of Corrections budget was nearly $428 million and of that amount, $310 million was spent on staff, according to the Governor's Commission on Corrections Reform which issued a report last June.

As of June 30, 2004, Massachusetts had 10,365 prisoners in its state prison system compared to 10,511 people 12 months before. That was a 1.7 percent drop in the number of inmates. Nationally there was a 1.6 percent increase in the number of individuals sentenced to state prisons between 2002 and 2003.
In 2003, Massachusetts admitted 2,185 new prisoners into the system while it released 2,302, according to U.S. Department of Justice data.
Steven Kenneway, who heads the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union - which represents about 5,000 members - speculates that the high cost of running the prisons is in part related to a shortage of correctional officers and the overtime pay the state has to pay for that shortage.
And the shortage is getting more severe each month, he said.
"The numbers are staggering," Kenneway said. "DOC (the Department of
Corrections) is hiring but it is trying to play catchup and it is so far behind it is ridiculous."
"It is actually dangerous," Kenneway said.
He said that counselors in treatment settings have been attacked when no correctional officer was present and one correctional officer was stabbed during a night shift when she was doing checks alone.
Kenneway said that one prison will lose through retirement 20 correctional officers this year. He estimated that between last year and by the end of this year 300 correctional officers will leave the system..
He said the system is already 500 down in correction officers compared with four years ago.
The state, he said, is forced to hire people overtime.
"It's burning out my officers and makes for a dangerous situation," Kenneway said. "I place the blame on (Gov) Mitt Romney and the Commissioner of Corrections (Kathleen Denihy) because neither one of them has a clue" on how the correctional system operates.
The state has 17 facilities of which two are maximum security.

©2005 The Republican
© 2005 MassLive.com All Rights Reserved.

Posted by lois at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Telephone Justice Campaign Against MCI

ITHACA JOURNAL
Aug 17, 2005
Prisoners' families seek lower-cost phone calls
By NICK REISMAN
Gannett News Service

ALBANY - Family members of New York prisoners Tuesday appealed the dismissal of a lawsuit that would have reduced the cost of collect phone calls to their incarcerated relatives.
"Stop treating families of prisoners like dollar signs," said Marion Rodriguez, a former inmate who also has an imprisoned relative. "The secret is out. Now it is time to correct this gross system."
Prison inmates are required to call collect at a price of 16 cents per minute plus a $3 surcharge, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, a Manhattan-based nonprofit civil-liberties group. The average phone call from prison last 19 minutes and costs $6- a 630 percent markup from normal phone calls, according to the group. The fee is charged to the person the prisoner calls.

"It is unjust and counterproductive in the desire to maintain families and communities," Ron Daniels, executive director of the group, said at a Capitol news conference. The group has filed a class-action lawsuit against the New York State Department of Corrections on behalf of the families.

The suit was dismissed by a trial-level state court last October ago on the grounds that the statue of limitations has expired based on the 2001 contract renewal with telecom giant MCI.

The advocacy group claims that the high fees place a limitation on the freedom of speech, violate due process, and are bad business practices on the part of MCI and New York.

New York receives about 57 percent of all revenue from phone calls made from inside-state prisons. The state has taken in more than $175 million since the contract with MCI was signed in 1996, the group said. These fees have been used to fund programs for inmates, including medical care. They have also been used to detect criminal activity in prisons by monitoring conversations, the group said.

Reducing the cost of phone calls would mean more contact with family members and help keep families intact - and prisoners out of jail once they're released, according to advocates.

"For many families who can't visit it (phone calls) become a valuable lifeline," said Cecily Coleman of Prison Families of New York.
A spokeswoman for the state agency that runs the prisons, the Department of Correctional Services, declined to comment.

A bill currently before the state Legislature would force the state to reduce the fees and provide a debit card system under which calls could be made.

The Assembly bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry, D-Queens, was passed in June. The senate version, sponsored by Senator Michael Nozzolio, R-54th District, is still in the Crime and Corrections Committee, which Nozzolio chairs. The bill is stuck there because it does not have the majority support of the committee members, according to a Nozzolio spokesman.

There was no indication of when the appeals court, the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court, will hear the advocates' lawsuit.
Cost of a call

Cost of typical 19-minute call for prisoners and others:

Prisoners: $6.04

MCI "net value" plan: 76 cents

Verizon "5-cent package" plan: 95 cents Sprint "7 cents any time " plan: $1.33

Note: the rate applies to calls from prisoners regardless of the location of who they call.

The Empire Journal

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Rates For Prison Phone Calls Challenged In Court
If the courts won't help us, who will?

That's the question being asked by thousands of New York family members who pay a grossly inflated rate to receive a phone call from their loved ones in state prisons. On behalf of these families, the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed an appeal in their case against the New York State Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) and MCI.

The lawsuit, Walton v. NYSDOCS, seeks an order prohibiting the State and MCI from charging exorbitant rates to the family members of prisoners to finance a 57.5% kickback to the state. MCI charges these family members a 630% markup over consumer rates to receive a collect call from their loved ones, the only way possible to speak with them, CCR says.

Albany County State Supreme Court Justice George Ceresia, dismissed the suit last fall, citing issues of timeliness. http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/legal/justice/docs/WaltonAppeal_81705.pdf

"By dismissing the suit, the Supreme Court is effectively dodging its responsibility," said Rachel Meeropol, the attorney handling the case for the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"New York State is siphoning money from those who can least afford it. Gov. Pataki, the Department of Correctional Services, and the State Senate have all chosen to ignore the unfair financial burdens on family members struggling to pay their bills. This appeal for a judicial check on the other branches of government may be their only hope."

Meeropol noted that that the Family Connections bill (A.7231-A/S.5299-A), which would amend the state Corrections Law to provide prisoners with fair-market telephone rates, passed the Assembly in June but the Senate sponsor, Michael Nozzolio (R-Fayette), has yet to move the bill out of his own committee.

"This appeal is so important to me and all the others who are stuck with MCI's outrageous prices. No one should be cut off from their family, just so the state can make a profit. I'm praying the courts won't turn a blind eye to this injustice," said Brooklyn resident and family member Marion Rodriguez, who is also an organizer with the campaign.

Last fall, Judge Ceresia held that the plaintiffs were challenging DOCS' ability to contract with MCI, and should have filed their claim within four months of the April 2001 contract. The appeal asserts that, on the contrary, the appellants' claims were timely because the phone rates have changed since the 2001 contract. The plaintiffs are challenging the current rates, which were not effective until immediately before the suit was filed.

The appellants also argue that because family members of prisoners are billed monthly, their rights are violated on a monthly basis, constituting a new injury that they can sue to correct every month. Indeed, the logical implication of Judge Ceresia's ruling would be that thousands of individuals whose loved ones entered prison after 2001 would have no way to challenge the unjust rates.

CCR says New York's prison system has the highest kickback to the state and among the highest rates in America. They say for a family member to speak with a loved one in a DOCS facility, the prisoner must call collect at 16¢ per minute after a $3 surcharge. The average prison phone call is billed at 19 minutes, costing just over $6 and adding up to monthly phone bills of up to $400. Phone rates in U.S. and New York City facilities are substantially cheaper, CCR says.

"Criminal justice experts all agree that keeping in touch with loved ones makes it easier for prisoners to successfully re-enter society in a healthy, productive way when they are released," said Ron Daniels, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). "This contract is a sneaky way for the State to tax mothers, wives, brothers and children who aren't guilty of anything more than loving a family member. It needs to end"

The New York Campaign for Telephone Justice is working to end the contract between MCI and the New York State Department of Correctional Services. The campaign is a project of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in partnership with Prison Families of New York, Inc. and Prison Families Community Forum. 8-18-05

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

August 20, 2005

Panel on Prison Rape Hears Victims' Chilling Accounts

Why were they incarcerated in the first place!
August 20, 2005
By CAROLYN MARSHALL
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 19 - T. J. Parsell was a lanky pimple-faced adolescent bent on mischief. So when he found a toy gun one evening in 1978 while wandering home from a high school party, he thought nothing of pointing it at a store clerk and grumbling, "Your money or your life."

He got $50 for what he now calls "a stupid impulsive prank." The incident landed the 17-year-old Parsell in an adult jail, where on his first night, an older inmate spiked his drink with Thorazine and sexually abused and raped him.

"While my friends prepared for our high school prom, I was being gang raped," Mr. Parsell testified on Friday to a Congressional commission investigating prison sexual abuse and rape.

Mr. Parsell, now 45, and a successful software executive who lives on Long Island, was one of six victims of prison rape to relate disturbing accounts with a bipartisan panel of The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission here.

"What they took from me went beyond sex," Mr. Parsell said. "They'd stolen my manhood, my identity and part of my soul."

The panel, which also heard from state and federal legislators, law enforcement and prison officials and mental health experts, has been investigating the prevalence, cause and possible solutions to a problem that many experts say has escalated as the prison system is collapsing. Overcrowding, staff shortages and budget cuts have contributed to an often taboo topic.

"As a society, we have an obligation to protect the people we lock up, even though they have harmed society," the commission chairman, Judge Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said. "Some people say inmates get what they deserve. But they don't think about the overall impact on society."

The body, created by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, was appointed by President Bush in June 2004, focusing on questions like inmates' physical and mental problems after being released and economic burdens.

Judge Walton, speaking before the meeting here, the second in a national series, conceded in an interview that the government did not know the magnitude of prison rape.

"We don't really know the prevalence right now," he said. "But I've been in the criminal justice system for 20 years and I have always believed the anecdotal evidence."

On July 31, the Justice Department released its first statistical report on prison rape and inmate sexual abuse, a report also required under the 2003 act. It estimated that there were at least 8,210 reported incidents of sexual abuse and rape a year within a prison population that exceeds 2.1 million.

According to the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, prison assaults rose 26 percent from 2000 to 2004.

Kendell Spruce told the commission that he was infected with H.I.V. after having been raped at knifepoint in 1991 in an Arkansas state prison. Mr. Spruce, who was convicted of forging a check to buy cocaine, said that in one nine-month period he was raped by at least 27 inmates. He was 28 years old and weighed 123 pounds.

"The physical pain was devastating," he said. "But the emotional pain was even worse."

A spokeswoman for the Arkansas Correction Department told The Associated Press that the accusations were untrue that that she believed that Mr. Spruce initiated the activity or was a willing participant. After his five-year term, Mr. Parsell returned to society as an addict of drugs, to "drown out the memories and pain."

He continues to hold back tears as he says he still struggles with the emotional residue of rape, a crime that tarnished his self-esteem and ability to trust.

Chance Martin, 50, an advocate for the homeless here, told the panel that he was incarcerated for 72 hours in April 1973, when he was arrested as an 18-year-old at a party where another guest had hashish. The charges were dropped, but Mr. Martin's three days in jail nearly ruined his life.

"On a purely emotional level," he said after testifying, "I have issues with self-confidence and trust since that day."

Mr. Martin echoed others' statements when he faulted a deteriorating prison system and what he described as a society that is indifferent, and at times disdainful, of people who have been incarcerated.

"Prison rape is a symptom of American society's retreat from rehabilitation toward a system that relies purely on punishment," he said.

The secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Roderick Q. Hickman, told the panel that California was trying to quantify the problem. But he said outdated prison designs, inadequate electronic surveillance systems and an antiquated computer database had stalled progress.

The information technology "system in California is completely inadequate," Mr. Hickman said.

"We need a system that can report and handle the cultural classifications of the population." he added.

Mr. Hickman, appointed last month, said he was working to streamline and centralize procedures to investigate accusations of sexual abuse that were previously handled by individual prisons.

To address guard intransigence, the department has established training programs intended to break what Mr. Hickman called "the code of silence" among guards, behavior that has helped conceal prison rapes.

Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat who was an initial co-sponsor of the 2003 law, equated prison rape with human rights violations. She and other prison rights advocates have stressed the need for "zero tolerance" and a corrections system that accommodates different sexual and cultural orientations.

"By doing nothing," Ms. Lee said, "we condone this inhumane and abusive behavior. Indifference, deliberate or not, violates the Eight Amendment of the Constitution banning cruel and unusual punishment."

In the afternoon, the panel heard criminologists, law enforcement officials and leaders of transgender, lesbian, gay and bisexual groups about the need for better inmate classification.

"We don't want a first-time offender charged with drunken driving to be housed next to a guy who has committed multiple armed robberies, and who has been in and out of the system for years," said Bart Lanni, the sheriff's deputy for Los Angeles County.

Mr. Lanni said misplaced inmates ran an increased risk of being a target of sexual abuse.

"Predators looking to rape someone tend to pick people without close ties or a gang affiliation," Dr. Terry A. Kupers, a psychiatrist and an expert on prison rape, said.

All the victims testifying on Friday said that they might have escaped their rapes if the authorities had placed them with inmates of similar age, race, sexual orientation and the same categories of crime.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

The Trillion Dollar War

August 20, 2005, NY Times
The Trillion-Dollar War
By LINDA BILMES
Cambridge, Mass.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/opinion/20bilmes.html?ex=1125201600&en=863f2c57d4f491a3&ei=5070
for graph go to the link above
THE human cost of the more than 2,000 American military personnel killed and 14,500 wounded so far in Iraq and Afghanistan is all too apparent. But the financial toll is still largely hidden from public view and, like the suffering of those who have lost loved ones, will persist long after the fighting is over.

The cost goes well beyond the more than $250 billion already spent on military operations and reconstruction. Basic running costs of the current conflicts are $6 billion a month - a figure that reflects the Pentagon's unprecedented reliance on expensive private contractors. Other factors keeping costs high include inducements for recruits and for military personnel serving second and third deployments, extra pay for reservists and members of the National Guard, as well as more than $2 billion a year in additional foreign aid to Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and others to reward their cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill for repairing and replacing military hardware is $20 billion a year, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office.

But the biggest long-term costs are disability and health payments for returning troops, which will be incurred even if hostilities were to stop tomorrow. The United States currently pays more than $2 billion in disability claims per year for 159,000 veterans of the 1991 gulf war, even though that conflict lasted only five weeks, with 148 dead and 467 wounded. Even assuming that the 525,000 American troops who have so far served in Iraq and Afghanistan will require treatment only on the same scale as their predecessors from the gulf war, these payments are likely to run at $7 billion a year for the next 45 years.

All of this spending will need to be financed by adding to the federal debt. Extra interest payments will total $200 billion or more even if the borrowing is repaid quickly. Conflict in the Middle East has also played a part in doubling the price of oil from $30 a barrel just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to $60 a barrel today. Each $5 increase in the price of oil reduces our national income by about $17 billion a year.

Even by this simple yardstick, if the American military presence in the region lasts another five years, the total outlay for the war could stretch to more than $1.3 trillion, or $11,300 for every household in the United States.

Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce from 1999 to 2001, teaches budgeting and public finance at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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

AL: "Once Woeful, Alabama Model in Child Welfare"

For folks familiar with what's happening in Alabama, I'd be very curious to what you think about this article.

August 20, 2005
Once Woeful, Alabama Is Model in Child Welfare
By ERIK ECKHOLM
MONTGOMERY, Ala. - As a mother, Stephanie Harris seemed hopeless. She was 29 and a determined crack addict back in 1993, when she was sent to prison for neglecting her six children, including infant twins. The authorities had little choice, she now agrees, but to give custody of her children to relatives.

"It didn't bother me," she recalled in a recent interview. "All I wanted to do was get high."

She served eight months, failed a urine test and went back to prison for a year.

If history were the guide, in Alabama or perhaps any other state, Ms. Harris might never have regained her children, child welfare officials here say. More likely, the children would have been shuffled among relatives and foster homes.

But officials here had, under court supervision, begun a wholesale overhaul of the child protection system to make it more pro-family, and they did not give up on Ms. Harris. Today she is off drugs, has a job and has custody of all but one of her children, whom an aunt is fighting to keep.

Her case illustrates what experts in child welfare say has been one of the country's most sweeping transformations of the handling of neglected and abused children. What by all accounts had been a dysfunctional system in Alabama, scarring too many children by sending them to foster-care oblivion while ignoring others in danger, has over the last 14 years become a widely studied model. But it has not been cheap, and in some ways Alabama has had to be dragged onto its pedestal because of political and philosophical resistance to the reforms and in spite of the state's endemic poverty.

"Alabama set the pace," said Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a private group in Alexandria, Va. "Though they've had some setbacks, I still view Alabama as a national model."

Forced by a legal settlement to make changes after parents and advocates filed a class-action lawsuit charging that the system failed to aid troubled families or protect children from neglect or abuse, Alabama has more than quadrupled its spending on child welfare since 1990, even as it has trimmed other programs in recent years.

One former governor, Fob James, complained about federal interference and questioned whether so much devotion to helping irresponsible parents was leaving children in harm's way. While Mr. James's successors have accepted the changes, they still resent being monitored; in a court brief this month, Attorney General Troy King said that the continuing court supervision defied the principle of "democratic self-rule through officials answerable to the people."

While Alabama's system is far from perfect, local officials and independent experts say, the system now is more likely than before to keep children with their parents, safely, and tries to provide whatever aid might help that happen.

Typical caseloads for social workers have been trimmed to 18 from 50, allowing far more intensive monitoring of families and help. Where reports of neglect or abuse sometimes lay unchecked for months, investigators are now usually on the scene within a day when danger is imminent, and within five days more than 90 percent of the time, officials report.

In what many call the best measure of a system's ability to protect children from abuse - the share of children who are mistreated after intervention by social workers - Alabama has steadily improved its record. In recent years, a second abuse incident within 12 months of the first one occurred in roughly 5 percent of cases, down from about 13 percent in the early 1990's. Studies indicate that the comparable national average is about 11 percent.

And in a recent federal survey of child welfare systems, Alabama was one of only six states found to be "substantially in compliance" with norms for protecting children from neglect or abuse.

"When the lawsuit was filed, we didn't have the services that could keep children at home safely," said Carolyn B. Lapsley, the state's deputy commissioner for children and family services and a veteran social worker. "Now we're very proud; we have changed the system in every single county."

Though Alabama says it has made enough progress that it should be released from court supervision, skeptics question whether the new, labor-intensive practices can be maintained in the face of stringent budgets, high poverty and other social ills, including methamphetamine use, which state officials blame for a recent rise in the number of children removed from homes.

"We do not dispute that the agency has made progress," said James Tucker, a children's advocate and a lawyer in the suit that produced court monitoring.

"However, we believe that their recent efforts have focused more on creating a paper trail that looks like reform than producing the real reforms we seek," Mr. Tucker said, adding that some counties were lagging substantially, for example, in provision of vital family services.

Judge Ira DeMent of Federal District Court in Montgomery ruled in May that the state had not proved it could sustain its gains and declined to end the oversight for now. The state has asked him to reconsider.

When the class-action suit was filed, in 1988, "those who looked at the Alabama system invariably judged it as one of the worst in the country," Mr. Tucker said.

The 1991 settlement committed the state to a series of principles: quick investigations to head off danger, family preservation if possible, wide-ranging services for struggling parents and faster adoption for those requiring it, among others.

Ira Burnim, a lawyer with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington who helped draw up the agreement, said parents were often seen more as threats than as potential partners. And, Mr. Burnim said, "there's a traditional tendency to focus on 'saving' the children but also to see them as damaged goods."

Child-welfare spending that totaled $71 million in 1990, including $47 million in federal money, rose to $285 million in 2004, $179 million of it from the federal government. Some of that came from Medicaid money the state had not previously tapped.

The state hired hundreds of new social workers and thinned caseloads. Workers could now spend more than 10 hours a week in some homes.

Cindy Letson, who lives in the small town of Moulton in the corn and poultry country of northern Alabama, has seen firsthand how the system works.

Her face weathered beyond her 48 years, Ms. Letson described a history of family violence and recalled the day in 2001 when the police took her for psychiatric evaluation.

She returned home within a day cleared of any serious disorder, she said, but was sent for counseling and help in breaking an addiction to antiseizure drugs. Her twin boys had already been removed and were sent to foster parents.

She followed the directives and was allowed to visit her boys for one hour a week. After repeated entreaties she regained custody two years ago, and now lives on welfare with her 7-year-old boys, Kyle and Kenley.

"I was ready to give up, but in the end the system worked," Ms. Letson said.

Elements of Alabama's approach have been adopted by other states. "A lot of the ideas we used came from the Alabama example," said Benjamin Wolf of the Illinois A.C.L.U., who has helped design changes to the system in Illinois, which is also operating under court supervision.

Alabama's method of evaluating its own system - choosing individual cases and closely examining how each was handled - has been adopted by the federal government for its assessment of child-welfare systems in each state, said Olivia A. Golden, a former federal welfare official now with the Urban Institute in Washington. New York City has also adopted the method.

But here, as in every state, there remain lapses. [On Wednesday, a state judge criticized the Jefferson County Department of Human Resources for failing to protect 2-year-old Sean Porter, who suffered severe bruising to his groin last December, two weeks after school officials reported suspicious bruises on his sister, The Birmingham News reported.]

In a report last November, Ivor D. Groves, a welfare expert from Florida who is Alabama's court-appointed monitor, said the state's progress toward the original reform goals had varied by county.

But without question, Mr. Groves said, "the egregious conditions of impossible caseloads and large numbers of uninvestigated" abuse and neglect reports "have been eliminated."

Some Alabama counties show "the best child-welfare practice in the country," Mr. Groves wrote.

Ms. Harris, in Montgomery, has been a beneficiary of Alabama's progress. As she emerged from work-release and a third drug-treatment program in 1995, she showed that she was serious about going straight. So caseworkers, while requiring regular drug tests, helped Ms. Harris rebuild her life and then regain her children.

They paid for years of counseling and helped with expenses like child care, utility bills and, at one point, Christmas presents and shoes for the children.

Ms. Harris has since borne two more children and lives in a subsidized red-brick house in Montgomery with five of her children.

She works the day shift as a carhop and scrambles to provide for her boisterous clan, supplementing her income with Social Security payments for a child needing special education and a father's child support for two of them.

"My social worker was there for me," she said. "I've learned to pay my bills and manage my life."

In June, the child agency finally closed its books on Ms. Harris, satisfied that she could provide a decent home.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2005

Lessons from Tulia--Bryne Grants

Nate Blakeslee
Reporter, Texas Monthly- 8-19-05

The War on Thugs
They were the jump-out boys—masked, black-clad narcs who busted dealers and jailed junkies all over rural Texas. Then came Tulia. Now the state’s drug task forces are fighting for their own survival. And that's a good thing.

AT THE ANNUAL CONVENTION of Texas narcotics officers, held this year in El Paso in August, narcs in search of continuing education were offered seminars with titles like “Hidden Compartments,” “Body Language,” “Risk Management,” and—new for this year—“Narcotraffickers and the Spiritual World,” in which a retired El Paso cop explained how to identify the image of Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of drug dealers, during traffic stops. Next year, conference organizers may have to add another seminar: “How to Find a New Career.” Over the past four years, close to a quarter of all narcs in Texas have been laid off, victims of a severe contraction in the state’s biggest anti-drug bureaucracy. Even more cuts may be on the way, depending on the outcome of a budget fight currently going on in Washington, D.C. The writing on the wall is easy to read: After almost two decades of lavish funding, the drug war is no longer a growth industry in Texas.

More than one hundred people are sent to prison in Texas every day, and one in three is convicted of a drug crime. Until recently, chances were good that the bust was made by a narc from one of the state’s multijurisdictional drug task forces, or DTFs, which handle the lion’s share of drug enforcement in rural and suburban areas. The “jump-out boys,” as they are commonly called, are known for their black tactical uniforms and the masks they sometimes wear during raids. They specialize in “buy busts,” undercover purchases of modest amounts of drugs—usually cocaine or marijuana—from street-level dealers. The money for the task forces comes from a U.S. Department of Justice program known as the Byrne grant, which was hatched in the late eighties, at the height of the drug war. Over a ten-year period, the DTFs grew into Texas’s largest narcotics enforcement effort, accounting for roughly 12,000 arrests every year.

Then came Tulia. In 1999 a Byrne grant—funded narc named Tom Coleman set up dozens of people, most of them black, in the small Panhandle town, allegedly for dealing cocaine. In the four-year legal battle that followed, Coleman was exposed as a liar, and Governor Rick Perry eventually pardoned almost all of his victims. The scandal put the task force program—and the diminished standards of drug enforcement that it had come to represent—in the national spotlight. Coleman had a terrible track record in law enforcement and no previous narcotics experience, yet he was allowed to do undercover work with virtually no controls—no wire, no corroborating officer, no video. But what was most embarrassing about Tulia was how common such irresponsibility and amateurism had become among task forces across the state.

The Tulia fiasco could not have come at a worse time for narcs. After September 11, the Byrne grant was one of many funding streams targeted by a Bush administration looking to free up resources for homeland security. Drastic cuts in Washington in 2003 and 2004, coupled with fears of liability for Tulia-like scandals, have led to a rapid decline in the number of task forces nationwide. Nowhere has this trend been more pronounced than in Texas. By June 2005, more than half of the state’s task forces had dissolved. This year the president has once again proposed cutting the program’s funding, and the mood among narcs nationwide is grim. “There’s not going to be anybody out there in rural or suburban America to work that stuff,” said Ron Brooks, of the National Narcotics Officers’ Associations’ Coalition. “We’ll go back to 1978.”

Critics of the Byrne program say the cuts are long overdue. In 2002 the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, published a paper on the Byrne grant noting that it had made no discernible impact on drug crime. In the Texas Legislature, the main detractors of the program have been an unlikely pair: Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a Democrat from the Valley with strong law-and-order credentials, and Representative Terry Keel, a Republican from the Austin suburbs. Keel, a former sheriff who once served on the board of a drug task force, has advocated ending the program in Texas altogether. It has been an uphill fight. “Let me tell you what the political reality is,” he said. “You’ve got a whole bunch of these brother-in-law types out there running around with ninja suits and sunglasses, cars and guns and cash. That is a valued law enforcement lifestyle for those persons, and there are lots of them. And they tend to turn up the political heat on their local elected officials, including legislators, who they lead to believe that the sky is gonna fall if their job is eliminated.”

LAUNCHED IN 1988, the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program was named in memory of a New York City police officer shot dead by drug dealers that year, when crack and inner-city violence was the hottest story in America. In a ceremony shortly after Byrne’s death, Vice President George H. W. Bush, on a visit to New York in the last stages of his bitter presidential race against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, held the dead officer’s badge in his hand and challenged Dukakis to come out in support of a bill before Congress that would allow the death penalty for high-volume drug dealers. For months Bush had been hammering away at his opponent for being soft on crime, and the Democrats, who then controlled Congress, took up the gauntlet. The result was the Anti—Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which was passed into law just before the election with shamefully little debate. “It is the declared policy of the United States to create a drug free America by 1995,” the preamble read. As preposterous as that language sounds in retrospect, by creating the Byrne grant, the bill did in fact have a drastic impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, though not in the way most members of Congress had envisioned.

By the late nineties, the Byrne task force program had been eclipsed by better-funded and more-publicized endeavors, such as crop eradication in Colombia and interdiction along the nation’s borders. Yet the Byrne money never stopped flowing, and the task forces quietly flourished. There were more than eight hundred at the beginning of 2003, employing between 5,000 to 7,000 narcs. (The Justice Department does not know the exact number.) For comparison, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the nation’s premier anti-drug bureaucracy, has about 5,300 agents. In a relatively short span of time, the Byrne grant, an ambitious experiment conceived in the heat of a political campaign, created an entirely new tier of law enforcement nationwide.

In Texas, drug enforcement outside the major cities was traditionally handled by the Department of Public Safety, which has maintained a narcotics unit since the early seventies. But DPS Narcotics was bypassed entirely when Texas established its first Byrne grant task forces, which were administered by the Texas Narcotics Control Program (TNCP), a new entity created inside the governor’s office. This was no accident: Byrne money was seen from the beginning as a form of pork, a valuable way for the governor to seek favor with rural and suburban voters. By federal standards, the amount of money involved was modest; in the late nineties roughly $500 million per year in Byrne money was allocated nationwide, a little less than half of which was spent on drug task forces. (Though Texas spends almost all of its Byrne funding on task forces, the money can also be used for a variety of other law enforcement purposes, including drug treatment programs.) In cash-strapped rural Texas, the Byrne money was a gold mine. Many rural sheriff’s deputies and police officers earn less than $20,000 per year and are forced to moonlight at second jobs. Some even qualify for food stamps. Turnover is very high.

The governor’s office was flooded with applications for the new source of funds. Ambitious sheriffs and district attorneys vied with one another to recruit neighboring counties into their new outfits. The program required the task forces to come up with matching funds equal to one quarter of the total budget; federal grant money, passed through the TNCP, covered the remaining three quarters. The more counties a task force project director could sign up, the more sources of matching funds he had access to and the bigger the potential grant from Washington. The program received a huge boost in 1989, when the Texas Legislature allowed law enforcement agencies to keep cash and other assets they recovered in the course of their operations, providing an alternate source of revenue for the all-important cash match. By the late nineties, almost every county in the state was in a task force, and task force narcs outnumbered DPS narcs almost three to one.

The jump-out boys were not like state police narcs. The DPS has always prided itself on its professionalism. Applicants must pass written, physical, and psychological tests, and officers are relatively well compensated. An assignment to the narcotics division is a highly sought-after promotion and carries a certain prestige. For task force agents, by contrast, the trip from patrol deputy in a one-stoplight town to undercover narc might involve a single two-week training course. As a result, the standards of narcotics enforcement across the state gradually eroded.

“These narcotics task forces are the antithesis of every good law enforcement management technique,” said Representative Keel. “The officers in the narcotics task forces do not have a chain of command that watches them carefully. They are left undercover and loosely supervised in some cases. They have unbridled discretion often on their interdiction decisions, and they deal with large amounts of cash. Now all of that is a formula for disaster.”

Because the task forces often operate in rural areas, far from major media markets, stories of malfeasance tend to stay beneath the radar. Read enough clips from small-town papers, however, and a pattern begins to emerge. Rogue officers, missing drugs, stolen cash, fabricated cases, failed drug tests: Every small town in Texas seems to have a story of corruption involving the jump-out boys. “People don’t understand,” said Barbara Markham, a task-force-narc-turned-whistle-blower, in the wake of the Tulia scandal. “Everybody’s talking about Tom Coleman. Well, there are whole task forces of Tom Colemans out there.”

In April 2001 the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it had found “another Tulia” in the Central Texas town of Hearne, where dozens of indictments were dismissed after a task force snitch admitted to fabricating cases. Attorneys from the national ACLU’s Drug Policy Litigation Project filed suit, making Hearne, and Byrne grant—funded task forces generally, one of their top priorities. As in Tulia, the defendants in Hearne were almost all black, and the cases were mostly for delivery of cocaine. The informant was a young black man with a history of drug abuse and mental illness. The local district attorney, who was also the head of the task force, was warned by his own polygraph examiner that the man was dishonest. But he pressed ahead with the prosecutions, until the snitch’s poor performance on the stand in the first case resulted in a mistrial. The snitch later claimed that task force officers coerced him into fabricating cases. Before the scandal broke, the district attorney abruptly resigned from the task force; later, the commander and several agents left as well. The eventual settlement of the ACLU suit in Hearne this past May, like the multimillion-dollar settlement in Tulia the year before, set the precedent that all counties and municipalities belonging to a task force would be financially liable for misdeeds perpetrated by task force officers, regardless of where they took place and who actually hired the officer in question. That got the attention of rural commissioner’s courts—and their insurance carriers—across Texas, hastening the statewide exodus from the program.

IN TEXAS, AS IN MANY STATES, the scramble for Byrne money is a competitive, zero-sum game: One task force’s funding increase is another’s loss. The TNCP developed a complex system of rating the relative success of the various outfits, weighing such indicators as number of cases opened, buys made, suspects arrested, drugs confiscated, and assets forfeited. In 1999, for example, thanks in large measure to Coleman’s bust in Tulia, the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force was the top-ranked task force in the state.

This statistics-driven model of law enforcement has meant a dramatic increase in drug arrests. Not surprisingly, the growth of the task force system in Texas has also coincided with a massive acceleration in prison construction. In what amounted to the largest public-works project in modern Texas history, the state more than tripled its prison capacity—from 40,000 to 150,000 beds—in just ten years. (Texas now has more inmates than California, even though Texas has 40 percent fewer people. Only Louisiana and Mississippi incarcerate a greater percentage of their populations.) There were many factors driving this expansion, including stricter parole guidelines and overcrowding lawsuits, but the task forces were central by any reckoning. According to civil rights advocates like Texas ACLU executive director Will Harrell, the emphasis on statistics has overshadowed more-pressing questions. “Nobody is looking at quality control. We’re simply looking for quantity,” he said. “That’s what the drug war is about: How many people have you arrested and locked up today?”

A focus on street-level buys more often than not means targeting black suspects, which helps explain a couple of striking statistics in Texas. African Americans account for 12 percent of the state’s population but 40 percent of prison inmates. On any given day, roughly one in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is in jail, on probation, or on parole. “It’s just too easy. They never go up the chain,” defense attorney Walter Fontenot, of Liberty, a small town in East Texas, said of the task forces. “If you dig into this stuff, you will find that most people are black, most people are poor, and they just cop out and get probation. A couple of years later the probation is revoked, because they go back to the same thing because that’s all they know,” he said. “It’s all about numbers,” said Anahuac defense attorney Ed Lieck, who has battled his local drug task force for years. “More numbers means more money.”

In 2002 Governor Perry announced that he was assigning supervision of the state’s Byrne grant drug task forces to the DPS. The transition has been a bumpy one. When DPS Narcotics captains made preliminary visits to their new charges, they discovered many of them in disarray. At one outfit in the San Antonio area, for example, evidence was missing from 20 percent of the unit’s case files, forfeiture cash was not properly accounted for, and commanders had “little contact or supervisory control” over some of their agents.

The DPS crafted new rules for the task forces, bringing them more in line with established policy for state police narcs. The use of masks in the serving of arrest warrants was banned, and procedures for control of evidence and use of confidential informants were tightened. Some task forces refused to accept the new command structure and chose to shut down rather than change their ways. A few announced that they would forgo Byrne grant money to avoid DPS oversight. These “renegade” operations subsisted for a couple of years on their own asset forfeiture accounts—some had accumulated huge hoards prior to the takeover—until this summer, when the Legislature finally forced them to comply with DPS supervision or fold altogether.

THE TASK FORCE PROGRAM has been on the ropes before; President Bill Clinton tried unsuccessfully to pare the Byrne grant down in 1994. But this time might be different. It has always been politically easier for Republicans to cut law enforcement programs, and violent crime is now at a thirty-year low. Last February, in testimony before Congress, even national drug czar John Walters said it was time to focus attention higher up the supply chain. “Otherwise, you are chasing primarily small people,” he said, “putting them in jail, year after year, generation after generation.”

For those who have become addicted to the annual grants, however, keeping the Byrne program alive has become an end in itself. Sensing the shift in the prevailing winds in Washington, task force directors have lately begun including “homeland security goals” in their grant applications, struggling to make a connection between combating drug abuse and fighting Al Qaeda. (The Waco-area task force, for its part, announced that it would be providing some unsolicited extra security for the Bush ranch in Crawford.)

“I’ve been doing this for ten years, and law enforcement is about money,” said Lieck, the Anahuac defense attorney. “Anybody who tells you different is lying.” After seventeen years, some veterans of the task force experiment in Texas are not shy about this fact. A former prosecutor affiliated with a Denton-based task force freely admitted that he offered lighter sentences to suspects who agreed not to fight forfeiture of cars, cash, or other items of value confiscated during drug investigations. “If we don’t have enough money by the end of the grant year, we’re all out of a job,” he told the Dallas Morning News in 2003. His candid remarks earned the ire of the task force’s director, Denton County sheriff Weldon Lucas. There’s no need to be embarrassed now, however: Late last year, the task force folded.

Adapted from Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, by Nate Blakeslee. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Book Group (perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.

Posted by lois at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times: "A Whiff of 'Reefer Madness' in U.S. Drug Policy

August 16, 2005
By SALLY SATEL, M.D.
Patients arrive broke, busted or abandoned at our methadone clinic in a raw section of Northeast Washington. They are opiate addicts, primarily dependent on heroin, though some take vast doses of street-bought painkillers like OxyContin.

Drinking the pink methadone solution every day prevents withdrawal sickness.

About half of our patients have also spent years on crack or alcohol. Not all have stopped, but at least they have cut back. We see almost no methamphetamine users, but that is a simple accident of geography - the corrosive drug hasn't yet reached epidemic proportions in this part of the country.

The personal ravages of hard-core addiction are enormous, and they translate into vast social costs - crime, violence, incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, hepatitis C, H.I.V./AIDS.

Such an immense burden makes me wonder about the wisdom of federal priorities.

Why is marijuana, of all drugs, the main target of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy?

Answer: the gateway theory of addiction. Start with marijuana, the idea is, and progress to methamphetamine or heroin or cocaine.

To me, the "gateway" assumption, which took root in the 1950's, has a nostalgic, "Reefer Madness" feel. But it is still driving federal policy. The drug czar's office made that clear last month in response to a call from the National Association of Counties "to put the same kind of emphasis on methamphetamine abuse as they have on marijuana." The association had just announced that its 500 members were reeling from methamphetamine-related crime, incarceration and child-neglect.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy defended its prioritization. Addressing "early marijuana use is an effective way of heading off and preventing subsequent movement into other drug use," said a spokesman for the drug czar on National Public Radio.

Is this true? Is the gateway argument a valid justification for marijuana policy?

No reasonable person disputes that most users of cocaine and heroin have smoked marijuana earlier in life. Likewise, the more frequently people consume marijuana the more likely they are to try hard drugs.

But what is the nature of the linkage? Is it actual cause and effect, as the drug czar's office implied, or a correlation based on a common factor that predisposes youth to drug use in general? And how frequently do we observe such a progression?

One theory is that teenagers who smoke marijuana without incident are emboldened by the experience to try other more risky and exotic drugs. And perhaps buying marijuana brings them in contact with dealers of stronger drugs.

Or possibly cocaine and heroin abusers would have developed their drug problems no matter what. As RAND researchers reported in a 2002 article, "Reassessing the Marijuana Gateway Effect," "Marijuana use precedes hard drug use simply because opportunities to use marijuana come earlier in life than opportunities to use hard drugs."

A relatively newer theory suggests that marijuana sets up the user's brain to be more receptive to harder drugs. A much-publicized 1997 study from the Scripps Research Institute reported that cannabis activates the same reward circuitry in the brain as cocaine, heroin, tobacco and alcohol. But this has dubious relevance to future addiction. After all, almost any normal pleasurable activity, like eating or sex, also stimulates those pathways.

In any event, a brain activation effect couldn't be too powerful, as most casual marijuana smokers do not graduate to the abuse of hard drugs. Only about 3 percent of monthly cannabis users go on to try a hard drug in the same year, according to data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. And roughly one-fifth of those who try cocaine eventually become addicted; perhaps one-third of heroin experimenters do.

Social scientists have found that adolescents who progress to hard drugs are already quite troubled to begin with. Truancy, failing in school, fighting, stealing and drinking often come before heroin or cocaine involvement. Marijuana use before age 15 is also a red flag indicating psychological turmoil and social instability.

By contrast, older teenagers who experiment with marijuana generally function as well as nonusers with respect to school and mental well-being.

These observations are consistent with my own clinical experience.

As staff psychiatrist for the clinic, I have taken over 500 detailed histories of adults with opiate addictions. Marijuana was the least of their problems when they were young. More often, they were staggering under the weight of a chaotic home life and had dropped out school, committed petty crimes and battled depression. These problems, not marijuana, led them to hard drugs.

Efforts to prevent new generations of addicts are noble, but they should be rational too. It's hard to say whether any one policy a drug czar could devise would have derailed the early trajectories of my patients' lives. But it is clear that such a large investment in the gateway theory has been of little help.

Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of "One Nation Under Therapy."

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Posted by lois at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

Race Gap Persists in Health Care--African Americans Get Fewer Tests, Less Therapy and Medicine

Race Gap Persists In Health Care, Three Studies Say
Blacks Get Fewer Tests, Less Therapy and Medicine

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 18, 2005; A01

Black Americans still get far fewer operations, tests, medications and other life-saving treatments than whites, despite years of efforts to erase racial disparities in health care and help African Americans live equally long and healthy lives, according to three major studies being published today.

Blacks' health care has started to catch up to whites' in some ways, but blacks remain much less likely to undergo heart bypasses, appendectomies and other common procedures. They receive fewer mammograms and basic tests and drugs for heart disease and diabetes, and they have fallen even further behind whites in controlling those two major killers, according to the first attempts to measure the last decade's efforts to improve equality of care.

Together, the research paints a discouraging picture of the nation's progress in closing the gap for one of the fundamental factors that affect well-being -- health care -- during a period when blacks have made progress in areas such as income and education.

"We have known for 20 years that we have a problem in our health care system: that blacks and whites do not receive equal care. We had hoped all the attention paid to this topic would result in some improvement. What we found is we have not made much progress," said Ashish K. Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led one of the studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This should be a call to action to make the changes needed to make sure people get equal care."

Despite the sobering findings, experts said they were encouraged that some care did improve for blacks when the government put pressure on health plans and doctors by requiring them to report whether they were meeting certain minimum standards.

Past studies have found that blacks and other racial minorities are much less likely than whites to receive many types of medical care. They are significantly more prone to illness, tend to experience more complications and take longer to recover when they get sick. They are more likely to succumb to their illnesses and generally die younger. Major medical organizations; local, state and federal health agencies; and private foundations have focused more on the problem in the past decade, launching a host of studies, programs and initiatives to try to close the gap.

In evaluating those efforts, the new studies examined only blacks, because reliable national data were unavailable for other minorities.

"These persistent disparities are saying that systematically, based on an individual's skin color, Americans are still treated very differently by our health care system," said David Williams of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "This is clearly unacceptable, given the values of our society. It's wrong both on a moral dimension and on a very practical dimension of ensuring life and the pursuit of happiness."

The cause of the persistent disparities has been the focus of intense research and debate. Blacks and other minorities tend to be poorer and less educated, which accounts for some of the differences. Some experts argue that blacks also tend to live in places where doctors and hospitals provide inferior care. Others suspect that cultural, or even biological, differences may also play a role. The most intense debate has centered on whether subtle racism pervades the health care system.

"There are clearly large gaps in the quality and quantity of care of African Americans relative to whites. But these papers cannot be used to argue that this is a result of discrimination," said Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University. "It could be that whites are getting way too much care than they should be getting."

The only hint of a cause offered by the new studies was the finding that gains tended to occur for the simplest care -- such as prescribing drugs -- and gaps tended to widen for more complex treatment.

In the first study, Jha and his colleagues analyzed data collected on all 30 million patients enrolled in Medicare each year from 1992 to 2001, examining how often they got nine of the most common surgical procedures.

By 2001, the researchers found, the gap between whites and blacks had narrowed only for one operation for each sex: the repair of abdominal aortic aneurysm among men and angioplasties for women -- a disparity that disappeared entirely. But the gap failed to narrow for heart bypasses and valve replacements, and it increased for back surgeries, stroke-preventing procedures called carotid endarterectomies, hip replacements, knee replacements and appendectomies.

"These are procedures that have significant consequences on peoples' well-being and lives," Jha said. "The fact that blacks receive significantly fewer of these procedures is having a significant impact on their quality of life and longevity of black Americans."

When the researchers examined whether the gaps had narrowed in particular regions, they found that no place had significantly equalized care for blacks for three procedures: bypass surgery, endarterectomy and hip replacement. In the Washington area, the gap widened slightly for all three, with blacks on average 50 to 70 percent less likely to get the operations.

"The size of the differences between whites and blacks is really distressing, and the fact that we see no progress happening anywhere across the country is really distressing," Jha said.

I n the second study, Viola Vaccarino of Emory University and colleagues studied the records of 598,911 patients treated for heart attacks at 658 hospitals from 1994 to 2002. Blacks remained much less likely than whites to get basic diagnostic tests known as angiographies, as well as drugs or procedures to reopen clogged arteries, such as angioplasties. Women were also less likely to get appropriate care than men, with black women receiving the worst care of any group, the researchers found.

In the third study, Amal N. Trivedi of Harvard Medical School and colleagues analyzed data on 1.5 million Medicare patients in 183 managed care plans from 1997 to 2003, examining whether women had mammograms, and whether heart disease and diabetes patients got basic tests and treatments.

The quality of care overall improved significantly for both blacks and whites, with blacks narrowing the gap with whites on seven of nine measures; on five measures, the difference fell to less than two percentage points. But the gap failed to disappear entirely in any category and widened for two, with fewer diabetic blacks having their blood sugar controlled properly and fewer black heart patients lowering their cholesterol.

"There's no measure where the performance for blacks is higher than for whites or even equal," Trivedi said. "Clearly, there's a lot more work that needs to be done."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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

Meth Mythology: "One Hit of Meth Enough to Cause 'New Defects'""

August 17, 2005

Guest Commentary
By Barry Lester, Ph.D.

Recently (July 27, 2005), Medical News Today (MNT) carried a story with the alarming title, "Single prenatal dose of meth causes birth defects." Join Together, a prominent website, published a summary of the story with a similar headline and opening with the possibly more inflammatory, "Pregnant women who use methamphetamine even once put their unborn children at risk of birth defects" (July 29, 2005). These headlines misleadingly imply that the research involved women when it actually involved mice, and both the original story and the Join Together summary failed to mention that this animal research may have little if any bearing on the health outcome of humans prenatally exposed to methamphetamines.

Moreover, such reports distort our understanding of the contributions animal research can make, and can result in social policy that is not an accurate representation of what we know about how drug use during pregnancy affects children.

Animal research has always been critical for understanding human problems, in part because we can do some kinds of research with animals that we cannot do with humans. But there are also limits to applying animal findings to humans.

This is one of the lessons we learned from the hype that surrounded the media-created "crack baby" of the 1980s. The media was quick to report early animal studies suggesting that prenatal exposure to cocaine caused serious and irreversible defects in children. The first round of human studies also predicted dire consequences. But these studies were preliminary and flawed. The results of larger, well-controlled studies failed to find any of the serious defects or malformations shown by the early animal studies or human studies. The effects of cocaine were found to be far more subtle than originally anticipated.

Nevertheless, in response to this alarmist reporting, our nation became very angry with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and wanted them punished for harming their unborn child. Mothers were prosecuted instead of being offered treatment, and record numbers of children were removed from their biological mothers overburdening an already overburden foster-care system. Sadly, science was used to justify punitive social policy.

Unfortunately, the MNT story suggests that we are on the verge of repeating the mistakes of the 1980s with regard to prenatal exposure to methamphetamines. The actual title of the study discussed in MNT is "Methamphetamine-enhanced embryonic oxidative DNA damage and neurodevelopmental deficits." In this study, researchers from the University of Toronto injected methamphetamine directly into the membrane
(peritoneum) that covers the reproductive and gastrointestinal organs in pregnant mice. The mice offspring that were produced after this direct exposure had poor motor coordination.

But what does this kind of animal research tell us about human babies? That question was addressed in March 2005 by a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expert panel reviewing the literature on methamphetamine. They concluded that this kind of mouse study -- that uses direct injection into the peritoneum -- is not relevant to humans because pregnant women don't inject the drugs they are dependent upon into the peritoneum -- the membrane that surrounds the fetuses they are carrying.

Does that mean that this kind of research has no value? Of course not. Rather than trying to replicate human conditions, animal researchers are trying to understand the mechanism of how drugs work. So, for example, the University of Toronto investigators have now added a potentially important piece to the methamphetamine puzzle -- that because the developing fetus hasn't developed certain enzymes, it may be more vulnerable to DNA damage. Their choice of method for delivering the drug directly into the peritoneum was not based on what humans do, it was based on the method that they felt was most appropriate to test their hypothesis. The problem comes in the extrapolation of these findings to humans, and especially the leap by the media to pregnant women and birth defects in children.

Part of the problem in this case may be the University of Toronto public-affairs office. They prepared a press release claiming: "One shot of crystal meth enough to cause birth defects." And in case anyone missed the implication that this was about humans, the first sentence of the press release talks about long term neurodevelopmental problems in "babies." MNT then ran with it, re-printing the press release as if it were an actual news story. MNT offered no words of caution, failing to acknowledge limitations of the study. Join Together, as well as numerous other websites, then picked up MNT's misleading story, giving it even wider play. The problem, however, is not the limitations of the study, nor the media alone. The bottom line is that we are all responsible -- the scientific community, policymakers, healthcare professionals, child welfare, and the legal and judicial communities -- for ensuring that public health and welfare polices are based on relevant research evidence, not press releases.

Research on the effects of prenatal exposure to methamphetamine in humans is just beginning. As with the early cocaine research, there is a body of animal studies that are finding some defects. And there are a few anecdotal reports and small, uncontrolled human studies that also report deficits in children prenatally exposed to methamphetamine. Fortunately, there is a major longitudinal multisite study underway funded by the NIH National Institute of Drug Abuse.

As a result, we will eventually have some answers. But until then, we need to prevent another "rush to judgment" in which children are labeled and stigmatized and families are destroyed based on pseudoscience. We made this mistake once already. Lets not make it again. Please.

Editor's Note: Join Together appreciates and agrees with Dr. Lester's criticism of our news summary, and we have corrected the story on our website.

Dr. Lester is Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and Director of the Brown University Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Brown Medical School and Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, R.I.
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Visit http://www.jointogether.org for complete news and funding coverage, resources and advocacy tools to advance effective drug and alcohol policy, prevention and treatment.

Posted by lois at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

AZ: Inmates Might do Chores at Schools

How absurd is it that these same people if they wanted jobs working at schools after being released from prison couldn't get the jobs they are currently doing because they were incarcerated.

And...another comment..."Does it strike anyone else as particularly ludicrous that AZ taxpayers arepaying thousands of dollars per year per person to warehouse people in astate prison who are considered non-threatening enuf to work on the groundsof elementary and secondary schools (e.g. Conchise County) ?"

http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/89056.php
Inmates might do chores at schools
Sunnyside considers them for upkeep, grounds work
By Jeff Commings
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

The Sunnyside Unified School District is considering using state prisoninmates for maintenance and groundskeeping work on district property.

Schools in Cochise County have been using inmate labor for several yearswithout incident, but Sunnyside community members who heard about the planfor the first time Tuesday are divided on the issue.

Some were upset that the district governing board would consider bringingconvicts of any kind within sight of students. Others believed the programwould give the inmates a career boost and the district a financial break.Many were hesitant to judge the board's proposal until they heard from theboard itself.

The board plans to present its proposal to the public at a special meetingTuesday. The meeting will be at 5 p.m. in the Fred T. Bull AdministrationBuilding, 2238 E. Ginter Road.

The inmates would come from the state's Wilmot prison, according to a
statement released by the district. The inmates are described in the releaseas low-risk Level 1 inmates who have committed nonviolent crimes and have nosex-related offenses.

Bart Graves, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Corrections, saidLevel 1 inmates include those who have committed drug-related or property crimes.

The inmates, who would be supervised while on district property by prisonguards and employees of the district's maintenance departments, would domost of their work away from schools, said Sunnyside spokeswoman MoniqueSoria. Jobs would include washing buses and handling repair orders that cometo the district's warehouse.

On the weekends, Soria said, the inmates would mow lawns on school propertyor perform other groundskeeping tasks.

That didn't sit well with Becky Quintero, the parent of three former Sunnyside students.

"I don't think they should be around the schools, on the weekends or suchjust because there are kids around," she said. "I have my doubts aboutthis."

But Marty Cortez, a former principal at Santa Clara Elementary School, saidthe program could be beneficial for the school district and the inmates whocould pick up job skills along the way.

"I wouldn't feel uneasy about it in the sense that they're going to gettrustworthy (inmates) there, following the rules and doing what they'resupposed to do," Cortez said. "They're not going to have anybody that'sgoing to be a threat to children or threatening property."

Many people saw the proposal as an attempt by the district to relieve somebudget constraints. If the program is approved, the district would pay just50 cents per hour per inmate.

"I think it's taking away jobs from people who live around the school,
people who can really do the job, have a background check and are safe towork around kids," said Quintero.

The inmate-labor program has been a success in other parts of the state,though no other school district in Tucson says it plans to use it.

In the Bisbee Unified School District, the program has run without incidentfor more than 13 years, said Superintendent Paul McDonald.
The inmates there do work on school grounds during school hours, he said,often with students and faculty members around.
"I wasn't used to it at first, but I'm used to them being around," saidMcDonald, in his third year as superintendent. "Our community has beenpretty used to them being on campus."

Many Sunnyside parents prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes tohaving an inmate, Level 1 or otherwise, on school grounds when children arepresent.

They note that students are often present on weekends for sports practice,tutoring sessions or work in the administration office.

"It's too tempting (for inmates)," said Quintero.

As the board prepares to address the community, school district resident JimMiller offers this advice: "As long as they look to make sure they don'tpose a problem, that'd be OK."

? Reporter Alexis Huicochea contributed to this story. ? Contact reporter
Jeff Commings at 573-4191 or jcommings@azstarnet.com.

Posted by lois at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

Iraq: Number of "detainees" grows form 5400 in 9-05 to 10,800 today

Battalion to secure Iraq prison population

ROBERT BURNS, Associated Press
Posted on Wed, Aug. 17, 2005 http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/12406892.htm

WASHINGTON - The 82nd Airborne Division is sending about 700 soldiers to Iraq to provide extra security for detainees, whose numbers have doubled over the past year, officials said Wednesday.

The 1st battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, based at Fort
Bragg, N.C., has begun preparing to deploy over the next two months. It will be the battalion's second tour in Iraq; the first was from
September 2003 to April 2004. Before that the battalion was in
Afghanistan from July 2002 to January 2003.

An announcement at Fort Bragg on Monday gave no information about the
battalion's new mission in Iraq, but Pentagon officials said Wednesday that the soldiers are needed to augment security for detainee operations. Spokesman Bryan Whitman said the deployment does not indicate any decision has been made to increase U.S. forces in Iraq this fall to provide security for planned voting in October and December.

Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said the 700 soldiers would be prepared to perform a range of duties related to detainee operations, including prison guard duty and providing defensive security around a prison compound.

There currently are three main detention centers in Iraq - Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper. Another, called Fort Suse, is being built to accommodate a prisoner population that has expanded rapidly as more suspected insurgents are captured. Fort Suse is on the site of a
Russian-built former Iraqi military barracks near the northern cityof
Sulaymaniyah.

Venable said the number of detainees in Iraq has grown from 5,400 in
September 2004 to about 10,800 today.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last month he wants the Iraqi government to move toward assuming full responsibility for detainee security and control.

ON THE NET
82nd Airborne Division: http://www.bragg.army.mil/www-82DV/
Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

Posted by lois at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

CT: Summer Sweeps Swamp Jails

Journal Enquirer
Wednesday 17 August, 2005
Summer sweeps swamp jails
By Max Heuer, Journal Inquirer

Summer sweeps by law-enforcement agencies coupled with a shortage of alternatives to prison have left state Correction Department officials with overcrowded facilities yet again, raising concern among prison guards about their ability to monitor for suicidal inmates, according to union and state officials.

"We've dealt with the crowding before," Wayne Meyers, president of the AFSCME Local 1565, which represents prison guards at pretrial detention facilities in the state, said Monday. "But as we move into these "county jails' and we really put the emphasis on suicide prevention by making more tours ... to have this many people above what the count should be, it makes it hard."

Meyers said that, for the first time this year, state officials were forced last week to accommodate a rising prisoner population by housing them in gymnasiums and on floors at pretrial detention centers around the state, exacerbating already grave concerns about inmate suicides.

There have been five suicides by inmates at state facilities so far this year and nine last year, Correction Department spokesman Edward Ramsey said.

He said the department had averaged about four suicides a year in the past. The majority of those deaths happen in pretrial detention centers, Meyers said.

"It increases the workload," Meyers said. "I worry about the suicide" issue, "and the agency's worried about it."

But, Ramsey said, data show that the dormitory housing doesn't increase the risk of an inmate committing suicide.

"The department never compromises safety and security," Ramsey said today.

Inmates back on floors

On Friday, there were 100 inmates sleeping on the floor in plastic beds at New Haven Correctional Center, 60 in similar living conditions at both Bridgeport Correctional Center and the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center in Montville and 40 such prisoners at Hartford Correctional Center, Meyers said.

And, as of Monday, a total of 18,337 people, including 4,342 unsentenced, or pretrial, inmates, were incarcerated in state prisons, Ramsey said. That means that since July 1, when there were 4,222 inmates awaiting sentencing, the state's pretrial inmate population has grown by 122 people, or roughly 3 percent, according to a Journal Inquirer analysis of Correction Department statistics.

Those figures include prisoners facing federal charges who are being kept in state prison in pretrial detention.

Biggest sustained increase

The overall 336-person increase from Jan. 1, according to Correction Department statistics, and 187-person increase since July 1 is the biggest sustained increase in the inmate population since January 2003, when the prison population began declining from its high-water mark of 19,589.

Last year, the total inmate population saw a modest rise in the same six-month period, changing from 18,523 in January 2004 to 18,583 in July 2004. But by Jan. 1, 2005, the population had plummeted to 18,001. The dive in prisoners was the first decrease since 1994, when there were 14,125 inmates behind bars.

In March 2004, state prison officials said all but two of the hundreds of inmates who were previously in "nontraditional" housing had been moved into traditional housing, but Meyers' and other officials' statements Monday underscored changing conditions which have led to a return to the practice.

Correction Commissioner Theresa Lantz said in a 2004 newsletter that she hoped her department would never return to housing inmates on floors -- or in "nontraditional" confines, as the state officials have termed it. She could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Connecticut is one of just six states in the country that operates pretrial detention centers -- otherwise known as "county jails" - through its state Correction Department, Ramsey said. Most other states operate those facilities through county or local governments.

More beds needed

Meyers said the development represents something of an "anomaly," as beds sit empty in other facilities designed for sentenced inmates.

"With all the people we've been pushing out," he said, "all of a sudden we've got this spike."

In the past, the state shipped 500 sentenced prisoners to Virginia, but Connecticut was able to bring those prisoners back here as its prisoner population was reduced, Lantz said in March.

Moreover, Meyers said, easing the overflow of pretrial inmates this year can be done by reopening instate facilities for sentenced prisoners.

Meyers said Correction Department officials reopened the Trumbull building at Gates Correctional Institution on Monday to transfer sentenced inmates out of pretrial detention centers and free up beds. He said the measure should make about 100 beds available, and he hoped the department would continue to take similar measures.

Correction Department officials "recognize it's a problem and they're trying to relieve the pressure," Meyers said.

William H. Carbone, executive director of the Judicial Department's court support services division, said another factor contributing to the inmate increase is that space in the alternative programs that take many pretrial inmates is limited.

"Obviously the people can't be released until the recommended services are in place," he said.

Inpatient needs

The shortage in beds at inpatient treatment centers is particularly sharp, Carbone said.

"I have noticed a continuous increase in the wait list over the past few months" for inpatient beds, Carbone said Monday.

He estimated there are currently about 200 people recommended for inpatient treatment who are waiting in state prison cells for a bed elsewhere to open up.

State Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chair of the legislature's Judiciary Committee, said the recent increase in the prison population was in part due to a normal ebb in crime during warmer months. But he added that more prisoners should be diverted to community programs like drug or mental health treatment.

"I think almost anybody in the system would agree, you need more options," Lawlor said. "Putting them in prison is only the most expensive and least effective" answer.

Carbone agreed, adding that court officials have "a wonderful collaborative relationship" with the Correction Department.

The inmate population problem, he said, has more to do with "increased enforcement and a lack of alternative programming."

A March harbinger?

At least one expert had warned earlier this year that the state had more work to do to reduce its prisoner population.

Tony Fabelo, a Texas-based analyst for JFA Associates who is working with state officials, told members of a joint legislative committee in March that Connecticut still had to improve its inter-agency coordination to handle shifts in the inmate population.

Prison overcrowding legislation passed in 2004 was aimed at cutting down on overcrowding by streamlining the prison release process. But the bill also required the Correction Department to work hand-in-hand with agencies like the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, the Judicial Department, and the Parole Board to implement re-entry strategies -- the very programs whose lack of availability officials said Monday were contributing to the recent increase in prisoners.

Fabelo recommended several steps at the hearing to avoid inter-agency confusion, including an annual analysis of how the inmate population is changing and better monitoring of how funding meets those varying needs.

He could not be reached for comment on Monday.

All of the officials interviewed Monday said increased police enforcement in some of the state's largest cities was affecting the inmate population more than the usual busy summer crime season.

"Hartford's got the big gun crackdown going on, the New London-area is really cracking down on drug dealers and gangs, and they've got some get tough stuff going on in New Haven and Bridgeport," Meyers said. "I think that's got a lot to do with" the inmate spike.

Lantz said Friday that she had expected the increase in the inmate population, and also attributed the spike to recent city policing efforts.

Meyers said the steep inmate rise happened with ominous alacrity.

"We usually see a spike every September in the county jails, but it's real early," he said. "This one here is significant and happened real fast."
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15042913&BRD=985&PAG=461&a
mp;dept_id=161556&rfi=6

Posted by lois at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2005

VT: Officials Worry About Surbe in Women who are Incarcerated

Officials worry about surge in female inmates

Published: Monday, August 15, 2005
The Associated Press

WINDSOR -- The growing use of illegal drugs, officials suspect, might be behind a recent surge in female inmates in the state.

Women remain only a small portion of the prison population but their numbers are growing.

Ten years ago women represented about 15 percent of those entering the corrections system for the first time. Now they account for more than 25 percent.

Nationally, the number of women in prison also has grown but not as quickly as it has in Vermont.

In 2003, the Southeast State Correctional Facility, formerly a prisoner-run farm housing men, was converted to a women's prison to accommodate the growing numbers.

Although fewer than 200 women are in the state's prisons at any given time, their typically short sentences mean that almost 1,000 go through the system each year.

Like Janet Slossberg, who is serving time on drug charges, most have children. Nearly 40 percent of those children ended up in state custody after their mothers were incarcerated. It costs the state, on average, $25,000 a year to care for a child.

Slossberg was a single mother and a college graduate working at an entry-level administrative job when she started dealing and using drugs, she said.

"I was living paycheck to paycheck," Slossberg said. She said she got into drugs, in part, as a way to make more money.

Michael Smith, secretary of the Agency of Human Services, said there should be a way to reduce the number of women in prison.

"We have some substance abuse issues in this state that we haven't paid enough attention to until recently," Smith said.

Case workers say about 95 percent of female inmates had drug or alcohol problems when they came into prison. The majority were convicted of nonviolent crimes related to their drug use, state officials said.

Fifteen percent of female imates are in prison in Vermont for violent crimes. For men, the percentage is about 60 percent, officials said.

Posted by lois at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)

Treatment Instead of Prison: A Place to Call Home

By JULIE DelCOUR Editorial Writer
8/14/2005

Oxford Houses offer recovering addicts safe haven
(Their) house is a very very very fine house with two cats (one, actually) in the yard. Life used to be so hard. Now everything is easy...

That's the refrain in the Crosby Stills Nash & Young song but actually life has not been easy for several dozen Tulsa men and women who until recently had too much past and not enough future. It's one day at a time on their road to recovery from substance abuse.

They're helped along by a remarkable concept of supported living that offers structure, security, companionship and dignity without a penny of taxpayer money. Oxford Houses have been so successful that the state is looking into getting at least one in every county with a drug court. Tulsa has 10, nine for men and one for women, Oklahoma City, Ardmore and Norman also have houses.

Not returning to where the recovering addict came from might be the single most important reason for the private program's success. Oxford Houses boast a 75 percent recovery rate against relapse. The first Oxford House opened 30 years ago in Ohio; now there are 1,000 homes nationally.

What residents come home to is a nice house in a stable neighborhood.
Applicants are screened carefully. If they have a record it cannot include a crime of violence.

Because residents adhere to a strict conduct code rarely are there
objections from neighbors although there have been a couple over the past four years. Larry B., landlord to all but two of the 10 Oxford Houses, is a successful businessman. He once had an alcohol problem. While he has been sober for years he empathizes with residents trying to make a new start in a state with limited opportunities.

Each Oxford House houses six to 10 people with two people per bedroom. Residents cannot drink or use drugs. They must hold a job, keep their curfews, attend regular Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings, pass drug tests and abide by any rules imposed by the drug court if they are a participant. They must pay their rent, maintain the homes and abide by all house rules or they're voted out.

Houses are run democratically and are self-supporting with elected officers who oversee the home and manage expenses. To apply for admission each resident go through an intensive treatment program and/or must prove he or she has maintained sobriety for at least 30 days. Residents are interviewed by house members and must receive an 80 percent yes vote for admission.

Residents pay $300-$400 per month, which covers everything except their food. Each house starts with a $4,000 loan from the state, which is repaid with interest. So far, houses here have met that obligation, Larry said.

Compare that cost to housing one prison inmate at $20,000 per year.

Each resident has a different story of what led him or her to the Oxford House. Residents represent every demographic. But they have one thing in common: they all had hit bottom before stepping through the door. And, all agree that the living arrangement has been their salvation, allowing them to live normally and independently but with structure and accountability.

At a south Tulsa Oxford House Wednesday, several men arrived home near dinner time. Some had taken the bus from their jobs, others had rides or had driven themselves home. One man was in a suit and tie, some in jeans. Their spacious home was immaculate with a manicured lawn and a well-fed yellow tabby cat in the yard. The cat is a metaphor of sorts for the "family" living inside. He came as a stray but stayed because he liked the
environment.

Residents proudly offer a tour of their well-furnished home, which has a computer and television with cable, washing machine and dryer. Each man has his own full-size refrigerator, with several of them lining one garage wall.

Residents are permitted to come and go as they wish as long as they meet the house curfew. They often spend free time together, going to movies or dances.They're free to have visitors. Every other weekend one resident's children visit, bunking in the den. As long as residents abide by rules they can live in the house indefinitely. Some arrived in the month, a few have lived several years at an Oxford House.

Jeff, 54, said that Oxford House has helped him rebuild a life shattered by the death of his wife and the loss of a successful business that once took in up to $15 million. "At the end I couldn't write a check for 25 cents," he said, recounting a long fall that included life on the streets. "I hadn't been out on the streets since the Sixties and guess what, it's not the Sixties anymore." After he disappeared, relatives filed a missing persons report. Tulsa police found him and his wife, who also had alcohol problems,
living behind a commercial air-conditioning unit near 11th Street and U.S. 169.

Jeff was in trouble but not with the law. "I was ashamed. I couldn't feed or clothe myself. My family looked after me for a year." When they got on their feet, Jeff and his wife moved back to Missouri. "My wife died suddenly. Alcoholism is the loneliest disease in the world. Here I was in an empty apartment, surrounded by memories. I had to have people."

Jeff completed a treatment program to break an alcohol habit that started at 17. He attends daily AA meetings and works with other recovering alcoholics.

Julie, 33, has lived in an Oxford House for seven months. Her problems began a decade ago when she became addicted to painkillers after an accident. The addiction took over her life. She forged prescriptions and checks and received probation several times before ending up in prison for three years. Ill-equipped to handle life when she came out she gave over custody of her two young children to a relative. With her family's help she went through
intensive treatment, something she did not get in prison. When she entered drug court, Oxford House was recommended.

"I've relapsed before but this is the best I've ever done. Oxford House helps you live again, teaches you basic things like keeping your room clean, doing chores, paying bills, getting along with other people. Because we're recovering addicts we all know the warning signs of relapse. We're not easily fooled."

Some residents have slipped. When they did there was no second chance. But most residents know what a good thing they have in a state with skyrocketing substance abuse problems and too few opportunities for recovering addicts and alcoholics -- especially for those with criminal records largely as a result of their addictions.

"I work 35 hours a week. I get up at 5:30 a.m. every day and walk four miles," Julie said. "Oxford House lets you live again. I needed the structure. I see my kids. Someday I'll go back to college. When I see the sunrise I'm so grateful to be free and enjoy the simple things. I'm just really happy."

julie.delcour@tulsaworld.com

Posted by lois at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)

GEO Buys Private Prison System

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Boca firm buys private prison system

Published Monday, August 15, 2005 1:00 amby By Corey Siggins

Boca Raton-based GEO Group is in the process of placing another privatized correctional facility under its ownership.

GEO, a company that specializes in operating prisons and mental health facilities across the world, recently signed an agreement to acquire Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) in Sarasota for $62 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, GEO will obtain contracts and awards held by CSC for the operation of 15 adult correctional facilities with a total capacity of 7,500 beds. The company will also pay $6 a share and assume approximately $124 million in CSC debt.

According to Pablo Paez, GEO¹s director of corporate relations, CSC also runs 17 juvenile correctional facilities with a total capacity of 1,300 beds through its subsidiary, Youth Services International Inc. Because the juvenile facilities are outside GEO¹s core business focus, the company is negotiating to sell the facilities back to CSC. Alternative buyers may be sought if an agreement with CSC cannot be reached.

The deal between GEO and CSC, subject to the approval of CSC shareholders, federal regulatory agencies and other conditions, is expected to officially close at the beginning of the fourth quarter this year.

³As a company, we have concentrated on acquiring the type of facilities that enhance our productivity and strength. It¹s the type of business we know well,² Paez said. ³Integrating CSC into our ranks will only bolster the standing we have in this industry.²

Originally begun as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation in 1984, GEO broke free and became an independent company in 2003.

In Florida, the company operates correctional facilities in Deerfield Beach, Moore Haven and South Bay, as well as Atlantic Shores Hospital in Fort Lauderdale and South Florida State Hospital in Pembroke Pines.

Acquiring CSC will bring the total number of facilities under GEO to approximately 55,
with a total capacity of 43,500 beds.

³This acquisition is an excellent strategic fit for our company that will have a positive impact on our financial performance and will increase our ability to pursue new business opportunities,² said George C. Zoley, chairman and chief executive officer of GEO. ³We are also excited about the community correctional services offered by CSC, which will broaden our service offerings and expand our relationships with existing clients.²

GEO earned between $148 million and $154 million in revenue for the second quarter ending June 31. Company officials forecast third quarter revenues to be between $140 million and $147 million.

Corey Siggins can be reached at 561-893-6441 or at csiggins@bocanews.com.
http://www.bocaratonnews.com/index.php?src=news&prid=12352&category=
BUSINESS%20NEWS>

Posted by lois at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

Alaska: State Offers Prison Space, Labor to Private Sector

http://www.ktuu.com/CMS/anmviewer.asp?a=14721&z=4>

State offers prison space, labor to private sector

by Angela Unruh - Monday, August 15, 2005  

Anchorage, Alaska - A year after closing down the auto shop at the Palmer Correctional Facility, the Department of Corrections is once again looking for private sector partners to operate prison industries in Palmer, Fairbanks and Kenai.

Corrections shut down the auto shop at the Palmer prison in April 2004 after nearly two decades. Now, the state hopes to use the shop space for another industry.

Commissioner Marc Antrim says the goal is to provide inmates with a place to work and get job training. The attraction for the private sector is that inmate wages is as low as 85 cents an hour.  

Posted by lois at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Inmates May Have it Right---Prisons Are About Jobs

Inmates may have it right -- prisons all about jobs
BY JEFF GERRITT
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
August 16, 2005
Many prison inmates swear the building boom in the penal system is a master plan to make money off them and create jobs, especially in the rural, mostly white areas where most prisons are. Plenty of inmates have told me this over the years.

If this prison-industrial complex sounds like a whack conspiracy theory, listen to Michigan state legislators. Republicans and Democrats have been beefing over whether to close a youth prison in Baldwin or the Newberry Correctional Facility in the Upper Peninsula. The debate isn't about which institution is best for rehabilitation, restitution or public safety -- it's about jobs. When the fight's over, legislators might stick the state with an $18-million-a-year tab for a prison it doesn't need.

Sounds like the inmates have it right.

Early this year, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the Michigan Department of Corrections sensibly proposed closing the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility. The Legislature's own independent auditor concluded the maximum-security prison was inefficient. It's also unnecessary. The so-called punk prison, run by a private, for-profit company, opened six years ago to handle an expected tsunami of young super predators. It never happened. Instead, the prison has taken mostly lower-security offenders; Corrections has enough spare beds to take them elsewhere.

But Republicans said shutting down the youth prison would bleed jobs from the hard-knock Baldwin area in Lake County. These are the same politicians who carp about government waste and inefficiency. They had another plan: Close Newberry Correctional Facility. That prison is in an area that, unlike Baldwin, Democrats represent in the state Legislature.

I've been inside the Newberry prison. It's generally well-managed and runs one of the country's top prison GED programs. Newberry also houses 1,100 inmates -- too many for the state prison system to absorb if it closes. Still, instead of arguing the merits, Democrats went the same route as Republicans. Closing Newberry, they said, would also hurt a struggling local economy.

Things are tough all over Michigan, and I feel for the folks who stress about their jobs. Anyone who has been broke and out of work -- and I have -- knows that it makes you feel like less than zero. Anyone who grew up in a blue-collar family that lived paycheck to paycheck won't forget the fear that came home when the checks stopped.

Whenever it closes an institution, the state should do what it can to transfer and retrain the employees. Still, if paychecks are the main issue, running an extra prison isn't the answer. The state would be better off to shut it down, anyway, and just mail out the checks for the next five years.

No doubt, prisons boost local economies. The Department of Corrections employs 3,000 people in the UP at nine prisons and five camps. It's the region's second largest employer. These aren't McJobs, either. Correctional officers earn up to $42,000 a year. But that doesn't mean legislators, staring at an $800-million budget hole, should view prisons as employment agencies. Michigan needs money for higher education, healthcare and other needs that are also paid out of the general fund. It doesn't need politicians running around the state vowing to save prisons when colleges are raising tuition by double digits.

Truth be told, most of the state's prisons should be in southeast Michigan, where most of the inmates come from. Maintaining family and community ties are important to inmates trying to change their lives. But prisons often get built in remote areas like the UP, where few people oppose them because they become a small community's biggest source of recession-proof jobs.

With nearly 50,000 people in state prisons, Michigan has one of the nation's highest rates of incarceration and prison spending. Prisons eat up nearly 20% of the state's general fund, or $1.8 billion. Other states have found ways to safely spend a lot less on locking people up.

Corrections has started to control prison population and spending, after two decades of breakneck growth. It has diverted more offenders into community programs, developed programs to reduce recidivism and sent fewer parolees back to prison for technical violations. Michigan was one of the few states to reduce its prison population, if only slightly, in 2003 and 2004.

But having fewer prisoners to support won't do the people much good if politicians won't close prisons because they view them as economic development tools.

Inmates don't need conspiracy theories anymore to believe that's how the system works. All they need is the Legislature.

JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com, 313-222-6585, or in care of the editorial page.

Copyright © 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc.

Posted by lois at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2005

WA: "Cleaned up, Not Locked Up"

Judges, counselors tout success of alternative-help program

By SAM SKOLNIK, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Saturday, August 13, 2005
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/236484_alternatives13.html

Bronte Anderson couldn't handle the news. When the registered nurse was fired from her job at an assisted-living facility in Bellevue last September, she reacted gravely, telling colleagues she wasn't sure she could go on.

Armed with a knife, police say, Anderson attacked them when they came to assist. She was subdued and arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to fourth-degree assault, a misdemeanor.

But after spending 12 days in the King County Jail -- and then 13 more days in a psychiatric center, where, she said, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental and physical ailments -- Anderson caught a break: A mental health court judge ordered her to spend time in a King County program that concentrates on healing rather than punishing.

The Community Center for Alternative Programs teaches accused and convicted small-scale criminals such as Anderson -- who are often addicted or mentally challenged -- how to stay clean, hold down a job and stay out of trouble.

She is one of a growing number of offenders whom local judges are steering into the center instead of jail.

In 2003, the center's first full year, 133 drug dealers, robbers, domestic abusers and other offenders were sent to the center instead of jail. Last year, 667 such offenders were enrolled -- and more than 1,100 are on a pace to spend time in the center this year.

Anderson, 62, said her time in the center proved invaluable. Officials there have assisted her with vital housing and medical needs, among many other things, she said, keeping her off the streets and on the right track.

"I would not have been able to be where I am now without that help," she said. "The future looks good."

Judges, elected officials and center administrators agree, saying the program is improving community safety by helping scores of offenders avoid a life of crime.

"What has taken place over the last three years is nothing short of incredible," King County Councilwoman Julia Patterson said at a recent town hall meeting in Des Moines. "We have gone from just locking people up to working on getting individuals the assistance they need to stay out of the system."

In 2001, about 3,000 adults on average were being housed daily at the King County Jail and the Regional Justice Center in Kent, and only 100 first-time or non-violent offenders were going through the county's various alternative-sentencing programs.

As of June 30, the average number of people in 2005 being jailed daily was 2,397, and the number of those assigned to alternative programs such as the center had shot up to 750 per day, county officials say.

The significant drop in the populations of the King County Jail system is the result not just of the increasing enrollment in the center. There has been increased use of such programs as work release and electronic home monitoring.

Seattle and other King County cities began housing inmates in Yakima in 2002, further reducing the local jail population.

The changes have spared the county from having to think about building a new jail and saved taxpayers millions, officials say.

The center was started in 2002, stemming from a King County policy to limit the jail population to violent and severe repeat offenders and to those considered likely to flee if released.

"There was a recognition that it made much more sense to intervene and prevent crime rather than just to lock them up," said Clifton Curry, a senior legislative analyst with the King County Council.

The center is the largest program of its type in the state, according to officials. Other counties, as well as the state Department of Corrections, have their own, more limited versions of day reporting programs.

The offenders can be ordered to attend classes in the center in lieu of jail or in addition to a shortened jail term as part of their sentence. Many of the offenders come from diversion programs such as the drug, domestic violence and mental health courts, in which judges often sentence treatment instead of jail time.

Located on the first floor of the Yesler Building near Pioneer Square, the center employs three caseworkers, an administrator and clerical staff, as well as officials from the state Department of Social and Health Services and other agencies to help offenders find out where they can perform community service and how to apply for food stamps or subsidized housing.

The classes focus on drug and alcohol treatment and education; domestic violence; GED tutoring; parenting; HIV and sexually transmitted diseases; nutrition; and job readiness, among other topics.

About half of the offenders are there for drug-related crimes; those charged with some theft, assault and drunken-driving crimes also are ordered into the center.

Offenders sentenced to the center follow a strict regimen that involves drug and alcohol testing; arrest warrants are immediately issued for those who miss their assigned classes. Offenders either are ordered to the "basic" program, where they take only some classes but also need to call in daily, or the "enhanced" level, which mandates daily class attendance.

"My hope is that they're a better person when they leave than when they got here," said center administrator Bernie Dennehy, a long-time county corrections official.

"Are we going to cure a lot of people here? We try. It's hard with someone who's here for 30 days, but who's been hooked on heroin for 30 years," said Dennehy.

Chemical-dependency counselor Percy "Slim" Belcher does seem to be getting his message through.

In one recent class on drug and alcohol education at the center, Belcher, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, had his students' rapt attention as he talked about the mental and physical dangers of addiction.

"You can tear the lining of your esophagus just anticipating drug use," said Belcher, a razor-thin man with an intense gaze.

"When you understand what's happening to you," Belcher explained to his students, "you have much more ability to stop it."

It is unclear how effective the center has been at both turning around the lives of the offenders and making communities safer by reducing recidivism. County officials said no statistics are available, though an outside study on the topic is being conducted by a San Francisco-based consulting firm.

One man who attended Belcher's class apparently had a difficult time accepting the lessons.

Jason Randall, 38, was arrested last November for stealing his roommate's OxyContin, a painkilling narcotic. He spent 45 days in King County Jail, then completed an inpatient drug treatment program while waiting to be sentenced. The judge in the case then sentenced him to spend 11 weeks at the center.

But Randall quit showing up, twice. The first time it happened, he was quickly picked up on a warrant and was ordered to go back to the center, which he did for a short period. Then he skipped out a second time before his sentence was completed.

Prosecutors say that overall, they are encouraged by how well the center appears to be working for some populations, including drug offenders.

But it is less clear that the center is working well for all types of offender populations, they say, including those with mental health problems. Moreover, said Kathy Van Olst, King County's assistant chief criminal deputy prosecutor, judges may be taking too much advantage of the program by sentencing offenders to as long as four months there -- time during which the offender may have exhausted all the classes the center has.

One local victims' rights advocate also expressed concerns.

Karen Sprinkel, with the Everett-based group Families & Friends of Violent Crime Victims, said allowing those who commit violent crimes such as assault and domestic abuse not to be imprisoned is "a slap in the face" to the victims, who could more easily be victimized again.

Unlike many other jurisdictions, District Court and Superior Court judges now are charged with assigning defendants to the center or other alternatives, said Nate Caldwell, director of the county's Community Corrections Division, of which the center is a part.

Judges concede that initially, they were pleased primarily because the center gave them another option for defendants they didn't believe should be jailed, and it allowed them a chance to better monitor them.

But now, a few years in, judges unhesitatingly say they are happy with the center and how it's working. For some offenders, in fact, the program is working so well that people don't want to leave it, two judges say.

"They were coming back to court glowing about the program," said Superior Court Judge Laura Inveen, who said she ordered about 75 defendants to the center over the past two years, mostly when she presided over drug court.

"I can't tell you how many people asked, 'Can you make my sentence longer?' " said Inveen. "It certainly feels to me that it's working."

Inveen's successor as drug court judge, J. Wesley Saint Clair, agrees. Saint Clair estimated that he has ordered more than 100 people into the center during his current assignment, and previously as presiding King County District Court judge.

The center is a vitally important alternative for judges, said Saint Clair. Before programs such as this were available, the main choice for judges, he said, "used to be between harsh words and secure detention."

P-I reporter Sam Skolnik can be reached at 206-467-1039 or samskolnik@seattlepi.com

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

MA: State FINALLY Settles Case of 3 Wrongfully Imprisoned Men

BOSTON (AP) - Three men wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit became the first to receive cash compensation from the state under a law approved last year.

Two of the men, Eduardo Velazquez and Eric Sarsfield, received the maximum allowed under the law - $500,000 each. A third man who had submitted two claims, Dennis Maher, received $550,000.

The cases were reviewed by the attorney general's office before they were sent to Gov. Mitt Romney's budget chief, Eric Kriss, who signed off on the three settlements Friday.

Another nine cases are still pending.

The three men had each been convicted of rape and spent a decade or more in prison. All three were later exonerated with the help of DNA evidence.

Sarsfield was convicted in 1987 for a rape in Marlborough. The victim identified Sarsfield three months after the attack, and after he was cleared, she wrote a letter in support of his attempt to get compensation from the state.

Velazquez was convicted in 1988 of aggravated rape and indecent assault in Chicopee. He served nearly 14 years in prison before being released in 2001.

And Maher was convicted in 1983 of two rapes and an assault in Lowell and Ayer. He was identified as the attacker by each of the three victims at two separate trials. He ended up serving 19 years in prison before being released in 2003.

Peter Neufeld of the law firm Cochran, Neufeld and Scheck, represented Sarsfield and Velazquez.

He said both men suffered during their time in prison. Velazquez spent a portion of his sentence in a private prison for sex offenders on the Texas/Mexican border.

Neufeld said Velazquez appreciates both the public declaration of innocence and the fact that he received the maximum available under the law.

''There's no question that the state can't adequately compensate Eric and Eduardo for the time they spent in prison and the freedom they lost,'' Neufeld said. ''Other young men were going out and getting married and starting family and starting careers and they were in these facilities punching license plates.''

Corey Welford, a spokesman for Attorney General Tom Reilly, said that under the law the three men were clearly entitled to the settlement.

''We're pleased to quickly resolve these cases for these three men whose innocence was clear and who clearly met the standards of the statute,'' he said.

Under the law passed by the Legislature late last year, exonerated people can ask for a civil trial to make their case for compensation of up to $500,000.

Anyone filing a claim has to show by ''clear and convincing evidence'' that they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted. They must also show they spent at least a year in prison. The state isn't liable for punitive damages.

Supporters of the law say it's a matter of simple justice that the state compensate the wrongfully convicted for the time spent behind bars.

More than a dozen other states already have similar laws, including New York and Illinois.

Before the law was approved, it required a special act of the Legislature to compensate the wrongfully convicted.

Posted by lois at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

August 11, 2005

The Nation: Nuclear Reactors & Racism

by JOSEPH J. MANGANO

[posted online on August 3, 2005]

The Entergy Nuclear company of Jackson, Missippippi, with the blessing of the Bush Administration, is seeking preliminary approval to add one or two new nuclear reactors to its existing reactor at Grand Gulf. If the move is approved, the company, a subsidiary of Entergy Corporation, will become the first US utility to order a nuclear reactor since 1978. This expansion, viewed by critics as a form of environmental racism, would worsen already significant health hazards to the area's poor, mostly black population.

Since African slaves began arriving two centuries ago, the Grand Gulf region of woods, soybean farms, and cotton farms has been plagued by the grinding poverty characteristic of the Deep South. In the five counties within 30 miles of the site, which are home to 92,000 people, poverty and unemployment levels are double the national levels. Poverty means undernourishment, inadequate housing, lack of access to medical care--and ultimately more deaths. Placing a buffet of radioactive chemicals in the midst of vulnerable people is like holding a lighted match over kerosene. In the two years after Grand Gulf first started emitting airborne radioactivity in 1982, local infant deaths jumped by 35 percent and miscarriages by 58 percent. Adult death rates soared past the state and nation beginning in the early 1990s.

The nuclear experiment in Mississippi also exemplifies economic injustice. Large construction cost overruns in the building of the first plant were conveniently tucked into the electric bills of consumers who could ill afford them. Grand Gulf promised local jobs, but just 125 plant workers, or 18 percent of the total, live in Claiborne County, where the plant is located. The plant also promised tax dollars, but soon after Grand Gulf opened a new state law reduced Claiborne County's share of the utility's state taxes from 100 percent to 30 percent--the rest going to the 44 counties that use the greatest share of Grand Gulf electricity.

The Claiborne County NAACP, the Mississippi Sierra Club, the Nuclear Information Resource Service, and Public Citizen have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to halt the proposal to expand the plant, basing their opposition in part on the lack of attention paid to the special needs of local residents. But Bush's Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected the claim in January. According to the government's 719-page environmental assessment, the new reactors would cause a microscopic .0004 additional cancers and birth defects each year within 50 miles. In addition to failing to assess how vulnerable the local population may be to radiation exposure, the report also ignores the threat of a terrorist attack and doesn't discuss how to dispose of the staggering amounts of dangerous nuclear waste.

Numerous local residents showed up at several public meetings, including one on June 28 in Port Gibson, to decry the expansion. But Entergy, playing its cards shrewdly, has successfully gained the backing of some key local players, including the mayor of Port Gibson and the Claiborne County supervisor, both blacks. Meanwhile, Entergy Nuclear president Gary Taylor has called for federal loan guarantees for constructing new nukes--a curious cry for taxpayer help from a $10 billion company whose stock price has more than tripled in the past six years.

Whether or not the push to revive nuclear power succeeds, one thing is clear: The government-industry partnership will do whatever it can to bring new nukes to America, even if it means jump-starting the process by employing white-collar racism that targets society's most vulnerable members.
This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050815&s=mangano

Posted by lois at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)

The Meth Mouth Myth

press box
The Meth-Mouth Myth
Our latest moral panic.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2005, at 3:34 PM PT

Moral panics rip through cultures, observed sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972, whenever "experts" and the "right-thinking" folks in the press, government, and the clergy exaggerate the danger a group or thing poses to society.

Immigrants have been the subject of moral panics, as have alcohol, jazz, comic books, sex, street gangs, rock, video games, religious cults, white slavery, dance, and homosexuals. But in the United States, moral panics are most reliably directed at illicit drug users. No exaggeration or vilification directed their way is too outrageous for consideration.

For the last year, a moral panic about methamphetamine and its users has been gathering force, and last week it peaked as Slate's corporate sibling, Newsweek magazine, joined the crusade with a cover story. Calling methamphetamine "America's Most Dangerous Drug," the magazine also portrayed its use as "epidemic." In typical moral-panic fashion, Newsweek offered no data to anoint meth as the deadliest of drugs, nor did it prove its assertion that meth use is spreading like a prairie fire. Instead, the magazine relied almost exclusively on anecdotes from law enforcement officials, anti-drug politicians, and users (current and reformed) to stir up emotions against meth and meth-heads.

If you were to reduce the current moral panic to a single image, it would be a photo of a meth user whose gums are pus-streaked and whose rotting teeth-what teeth he still has-are blackened and broken. The affliction, tagged "meth mouth" in scores of articles, earns a prominent place in Newsweek's Grand Guignol coverage (see the picture in this Newsweek spread).

Although users have been snorting, smoking, injecting, and swallowing methamphetamine in great quantities for more than 40 years, the phrase meth mouth is brand new. It makes its first Nexis appearance in Investor's Business Daily as an unsourced one-liner in a Jan. 31, 2003, digest of news: "Methamphetamine's drying effect on saliva glands leads to tooth decay and gum disease, dentists say, a trend known as 'meth mouth.' "

More than two dozen different stories about meth mouth have appeared in Nexis since the IBD mention, but the majority of them fail to advance the story in any significant way. The better articles note, as IBD did correctly, that methamphetamine users suffer from dry mouth (xerostomia), which contributes to tooth decay and gum disease. Many of them also find that many users attempt to refresh their dry mouths with sugared sodas, which accelerates decay. The best articles explain that many meth-mouthers get that way because they've neglected brushing, flossing, and regular visits to the dentist. Such a regimen is almost always a prescription for tooth loss.

But most of the articles go off on tangents, blaming contaminants or the corrosive quality of meth itself. For instance, Minneapolis' Star Tribune (Jan. 6, 2005) writes that the "acidic nature of methamphetamine if it is smoked or snorted" plays a role (reprinted in shorter form). The St. Paul Pioneer Press (Jan. 6, 2005) finds that "acid in meth corrodes tooth enamel, letting decay-causing bacteria seep in."

The Kansas City Star (Jan. 26, 2005): "What causes the problems is the acid content in some of the ingredients used to make methamphetamine, including anhydrous ammonia, ether and lithium. The acid can decrease the strength of the enamel on the teeth." Nice try, Star, but anhydrous ammonia, ether, and lithium are not acids.

The AP (Feb. 2, 2005) points to contaminants as well: "Methamphetamine can be made with a horrid mix of substances, including over-the-counter cold medicine, fertilizer, battery acid and hydrogen peroxide"-chemicals that reduce saliva, which is needed to neutralize acids and clear food from the teeth. Later that same month, the AP (Feb. 21, 2005) says that "methamphetamine ingredients like hydrochloric acid and lye corrode teeth when users inhale the drug's smoke. The drug dries in users' mouths, drying saliva that would block the acid and letting food build up on the gums against the teeth."

The Albuquerque Journal (April 12, 2005) collects this artful anecdote from a local dentist: "Meth use is an emerging epidemic. ... It explodes people's teeth. It's like ice crystals forming in the crevices of rock, fracturing the teeth."

The New York Times (June 11, 2005) showcases the meth-mouth story on PageOne: "Other dentists said they suspected that the caustic ingredients of the drug-whether smoked, injected, snorted or eaten-contributed to the damage, which tends to start near the gums and wander to the edges of teeth. Among ingredients that can be used to make meth are red phosphorus found in the strips on boxes of matches and lithium from car batteries."

The contaminant angle is complete misinformation. Dr. John R. Richards M.D., who studied tooth damage among 49 users in the late 1990s and co-wrote a paper on his finding for the August 2000 issue of the Journal of Periodontology, says users could consume pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine and still lose their teeth.

The paper, titled "Patterns of Tooth Wear Associated With Methamphetamine Use," recorded the most dramatic tooth wear among methamphetamine users who preferred snorting meth over other means of administration. Frequent snorting of the drug inhibits blood flow to the arteries that service the top front teeth, the authors found, which weakens them. Also, most of study's subjects smoked tobacco, and the connection between smoking and bad teeth is well-known.

"Not all that much tooth damage could be caused in the short time methamphetamine is in your mouth," Richards says. He adds that upper teeth are more prone to drying than lower teeth. When meth users binge and pass out, they may sleep for a day or longer with their mouths open, further drying their uppers.

Richards calls neglect of basic hygiene the biggest cause of dental damage among users. "It's a lifestyle issue," he says.
None of the articles blaming "contaminated" methamphetamine for meth mouth cite any literature or authority, perhaps because it doesn't exist. Page 59 of this 1991 monograph from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse surveys the scientific literature and finds examples of rare lead poisoning from bathtub meth (14 cases) but is silent on acids. Page 62 lists known organic contaminants in clandestinely made meth but concedes that no toxic reactions to the compounds have been reported.

The second press piece published on meth mouth should have served as a template for the reporters chasing the story. On April 5, 2004, the AP reported on meth mouth among inmates in North Dakota's state penitentiary. The peg for the story was that the prisoners were incurring gargantuan dental bills for you-know-what. From the AP story:

[Prison dentist Lonnie] Neuberger said he thinks there is a relationship between the chemicals in meth and tooth decay, but said there is little scientific evidence about the phenomenon. Neuberger said malfunctioning salivary glands are another factor that causes tooth decay among meth users. The glands normally secrete saliva, which neutralizes acids present in the mouth and around teeth.

In meth users-partly because of the dehydration common because they do not drink enough fluids-salivary glands quit and swell shut.
The next sentence, also attributed to Neuberger, places the condition in a normalizing context:
The same thing often happens to the elderly because of inadequate hydration and side effects from medication. [Emphasis added.]
In other words, abstinent grandmothers and grandfathers, many of whom who couldn't spell methamphetamine if their lives depended on it, are sometimes victims of meth mouth!

The Merck Manual of Medical Information speaks articulately to the rampant tooth decay that follows salivary gland malfunction: "Because saliva offers considerable natural protection against tooth decay, an inadequate amount of saliva leads to more cavities-especially on the roots of teeth."

Many drugs-some of them in your medicine cabinet-inhibit saliva production. An AP story from October 1997, years before the meth moral panic set in reports:

Hundreds of medicines that Americans take every day, from the country's most popular blood pressure pills to chewable vitamin C tablets, can cause serious tooth decay and gum disease, oral medicine experts told the American Dental Association.
One patient stuck his nitroglycerine tablets under his upper lip instead of under his tongue, where it was supposed to go. "And they ate a hole in his tooth," the AP writes. Nearly 20 percent of patients taking best-selling calcium channel blockers (Procardia, Cardizem, and Adalat) for high blood pressure and heart disease suffer gum swelling. Bacteria attack the inflammation, causing more swelling and serious gum disease ensues. Anti-epilepsy drugs, particularly Dilantin, and some amphetamines given to hyperactive kids cause similar swelling. Cyclosporin, which prevents organ rejection, can cause massive gum overgrowth.

The connections between drug abuse and tooth loss are established in the medical literature, even when the drug is booze. A recent study at the University of Buffalo found that alcohol abuse may lead to periodontal disease, tooth decay, and potentially precancerous mouth sores, but don't expect anybody to call it "Miller mouth."

Richards' paper has yet to be cited in a newspaper or magazine indexed by Nexis, perhaps because most reporters think of drug abuse in terms of criminal justice and moral panic. Had one journalist seriously considered covering meth mouth from a public health point of view, all he had to do is plug "methamphetamine and teeth" into PubMed, the free federal database, to find the Richards paper citation.

******

Give the New York Times an honorable mention for an April 12, 2005, story that discusses meth mouth from a public health point of view, stating that the poor dental and oral health of rural, ethnic, and disabled Americans has not improved since a surgeon general called attention to it in 2000 report. Thanks to the American Academy of Periodontology for providing the Richards article on short notice. Thanks to reader Jon Paul Henry for the moral-panic angle. Send e-mail containing an angle of your own to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted unless the writer stipulates
otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2124160/

Posted by lois at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)

Prisoners Share Insights on Ending Street Violence

By KATHY MATHESON
The Associated Press GRATERFORD, Pa. - Describing themselves as having once been part of the problem, a group of prisoners told participants in a crime conference Tuesday that they can now be part of the solution to ending the violence that plagues many urban neighborhoods.

The inmates, many of whom are serving life sentences at the state prison here, said they owe it to their communities to repair the damage they did while living there. They also want to make the streets safer for their families, who still live in areas where they are likely to be crime targets.

About 70 prisoners and 150 visitors - including international criminologists, students and professors - participated in "Ending the Culture of Street Crime," a daylong conference sponsored by Temple University, the Pennsylvania Prison Society and an inmates' group known as Lifers Inc. It was held in conjunction with the 14th World Congress on Criminology, which is meeting at the University of Pennsylvania through Thursday.

The prisoners shared their insights during a presentation and a panel discussion, and in small meeting groups, a skit and even a rap song. They explained the difference between street culture and mainstream values, and spoke about the need for released convicts to steer young people toward the latter.

State corrections officials would not allow the media to fully identify the prisoners, citing sensitivity to victims' families.

Conference participant Liz Elliott, co-director of the Centre for Restorative Justice at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, said the Canadian justice system is much more forgiving than that of the United States.

Being sentenced to life without parole is not something that happens in Canada, Elliott said.

"I can't imagine what that would do to people," she said.

So it's noteworthy that Lifers Inc. is reaching out to the public, Elliott said.

"I appreciate their sharing," she said.

Graterford, the state's largest maximum-security penitentiary, houses more than 3,400 inmates about 35 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Nearly 770 are serving life terms, corrections officials said.

Prison superintendent David DiGuglielmo asked participants to do more than just talk about ending street crime.

"Take whatever you learn back home," he said, "and do something positive with it."

DiGuglielmo noted that when he began working at Graterford in 1974, the state had eight prisons. Now, he said, there are 26.

He added that while he is amazed by the number of people who volunteer to work with inmates at the jail, he is frustrated by the lack of aid once the prisoners are released back into the community.

"It's hard to find people to help them," said DiGuglielmo.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/103-08092005-525545.html

August 9, 2005 4:50 PM

Posted by lois at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2005

NY Times: Cultural Differences Complicate A Georgia Drug Sting Operation

August 4, 2005, NY Times

Cultural Differences Complicate a Georgia Drug Sting Operation

By KATE ZERNIKE

ROME, Ga., July 29 - When they charged 49 convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwest Georgia with selling materials used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors declared that they had conclusive evidence. Hidden microphones and cameras, they said, had caught the workers acknowledging that the products would be used to make the drug.

But weeks of court motions have produced many questions. Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of transactional English mocked in sitcoms.

So when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish up a cook," some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

The case of Operation Meth Merchant illustrates another difficulty for law enforcement officials fighting methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that can be made with ordinary grocery store items.
Many states, including Georgia, have recently enacted laws restricting the sale of common cold medicines like Sudafed, and nationwide, the police are telling merchants to be suspicious of sales of charcoal, coffee filters, aluminum foil and Kitty Litter. Walgreens agreed this week to pay $1.3 million for failing to monitor the sale of over-the-counter cold medicine that was bought by a methamphetamine dealer in Texas.

But the case here is also complicated by culture. Prosecutors have had to drop charges against one defendant they misidentified, presuming that the Indian woman inside the store must be the same Indian woman whose name appeared on the registration for a van parked outside, and lawyers have gathered evidence arguing that another defendant is the wrong Patel.

The biggest problem, defense lawyers say, is the language barrier between an immigrant store clerk and the undercover informants who used drug slang or quick asides to convey that they were planning to make methamphetamine.

"They're not really paying attention to what they're being told," said Steve Sadow, one of the lawyers. "Their business is: I ring it up, you leave, I've done my job. Call it language or idiom or culture, I'm not sure you're able to show they know there's anything wrong with what they're doing."

For the Indians, their lives largely limited to store and home, it is as if they have fallen through a looking glass into a world they were content to keep on the other side of the cash register.

"This is the first time I heard this - I don't know how to pronounce - this meta-meta something," said Hajira Ahmed, whose husband is in jail pending charges that he sold cold medicine and antifreeze at their convenience store on a winding road near the Tennessee border.

But David Nahmias, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said the evidence showed that the clerks knew that the informants posing as customers planned to make drugs. Federal law makes it illegal to sell products knowing, or with reason to believe, that they will be used to produce drugs. In these cases, lawyers say, defendants face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

In one instance, Mr. Nahmias said, a store owner in Whitfield County pulled out a business card from a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent and told the informant that he was supposed to contact the agent if someone requested large amounts of the materials. When the informant asked if he would call, Mr. Nahmias said, the owner replied, "No, you are my customer."

"It's not that they should have known," Mr. Nahmias said. "In virtually or maybe all of the cases, they did know."

Like many prosecutors, Mr. Nahmias describes methamphetamine, a highly potent drug that can be injected, ingested or inhaled, as the biggest drug problem in his district. While only about a third of the meth here is made in small labs - the majority of the drug used in this country comes from so-called superlabs in Mexico - those small labs can be highly explosive, posing a danger to children, the environment and the police departments that are forced to clean them up. Their sources, he said, are local convenience stores.

"While those people may not think they're causing any harm, the harm they cause is tremendous," Mr. Nahmias said. "We really wanted to send the message that if you get into that line of business, selling products that you know are going to be used to make meth, you're going to go to prison."

Operation Meth Merchant started, Mr. Nahmias said, with complaints from local sheriffs that certain stores were catering to the labs. Prosecutors paid confidential informants - some former convicts, others offered the promise of lighter punishment for pending charges - to buy products in stores in six counties beginning in early 2004, and drop hints that they were making drugs.

Defense lawyers said some of the defendants probably did know what they were doing when they sold the materials. But on several tapes, provided by the government to the lawyers, who played them for a reporter, it was not always clear that the people behind the counter understood.

One recording captures an informant who walked into the Tobacco and Beverage Mart in Trenton, Ga., and asked for Pseudo 60, a particularly potent brand of cold medicine, which contains pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient of methamphetamine. The clerk, Mangesh Patel, 55, said the store no longer carried it. "Police guy came here said don't sell," Mr. Patel said. "Misuse. Public misuse."

The informant replied: "I know what they're doing with it, because that's what I'm going to do with it."

"Yah," Mr. Patel replied, "public misuse."

When the informant found another bottle of pills that he said might work, Mr. Patel told him he could sell only two, under orders from "the police guy." The informant asked if his friend could come in and buy two more. "Yeah," Mr. Patel replied, "But I cannot sell two to one guy."

Defense lawyers say the Indians were simply being good merchants and obeying what they believed was the letter of the law. Several refused to sell more than two bottles of cold medicine, citing store policy. They were charged, prosecutors say, because they allowed the "customers" to come back the next day for more. Prosecutors say that should have made it clear to the clerks that the buyers were up to no good.

In some cases, the language barriers seem obvious - one videotape shows cold medicine stacked next to a sign saying, "Cheek your change befor you leave a counter." Investigators footnoted court papers to explain that the clue the informants dropped most often - that they were doing "a cook" - is a "common term" meth makers use. Lawyers argue that if the courts could not be expected to understand what this meant, neither could immigrants with a limited grasp of English.

"This is not even slang language like 'gonna,' 'wanna,' " said Malvika Patel, who spent three days in jail before being cleared this month. " 'Cook' is very clear; it means food." And in this context, she said, some of the items the government wants stores to monitor would not set off any alarms. "When I do barbecue, I have four families. I never have enough aluminum foil."

According to court records, prosecutors first identified Ms. Patel as the woman who sold two bottles of cold medicine to an informant in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., because her name appeared on the registration of a van parked outside. But the driver of the van worked for a company, owned by her and her husband, that installs security cameras, and Ms. Patel produced records showing that she was picking her son up at a day care center in Tennessee at the moment she was said to be in Georgia.

Her misidentification has fueled the belief among the Indians that investigators were operating on cultural bias. This corner of the state is still largely white; Indians began moving here about 10 years ago, buying hotels and then convenience stores, and some whites still say, mistakenly, that "Patel" means "hotel" in Hindi.

"They want to destroy all Indian businesses," said Ms. Ahmed, whose husband is in jail. "Because they hate us, or I don't know."

Mr. Nahmias said he was willing to consider evidence of language barriers when the cases went to trial later this year. But he denied singling out any group. "We follow the evidence where it goes," he said.

Still, the case has set off ripples from the green ridges here to the Indian state of Gujarat, the traditional homeland of Patels, where newspapers have carried articles about the arrests.

"We go into temple and they look at you - it's a bad image right now," said Dilip Patel, who owns one of the stores involved. "If I have to go to the City Hall to do some paper, they see me 'Patel,' they look at me I'm a hard man, I'm a bad guy."

Malvika Patel's husband, who has Americanized his name from Chirag to Chris, says his wife's arrest made him think about selling his three stores and leaving the country.

"We are from so much cleaner society where we are from in India," he said. "We didn't even know what drugs were."
Ms. Patel says she has tried to shield herself from the ugly aspects of life here - she does not read newspapers because she wearies of all the crime. Maybe, she said, that was a mistake. "I think you need all this bad knowledge now if you want to live here."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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NY Times: Developing a Crack Index

August 7, 2005
Up in Smoke
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
Developing a Crack Index
If you rely on the news media for your information, you probably think that crack cocaine is a thing of the past. If you rely on data, however, you reach a different conclusion.

Measuring the use and impact of a drug like crack isn't easy. There is no government Web site to provide crack data, and surveying dealers is bound to be pretty unreliable. So how can you get to the truth of crack use? One way is to look at a variety of imperfect but plausible proxies, including cocaine arrests, emergency-room visits and deaths. Unlike the volume of news coverage, the rates for all of these remain shockingly high. Cocaine arrests, for instance, have fallen only about 15 percent since the crack boom of the late 1980's. Cocaine-related deaths are actually higher now; so are the number of emergency-room visits due to cocaine. When combined in a sensible way, these proxies can be used to construct a useful index of crack.

And what does this index reveal? That crack use was nonexistent until the early 1980's and spiked like mad in 1985, peaking in 1989. That it arrived early on the West Coast, but became most prevalent in the cities of the Northeast and Middle Atlantic States. And that it produced a remarkable level of gun violence, particularly among young black men, who made up the bulk of street-level crack dealers. During the crack boom, the homicide rate among 13- to 17-year-old blacks nearly quintupled. But perhaps the biggest surprise in the crack index is the fact that, as of 2000 -- the most recent year for which the index data are available -- Americans were still smoking about 70 percent as much crack as they smoked when consumption was at its peak.

If so much crack is still being sold and bought, why aren't we hearing about it? Because crack-associated violence has largely disappeared. And it was the violence that made crack most relevant to the middle class. What made the violence go away? Simple economics. Urban street gangs were the main distributors of crack cocaine. In the beginning, demand for their product was phenomenal, and so were the potential profits. Most crack killings, it turns out, were not a result of some crackhead sticking up a grandmother for drug money but rather one crack dealer shooting another -- and perhaps a few bystanders -- in order to gain turf.

But the market changed fast. The destructive effects of the drug became apparent; young people saw the damage that crack inflicted on older users and began to stay away from it. (One recent survey showed that crack use is now three times as common among people in their late 30's as it is among those in their late teens and early 20's.) As demand fell, price wars broke out, driving down profits. And as the amount of money at stake grew smaller and smaller, the violence also dissipated. Young gang members are still selling crack on street corners, but when a corner becomes less valuable, there is less incentive to kill, or be killed, for it.

So how can it be that crack consumption is still so high? Part of the answer may have to do with geography. The index shows that consumption is actually up in states far from the coasts, like Arizona, Minnesota, Colorado and Michigan. But the main answer lies in the same price shift that made the crack trade less violent. The price has fallen about 75 percent from its peak, which has led to an interesting consumption pattern: there are far fewer users, but they are each smoking more crack. This, too, makes perfect economic sense. If you are a devoted crackhead and the price is one-fourth what it used to be, you can afford to smoke four times as much.

But as crack has matured into a drug that causes less social harm, the laws punishing its sale have stayed the same. In 1986, in the national frenzy that followed the death of Len Bias, a first-round N.B.A. draft pick and a cocaine user, Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This disparity has often been called racist, since it disproportionately imprisons blacks.

In fact, the law probably made sense at the time, when a gram of crack did have far more devastating social costs than a gram of powder cocaine. But it doesn't anymore. Len Bias would now be 40 years old, and he would have long outlived his usefulness to the Boston Celtics. It may be time to acknowledge that the law inspired by his death has done the same.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of ''Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.'' More information on the academic research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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

NY Times Op-Ed: Debunking the Meth Epidemic

August 9, 2005

Debunking the Drug War

By JOHN TIERNEY

America has a serious drug problem, but it's not the "meth epidemic" getting so much publicity. It's the problem identified by William Bennett, the former national drug czar and gambler.

"Using drugs," he wrote, "is wrong not simply because drugs create medical problems; it is wrong because drugs destroy one's moral sense. People addicted to drugs neglect their duties."

This problem afflicts a small minority of the people who have tried methamphetamines, but most of the law-enforcement officials and politicians who lead the war against drugs. They're so consumed with drugs that they've lost sight of their duties.

Like addicts desperate for a high, they've declared meth the new crack, which was once called the new heroin (that title now belongs to OxyContin). With the help of the press, they're once again frightening the public with tales of a drug so seductive it instantly turns masses of upstanding citizens into addicts who ruin their health, their lives and their families.

Amphetamines can certainly do harm and are a fad in some places. But there's little evidence of a new national epidemic from patterns of drug arrests or drug use. The percentage of high school seniors using amphetamines has remained fairly constant in the past decade, and actually declined slightly the past two years.

Nor is meth diabolically addictive. If an addict is someone who has used a drug in the previous month (a commonly used, if overly broad, definition), then only 5 percent of Americans who have sampled meth would be called addicts, according to the federal government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

That figure is slightly higher than the addiction rate for people who have sampled heroin (3 percent), but it's lower than for crack (8 percent), painkillers (10 percent), marijuana (15 percent) or cigarettes (37 percent). Among people who have sampled alcohol, 60 percent had a drink the previous month, and 27 percent went on a binge (defined as five drinks on one occasion) during the month.

Drug warriors point to the dangers of home-cooked meth labs, which start fires and create toxic waste. But those labs and the burn victims are a result of the drug war itself.

Amphetamine pills were easily available, sold over the counter until the 1950's, then routinely prescribed by doctors to patients who wanted to lose weight or stay awake. It was only after the authorities cracked down in the 1970's that many people turned to home labs, criminal gangs and more dangerous ways of ingesting the drug.

It's the same pattern observed during Prohibition, when illicit stills would blow up, and there was a rise in deaths from alcohol poisoning. Far from instilling virtue in Americans, Prohibition caused them to switch from beer and wine to hard liquor. Overall consumption of alcohol might even have increased.

Today we tolerate alcohol, even though it causes far more harm than illegal drugs, because we realize a ban would be futile, create more problems than it cured and deprive too many people of something they value.

Amphetamines have benefits, too, which is why Air Force pilots are given them. "Most people took amphetamines responsibly when they were freely available," said Jacob Sullum, the author of "Saying Yes," a book debunking drug scares. "Like most drugs, their benefits outweigh the costs for most people. I'd rather be driving next to a truck driver on speed than a truck driver who's falling sleep."

Shutting down every meth lab in America wouldn't eliminate meth because most of it is imported, but the police and prosecutors have escalated their efforts anyway and inflicted more collateral damage.

In Georgia they're prosecuting dozens of Indian convenience-store clerks and managers for selling cold medicine and other legal products. As Kate Zernike reported in The Times, some of them spoke little English and seemed to have no idea the medicine was being used to make meth.

The prosecutors seem afflicted by the confused moral thinking that Mr. Bennett blames on narcotics. "Drugs," he wrote, "undermine the necessary virtues of a free society - autonomy, self-reliance and individual responsibility."

If you value individual responsibility, why send a hard-working clerk to jail for not divining that someone else might manufacture a drug? And why spend three decades repeating the errors of Prohibition for a drug that was never as dangerous as alcohol in the first place?

Email: tierney@nytimes.com

Posted by lois at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2005

More Minorities Are In Foster Care: Michigan Asks Why

Meetings over the past year have been trying to come up with ways to reduce the numbers.

By Amy F. Bailey / Associated Press
LANSING -- It took Barbara Trickey nearly a year of fighting and thousands of dollars in attorney fees to get her young grandsons out of foster care.

Malek and Malcolm Evans spent 10 months in two foster homes 3 1/2 years ago after their mother left the youngest, Malcolm, in the car overnight in the middle of winter when he was 5. The boys have lived with their grandmother since October 2002.

"I had to get an attorney to get my grandchildren out," Trickey, an elementary school art teacher, told a state task force.

The 40-member panel is trying to find out why black children such as Malek and Malcolm Evans account for only 17.5 percent of Michigan's 2.6 million children overall but make up 51.9 percent of children in the state's foster care system.

According to a report by the state Department of Human Services, nearly 10,300 of the 19,800 children in foster care in May were black. Black children enter the foster care system at a higher rate, stay in the system longer and are reunited with their families less often than others, the report said.

Last week's hearing at Lansing Community College was one of several held across the state in the last year to help the task force come up with ways to reduce the number of minority children in the system.

Donna Budnick, a specialist on American Indian affairs for the state Department of Civil Rights, said caseworkers are more likely to remove children from the home of a minority family than offer services or direct them to programs to help them get back on their feet.

"This system punishes you if you are a minority," Budnick told the task force, which met jointly with the Michigan Civil Rights Commission.

The racial disparity in Michigan's foster care is not unique.

Two-thirds of the children in foster care across the country are black or Hispanic, according to a report released in June by Florida researcher Lance Carroll II.

Foster children in large cities also are usually minorities, in part because those cities have large minority populations. Ninety-five percent of children in Chicago's child welfare system are minorities while 90 percent in New York's system in 1997 were minorities, Carroll's research showed.

Bill Long, an attorney and the former head of the Lansing-based Michigan Federation for Children and Families, said the high number of minorities in the foster care system is caused by higher rates of poverty, school expulsions, inadequate housing and limited options for child care in those communities.

He encouraged the task force to require counties with a big gap between minority and white foster children to reach out to minority communities and to use the policies that have been successful in counties where the number of white and minority foster children are more closely balanced.

Posted by lois at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2005

OR: Wall Street Journal: $58 million dollar jail without operating funds

August 4, 2005
Portland Jailblazers

By CHRIS LYDGATE
August 4, 2005; Page A13

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Last month, Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto gritted his teeth and released 391 inmates from the county jail, including legions of drug dealers, drunk drivers, burglars, car prowlers, identity thieves, check forgers and assorted rip-off artists.

This spectacle has become numbingly familiar in Portland, a laid-back city that is suffering from an acute shortage of jail beds, a surge in property crimes, and a spike in methamphetamine use that led the state Legislature this week to pass a law requiring a doctor's prescription for cold and allergy medicines that could be used to make "meth." So far this year, Sheriff Giusto has sprung more than 2,700 inmates -- and a town that prides itself on its progressive image is confronting a crisis in public safety.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112312259742904722,00.html?mod=home_colum
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"The criminal justice system is teetering on the edge of collapse," fumes Mr. Giusto, whose own car was recently broken into in a lot across from his office, beneath a sign reading "Sheriff's Patrol."

What makes the sheriff's predicament particularly maddening is that a few miles away, on the north side of town, sits the answer to his prayers -- a brand new $58 million jail known as the Wapato Facility. Secluded in an 18-acre parcel where sparrows chuckle in the cottonwood trees, Wapato is the last word in detention. Its 525 beds were designed for "direct supervision," a correctional philosophy in which there are no physical barriers between the inmates and the corrections officers who watch over them. The dorms comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The jail boasts its own power plant, kitchen, laundry and medical clinic, and the security glass in the central control room is two-inches thick.

But the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, reeling from revenue shortfalls and paralyzed by infighting, has not given the sheriff the money to get the jail up and running. So while local newscasts air endless horror stories about crime and meth fiends, Wapato has yet to play host to a single inmate. Sheriff Giusto calls it "a $58 million echo chamber."

The first act of this farce was written in 1995, when local voters approved a levy to build a new jail. The levy did not include money for operations, but county officials reckoned that Portland's rising property values would generate the cash. "It all penciled out," says Diane Linn, chairwoman of the five-member Board of Commissioners, which is elected separately from the sheriff.

Then Oregon voters passed a pair of ballot measures that imposed sharp limits on property taxes, the chief source of revenue for local government in this state (which has no sales tax). The ballot measures, combined with the 2001 recession, punched a huge hole in the county's projections and set off a painful round of service cuts and layoffs. "We hit a huge crisis, and we've been rolling from year to year," says Ms. Linn.

Desperate for savings, the board tore into the sheriff's operating budget; he responded by shutting down wards in his five existing jails. Since 2001, he has rolled up more than 400 jail beds, or 20% of his total capacity, and implemented a "matrix system," based on an inmate's propensity for violence and likelihood to commit more crimes. In this real-life matrix, drug dealers and drunk drivers are released to make way for more dangerous offenders such as rapists and robbers. (Brief profiles of freed inmates are posted at
www.inmatereleases.org.)

Still, no one would ever mistake Portland for, say, East St. Louis. Violent crime is down, the parks teem with toddlers splashing in the fountains, and the cops are more likely to brandish lattes than nightsticks. But when it comes to public safety, perception is reality, and everyone seems to know someone who has had his car or house broken into -- including County Commissioner Lisa Naito, whose laptop was stolen by a self-described meth addict in February. Many crime victims are outraged that red-handed burglars are routinely released back onto the streets within hours of being arrested. "We're losing to these people," says Sheriff Giusto. "We are losing."

While scofflaws scoff and perps perpetrate, the Board of Commissioners is deadlocked over the sheriff's budget. Chairwoman Linn has proposed a deal that would restore 171 jail beds, but has failed to win over a majority of her colleagues, some of whom suspect that the sheriff could open more beds by cutting the amount of overtime he pays his deputies. Board meetings, once about as contentious as a group hug, have turned icy.

Meanwhile, Wapato remains shuttered, its corridors silent. No visitors can appreciate the $180,000 sculpture that adorns its driveway -- a series of concrete pillars that resemble the barnacled ribs of an ancient shipwreck -- because no one is allowed to visit. So what do you do with a jail that costs $300,000 just to keep closed, anyway? Wags have suggested rehabilitating it into a casino, a hotel or a brewpub. It has also served as the backdrop for a horror flick titled "Path of Evil."

Desperate to find some way out of the maze, county officials recently approached the Oregon Legislature for help. The state prison system is also bursting at the seams -- why not house those prisoners at Wapato? Unfortunately, the response so far has been tepid. State officials say Wapato is not suited for long-term incarceration, in part because it has no facilities for an outdoor exercise yard or a Native American sweat lodge, both required by state law.

Besides, the state already has its own project in the works: a 2,100-bed prison in the windswept town of Madras. Last month, the Legislature authorized $191 million to build the Madras prison, but it has not yet figured out how to fund its operation.

Is there an echo in here?

Mr. Lydgate is a Portland writer and author of "Lee's Law: How Singapore Crushes Dissent," (Scribe Publications, 2004).

Posted by lois at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)

CT: Lawmakers Weigh Closing "Training" School for Youth

"Finding communities willing to take the homes likely be a problem as the plan moves forward, said Rep. Robert Farr, R-West Hartford, citing difficulty getting detention facilities built elsewhere. "If Hartford's not going to take one of these places, who's going to take them? Bridgeport? We can't get a juvenile facility built in Bridgeport and we've been looking at it for over a decade," he said."

New Haven Register
News |
Aug 2, 7:25 PM EDT

Lawmakers weigh blueprint for closing training school

By NOREEN GILLESPIE
Associated Press Writer

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Cost emerged as a major concern Tuesday as state lawmakers considered Gov. M. Jodi Rell's plan to close the embattled Connecticut Juvenile Training School.

Tuesday's special legislative hearing followed the release of a report this week by the Department of Children and Families recommending that the Middletown detention center for troubled boys be closed because of numerous problems.

The plan calls for shutting down the 4-year-old facility, which cost $57 million to build, by 2008 and replacing it with three smaller, community-based centers.

DCF Commissioner Darlene Dunbar and Juvenile Services Director Don DeVore painted a picture of a facility that was too prison-like, too institutional and too big for the 92 boys who live there. While improvements have been made in programming and reducing violence, there's a limit to what can be done, DeVore said.

"Physical environment does say a lot about how we think about these kids, and how we care about them," DeVore said.

But the closure plan may face some opposition in the legislature, where the first of several concerns was voiced Tuesday during the joint hearing before the budget-writing, judiciary and children's committees.

Rep. Denise Merrill, D-Mansfield, said reports have shown that the problems at the facility were with staffing levels, poor suicide watches and education programs, among other things. She questioned whether constructing new buildings would eradicate programming issues.

"I'm having trouble making that leap, frankly," said Merrill, the co-chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee. "This is an enormous amount of money for the state to spend, again."

DCF hasn't come up with firm numbers on what it will cost to create the new facilities - two 45-bed homes for boys and one 12-bed center for girls. Early estimates show building new boys facilities would cost $33.9 million, while renovating existing facilities would cost $23.2 million. The annual cost of running the boys' centers, along with other proposed services, would be $27.9 million.

Before adding the cost of girls' programs, that is slightly less than the $32.9 million the state spent on CJTS in 2005. Rell's budget office estimates it will cost $240,686 a year to house a boy at one of the smaller centers, compared to $365,845 at CJTS.

Rep. Marie Kirkley-Bey, D-Hartford, was upset with the plan. She questioned why it would be good idea to send boys back to where they got in trouble in the first place for rehabilitation. She asked why DCF was turning to community-based services now, when they have been around for years.

"Either you have not tapped into them ... or now you've just come into the realization this is what you need to do," she said.

Kirkley-Bey added, "You have been a drain and a bloodsucker on the budget, and I'm calling it the way I see it."

DCF officials say the new plan will provide better ways to work with families and address children's issues, such as mental health, substance abuse and education. But Kirkley-Bey also said it wasn't fair to put all the centers in inner cities, inundating them but not the suburbs with troubled youth.

Finding communities willing to take the homes likely be a problem as the plan moves forward, said Rep. Robert Farr, R-West Hartford, citing difficulty getting detention facilities built elsewhere.

"If Hartford's not going to take one of these places, who's going to take them? Bridgeport? We can't get a juvenile facility built in Bridgeport and we've been looking at it for over a decade," he said.

While some lawmakers considered a special session to handle the training school issue, one is not scheduled, said Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Hartford, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Lawmakers will likely wait and watch until DCF delivers a final blueprint for the proposal 12 to 18 months from now.

Lawmakers say they want to tread carefully. The original contract for the training school was fast-tracked through the legislature and became a focus of a corruption probe into former Gov. John G. Rowland's administration. Rowland is now serving a year-and-a-day federal sentence.

Though it will be expensive, keeping CJTS open will likely cost more in the long-run, Lawlor said.

"I think it's probably fair to say the do-nothing option is probably far more expensive."

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy.

Posted by lois at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)

AL: 70% of kids sent to DYS Return

Advocates seek youth justice reform
Study finds 70% of kids sent to DYS return to trouble
Friday, August 05, 2005

CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer

MONTGOMERY - More than 70 percent of Alabama children sent to the Department of Youth Services run into more trouble with the law when they get out, a recidivism rate that demands an overhaul of the way the state treats young offenders, children's advocates said Thursday.

"Our state's duty to our wayward children is when they come into care, they leave better off," said Sue Bell Cobb, an Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals judge and a former juvenile judge. She spoke at a State House news conference releasing the youth recidivism study, which she said "now proves that Alabama fails in this critical duty 70 percent of the time."

Teens return to the system most often for minor failings such as violating probation or curfew, called "aftercare violations," the study showed. Other offenses that land teens back in court include domestic violence, drug and alcohol use and resisting arrest. A small fraction commit robberies or sexual offenses once released, the study found.

Demographer Donald Bogie of Auburn University Montgomery conducted the study for the Children First Foundation and Voices for Alabama's Children, Montgomery-based child-advocacy groups.

He tracked about 5,000 Alabama youths committed to DYS-run or -funded lockups, boot camps and treatment centers who were released during 2001 and 2002. Researchers tracked the youths until October 2004.

Some returned to DYS programs. Others entered state prison. Only 30 percent stayed out of trouble.

Children First officials said they have asked to work alongside DYS to review the department's programs. Such a request was written into this year's appropriations bill, then deleted at the request of Rep. Locy Baker, D-Abbeville, a DYS board member, said Graham Champion, chairman of Children First Foundation.

"What is it that they are so afraid of that they don't want oversight from the group that protects their funding?" Champion asked.

Difficult backgrounds:

J. Walter Wood Jr., executive director of DYS, issued a statement saying the agency welcomes efforts of the two groups and will work with them, state agencies and the Legislature to serve the juveniles.

He said many of the youth sent to DYS come "from backgrounds that often include poverty, broken homes, and alcohol and drug abuse, and all too often go home from DYS programs to this same environment with little or no aftercare supervision."

DYS provides education, drug treatment, anger management and other counseling activities, Wood said.

Children First has helped distribute millions of dollars that Alabama receives from the national tobacco settlement. When tobacco funds started coming in, the advocacy group pushed for the creation of novel programs with the new dollars. Instead, DYS has used its millions to pay for the same juvenile lockups it's always used, which the new study shows don't work, Champion said.

DYS's share of tobacco money has ballooned from $1.25 million in 2000 to $11.8 million this year.

Some of the highest recidivism rates occurred at DYS-run juvenile prisons. After being sent to Birmingham's Vacca campus, 77 percent of youths returned to the system. At Mount Meigs outside Montgomery, the rate was 73 percent.

The study also looked at return rates for delinquents sent to private contractors paid by the state. The Bridge Male Adventure Treatment program, a boot camp type of facility, posted the highest recidivism among private programs at 73 percent.

The study also found that children sent to DYS at ages 11 and 12 were the most likely to return. Older children were less likely, possibly because of maturity, researchers said.

Officials speculated that youngsters sent off for minor problems were becoming more hardened at juvenile prisons.

"Do you really want to lock up an 11- or 12-year-old because they weren't going to school?" Champion asked. "They become far more street smart, just because of the nature of self-preservation. They become tougher and harder, and in some respects they become far bolder because they've had to defend themselves in a situation that's not Sunday School."

Family counseling:

Champion and Cobb emphasized that the release of the study was not aimed at embarrassing DYS, but the first step in using a research-based approach to reforming a broken system.

They called for an increase in treatment programs that keep families together and offer mental health treatment and counseling, as opposed to "warehousing" teens away from their families.

Family court judges in the Wiregrass region are using a pilot program called Multi Systemic Therapy, or MST, that has been successful in other states and has shown to have a 30 percent recidivism rate, Champion said.

MST involves the whole family in counseling, rather than locking up children.

DYS officials have been reluctant to give up their funding for local, less restrictive programs. Until these sorts of programs are available statewide, Champion said, parents will continue to turn to the courts for help with mentally ill children, and the children will get locked up instead of diagnosed.
http://www.al.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/112323362124150.xml&coll=2

E-mail: ccrowder@bhamnews.com

Posted by lois at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)

AL: 1/5 of state's budget goes for prisons

Alabama adopted a $1.55 billion General Fund budget.

"Twenty percent of the money, $305 million, will go to pay for the state's prison system at a cost of about $10,991 per inmate. Only one item in the General Fund is larger: the $429 million in spending for Medicaid, the state-federal health-care safety net for poor people."

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/NEWSV5/storyV5STATEBUD05W.htm

By John Davis
Montgomery Advertiser

The newly signed state budget to pay for health care, prisons, courts and other government services contains enough money to give almost every Alabamian $344.

To put it another way, the $1.55 billion in the General Fund budget for next year is enough dollar bills to build a 37-foot-high wall of cash from the Capitol on Dexter Avenue to the governor's mansion on South Perry Street, a distance of almost one and a half miles.

That much money is a vague concept to most people, according to local financial planner Van Sievers.

"Once you talk about over a million, people don't have any concept," said Sievers, the general partner for Financial Solutions Group in Montgomery.

Twenty percent of the money, $305 million, will go to pay for the state's prison system at a cost of about $10,991 per inmate.

Only one item in the General Fund is larger: the $429 million in spending for Medicaid, the state-federal health-care safety net for poor people.

Unlike prisons, the federal government outspends states for Medicaid, meaning that the General Fund's $429 million will help buy the state a $4 billion program.

For many people, these large numbers don't mean much unless they see money coming out of their own pocketbooks. According to John M. Cluck, a semi-retired financial planner in Montgomery, people pay attention to government spending "only as it affects them through taxes."

No one in the Alabama Legislature or Gov. Bob Riley's office is pushing for more taxes, even though many are quick to point out how difficult it is to pay for the state's General Fund needs with the money on hand.

It was so difficult this year that the Legislature had to convene twice to come up with a budget, finishing the task with only two months left in the current budget year.

"We are grateful to the administration and the Legislature for working together on a budget that will allow the agency to continue to provide services and eligibility at their existing levels," said Medicaid spokeswoman Mary Finch, of the program that offers health care to one in five Alabamians.

Riley signed the budget Thursday, ensuring funding for the state's court system, police and the Choccolocco Creek Watershed, which is getting $18,397, or enough stacked dollar bills to match the height of a tall man.

Posted by lois at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

Black Commentator: Mass Incarceration and the Black Elite

Text of Radio BC audio commentary

August 5 2005

When Black Commentator Associate Editor Bruce Dixon wrote his recent Cover Story, “The Ten Worst Places to be Black,” some people in Wisconsin and Iowa got very upset. In terms of the disparity in the rates of incarceration between Blacks and whites, Wisconsin and Iowa were number one and number two. Number three was the prison hell called Texas, but Wisconsin and Iowa’s racial imprisonment disparity was more than twice as large as even Texas. Therefore, Wisconsin and Iowa were placed at the top of our Ten Worst Places to be Black. Milwaukee seems to tattoo prison numbers on Black baby boys, at birth.

Dixon also pointed out that Milwaukee has the highest child poverty rate of any big city in the country. There is, of course, a connection. It’s very difficult to build two-parent families when such huge numbers of would-be marriage partners are in prison. The effects cascade throughout Black society, destroying the very fabric of African American life.

However, there is an historical current in Black politics that is more embarrassed than outraged at mass Black incarceration. Thus, we witnessed a long NAACP boycott of the state of South Carolina, because it refused to remove the confederate flag from the Capital Building – but then the NAACP stages its national convention in Milwaukee. The NAACP rewarded – with millions of convention dollars – the city with the highest Black incarceration and child poverty rates. Somebody’s got their priorities very, very wrong. These are the same people who care more about getting relatively small numbers of Blacks in prestigious universities, than punishing the localities that place far higher numbers of young Blacks in prison. They care more about getting contracts for a few more Black business people, than in destroying the savage, thirty-year old public policy of criminalizing whole Black neighborhoods.

I’m reminded of a petition sent to the white administration of New Orleans by an elite organization of Blacks, back in the 1880s. These community leaders were upset that Black women city jail inmates were set to work cleaning up the streets. Their concern was not for the well-being of the female inmates, many of whom had been sentenced for prostitution, and some of whom were probably glad to get out of the dungeons and into the open air.

No, the Black elite were upset that the sight of these unfortunate women on New Orleans boulevards made the “colored race” look bad. They were embarrassed. A century and a quarter later, much of the African American elite is exhibiting the same political behavior. Why else would they reward a city that treats its Black citizens as badly as Milwaukee. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.

You can visit the Radio BC page to listen to any of our audio commentaries voiced by Co-Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Glen Ford. We publish the text of the radio commentary each week along with the audio program.

Posted by lois at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times: Groups Expanding Background Checks

August 4, 2005
By STEPHANIE STROM

Volunteering and working for an organization that serves children often means consenting to an extensive background check.

Now that examination just keeps going - and going.
Several Boys & Girls Clubs have begun using a technology that provides continuing updates on criminal convictions among staff members and volunteers. The clubs say concerns about children's safety outweigh any potential invasion of privacy.

The Boy Scouts of America is considering whether to use a similar technology, a spokesman, Greg Shields, said.

Nonprofit groups that work with children have been searching for better ways to screen adults, especially after the pedophilia scandals rocked the Roman Catholic Church, frightened parents and drove up the cost of liability insurance.

Several groups said the new idea was intriguing.

"If it means faster, better access to criminal records, I'd certainly want to hear about it," Brian Hassett, president of Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Central Arizona, said. "You have a real need to know who your volunteers and staff are when you deal with children."

Verified Person of New York, the company supplying the information to about 15 Boys & Girls Club organizations, has collected more than 70 percent of all felony and misdemeanor convictions from federal, state and county courthouses and continuously updates its database, significantly enlarging the scope of information available and the ease of looking it up.

"It also captures anyone who's had a charge brought against them, though we only report those individuals who've been convicted, to allow for the mentality that people are innocent until proven guilty," said Tal Moise, who founded Verified Person with John Sculley, former chief executive of Apple Computer.

Civil rights experts say the collection and widespread commercial distribution of such information raises hard questions. Are all crimes relevant? Should age at the time of conviction be considered? How much time must pass before a conviction is discounted or ignored? To whom should it be made available?

How important, for instance, is the knowledge that someone who is applying to volunteer to mentor a child was convicted for shoplifting 35 years ago, when she was 19?

"The real point is that all this is happening without rules and boundaries and thought and legislation," said Ira Glasser, president of the Drug Policy Alliance and former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The information is now so unlimited and so discretionary, and the privacy issues spring from that lack of boundaries."

Mr. Hassett and other executives at nonprofit groups acknowledged the privacy questions but said concerns about child safety outweighed them. The system allows clients, whether corporations or charities, to specify what criminal infractions they would like to track and how often they would like to be notified.

Sonya D. van Norden, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Stamford, Conn., said that if the system produced a record of criminal activity, an applicant would be asked for greater detail and would, in some cases, be allowed to volunteer or work at the club anyway. Any record of sexual or drug abuse, however, immediately disqualifies an applicant.

"The most important thing," Ms. van Norden said, "is to protect our members, and the sooner you find out something that might not be in their best interests, the better."

For that reason, Mr. Glasser expressed concern about the potential effects on participation by members of minorities. A report in 2001 from the Sentencing Project said African-Americans made up 13 percent of the drug-using population but 35 percent of the people arrested in drug crimes and 53 percent of those convicted of such crimes.

While keeping drug offenders away from children is laudable, the statistics suggest that the effects may not be equitable.
"If this becomes a permanent barrier to employment and volunteering because of the use of this technology, then you're locking in the racial discrimination already in the system and multiplying its effect to a devastating degree," Mr. Glasser said.

Along with privacy concerns, some groups wonder how helpful the additional information will be.

A spokeswoman for Girl Scouts of America, Ellen Christie, said that her group's volunteers were never allowed to be alone with children, so its conventional background checks were probably adequate.

"We have very stringent rules about how many adult volunteers, staff and so forth need to be with what number of kids," Ms. Christie said.
Privacy advocates said the technology was no guarantee against problems and could create a false sense of security.

"You're always going to miss information," Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said. "And there will always be individuals who don't have criminal records who will nonetheless present problems."
Ms. Givens noted that certain convictions could be expunged after a period of time and that such technology would circumvent the lawful processes that let people clear their names. "There will be this black mark against them," she said.
The system will pick up far more convictions because it checks records nationally, rather than just by county or state, as many past searches have. And that is a big improvement in an era of easy mobility, said Susan P. Crawford, a privacy expert at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University.
If used properly, the technology does not create a real problem, Ms. Crawford said, adding: "This service is no more than a speeded-up version of what already happens. So if the process of conviction was a fair one, we should not be queasy about making the results of that process available more immediately."

Les Nichols, vice president of club safety and design at Boys & Girls Clubs of America, said about a third of the criminal records that turned up were from states other than the one where the applications were submitted.
"It can take as long as 18 months to retrieve those records," Mr. Nichols said, "and that time lag works against us, particularly because we are in a business where we have a lot of seasonal staff and volunteers. The quick turnaround the technology provides is very valuable."

Executives at nonprofit organizations also point out that volunteers and staff members are typically told that they will be subject to background checks when applying for a position.

"We do let everyone know up front that this is what we'll be doing, and if you have a problem with that, then you can decline to volunteer or be an employee here," said Sharon Driggers, vice president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Fort Worth.
Ms. Driggers's unit and the Stamford group are among roughly 15 affiliates that recently started Verified Person. Roughly one-fifth of the system customers are nonprofit organizations. The rest are corporations in the health care, retail, dating services, professional services, finance and security industries.

The Right One, a dating service, has been using the system to screen its customers and staff members. Its chief executive, Paul A. Falzone, said it had lowered costs and decreased the time to finish background checks.

Conventional background checks can be expensive and cumbersome. Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Central Arizona runs a F.B.I. check on each volunteer as well as a background check of criminal records.

Mr. Hassett said he asked volunteers to pay the $46 cost but worried that that discouraged some.
"The biggest issue, though, is that it takes a long time to get results," he said. "It takes weeks, and sometimes months, to get clearances, and I've got 1,100 kids waiting for a volunteer."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2005

CA: Women Still Give Birth In Shackles

Tue, Aug. 02, 2005
EDITORIAL, ContraCosta Times, CA
Remove the shackles

A WOMAN IN LABOR writhes in pain on a hospital bed, and as she does, a shackle secures one of her ankles to the bed rail. It sounds like something out of a medieval chamber of horrors. But believe it or not, that's what happens when a female prisoner in California -- and in 20 other states -- gives birth.

Women inmates are routinely cuffed during transport from prison to the hospital, during most of their labor and immediately after childbirth. The ankle restraints aren't removed until the doctor decides that the woman has gone into "active" labor -- whatever that is supposed to mean. What it usually winds up being is the final, pushing stage.
\

What possible reason could there be for this barbaric practice when at least one guard is in the delivery room watching an inmate at all times?

"Basically, we don't want them to escape -- that's the bottom line," says state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Terry Thornton. "It's part of our mission of public safety."

Well, we don't want them to escape either, but surely a trained prison guard can handle a single inmate in labor.
Under department guidelines, all prisoners, without exceptions, who leave state prisons for outside medical treatment are to be shackled and guarded by at least one officer.
We find it hard to believe that a prisoner going through labor is going to leap off the delivery table and flee, between contractions. True, these women are in prison because they have committed crimes -- some of them serious. But a guard who is incapable of keeping a pregnant woman in the throes of labor from fleeing needs to find another line of work.
This absurd logic must have come from the same rocket scientists who were paying vast sums of overtime for corrections officers to guard comatose inmates around the clock at taxpayer expense.
Fortunately, saner minds realize that this kind of treatment has no place in a civilized society. Besides increasing a pregnant woman's already significant discomfort, shackling can have harmful effects on the baby, who, incidentally did not commit a crime, and is already coming into the world with a major strike against him or her.
Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-San Jose, has introduced a bill that would ban the shackling of pregnant inmates, during transport from prison to the hospital and during delivery. The long overdue bill, now awaits action by the Senate. We support the bill and urge lawmakers to act quickly to put an end to this horrible practice.
Even the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association -- usually vehemently opposed to any loosening of inmate restrictions -- supports a change in policy, with exceptions only for high-risk inmates.
They too understand that it's not a matter of coddling criminals; it's a matter of basic human decency and common sense.
© 2005 ContraCostaTimes.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.contracostatimes.com

Posted by lois at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)

SOROS Justice Fellowships

Dear Colleagues,
In 2006, OSI’s U.S. Justice Fund will support individuals through two programs: the Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowships and the Soros Justice Media Fellowships. Similar in many respects to the previous initiative, the newly launched program will fund outstanding lawyers, advocates, grassroots organizers, activist academics, journalists and filmmakers to implement innovative projects that address one or more of the U.S. Justice Fund's criminal justice priorities. Projects should seek to accomplish one or more of the following:
· advance death penalty reform and abolition efforts;

· improve public defense services;

· combat racial profiling;

· promote leadership in progressive justice reform efforts among people who are or have been imprisoned;

· encourage systemic reforms that create incentives for community based solutions over parole and probation revocation;

· challenge unreasonable civil and legal barriers to the reintegration of people returning from prison;

· redirect criminal justice monies to strengthen community resources and responsibility for public safety and justice;

· advance sentencing reform efforts;

· curtail prison expansion;

· empower communities most affected by mass incarceration to develop and advocate for alternative policies that address underlying social, racial and economic inequality.

Projects may also emphasize the intersection of the above priorities with the particular needs of: communities of color; immigrants; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities; and women and children.

The Advocacy Fellowships have two distinct tracks. Track I supports new and emerging advocates with two to five years of advocacy experience. Track II supports seasoned leaders with a minimum of ten years experience in their fields and five years of advocacy experience. Both tracks are 18 months in duration and may be implemented in conjunction with large or small not-for-profit organizations The Media Fellowships support mid-career and veteran print journalists, filmmakers, and individuals with unique voices proposing writing projects and are 12 months in duration.

Guidelines and application information are now available on our website at: http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/focus_areas/justice_fellows/

The Fellowship deadline is Friday, October 14, 2005 at 5PM

Please forward this information onto your listservs and throughout your professional networks to help us get the word out! Feel free to contact me with any questions or ideas for how to publicize the Fellowships far and wide and reach strong potential applicants around the country.

For additional information, please contact Nidia Cordova-Vazquez at ncordova@sorosny.org.
Nicole Kief
The After Prison Initiative
Open Society Institute
400 W 59th Street
New York, NY 10019
nkief@sorosny.org
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/focus_areas/after_prison/

Posted by lois at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)

MA: It's Time to Re-Think CORI

ADRIAN WALKER
It's time to rethink CORI
By Adrian Walker, Globe Columnist | August 4, 2005

The notion that the Boston City Council chambers could be packed in support of convicted criminals seems odd at first thought.

But the chambers were yesterday, thanks to a newfound broad consensus that something is wrong with the state's criminal records law, better known by its acronym, CORI.

It is a law that, many assert, is keeping thousands of people from finding work or housing. It is the punishment that keeps punishing. Given the constant concern over how released criminals are going to return to society, CORI reform, for decades a political loser, is suddenly hot.

''These city councilors are dealing with people coming out of jail with no place to go," said Horace Small of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods. ''How can we lose with this kind of support?"

The council, a group that has trouble finding unanimity on what time it is, voted 13-0 yesterday to pass a resolution calling for reform of the records law.

The resolution is nonbinding, since it concerns state law over which the council has no jurisdiction. But it's far from meaningless. It's part of a growing movement to make changes to a 32-year-old law whose effectiveness has been greatly diluted over time.

No sane person disputes the need to keep certain classes of criminals out of certain occupations. But the law, which was originally intended to make reentry to society easier by limiting public access to criminal records, plainly doesn't do that anymore.

Some 55 bills seeking to overhaul some aspect of the CORI law are pending in the Legislature. Most would make access to the records more restricted or would delete some information, such as charges in which there was no conviction.

Councilor at Large Stephen J. Murphy, the lead sponsor of the resolution, said it meets a need.

''There's a tremendous amount of the population in this state who are crying for help," Murphy said. ''And one of the ways we can help them is by reforming this system that is out of whack."

No one knows how many Massachusetts residents have records in the system. Advocates throw out the figure of 2.8 million records, implying that nearly half the state's residents have records. That's not true, since there is no provision for purging the registry, which includes records going back decades. So, Malcolm X, deceased 40 years and last a Massachusetts resident in the early 1950s, still has a record in the CORI system.

Meanwhile, access to the records has swelled far beyond the original intention of the law, with good reason. In 1973 there wasn't nearly the anxiety about protecting vulnerable people, especially children and the elderly, that there is now. As a result, more than 11,000 agencies have access to the records, a number that grows almost every day.

That means that there are all kinds of jobs that people, regardless of their offense, are shut out of. And because the records include charges as well as convictions, even a charge that didn't bring a conviction can come back to haunt you.

In theory, some of the records are sealed eventually. But even that is imperfect, because it invites potential employers to think the crimes under seal are worse than they might actually be.

''I'm a defense lawyer, and I've told clients they're better off not sealing their records," said Representative Eugene L. O'Flaherty, Democrat of Chelsea and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. ''I've told them that they're better off explaining the circumstances to potential employers."

He says he hopes to consolidate the mountain of bills now clogging the pipeline into one piece of legislation that could pass. He favors reform, though he doesn't seem certain how much, given the competing concerns of public safety and rehabilitation.

Certainly, the difference between a good bill and a bad one will reside in the fine print. But if we really believe offenders deserve a second chance, then the CORI law has to get a second look. Even Chuck Turner and Jimmy Kelly agree on that.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2005

Meth Science Not Stigma: Opeoon Letter to the Media

Meth Science Not Stigma: Open Letter to the Media
http://www.jointogether.org/sa/files/pdf/Meth_Letter.pdf
”As medical and psychological researchers, with many years of experience studying prenatal exposure to psychoactive substances, and as medical researchers, treatment providers and specialists with many years of experience studying addictions and addiction treatment, we are writing to request that policies addressing prenatal exposure to methamphetamines and media coverage of this issue be based on science, not presumption or prejudice.”

Posted by lois at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

Meth Science Not Stigma: Opeoon Letter to the Media

Meth Science Not Stigma: Open Letter to the Media
http://www.jointogether.org/sa/files/pdf/Meth_Letter.pdf
”As medical and psychological researchers, with many years of experience studying prenatal exposure to psychoactive substances, and as medical researchers, treatment providers and specialists with many years of experience studying addictions and addiction treatment, we are writing to request that policies addressing prenatal exposure to methamphetamines and media coverage of this issue be based on science, not presumption or prejudice.”

Posted by lois at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

CT: What's Causing So Many Suicides in Prisons

commentary

What's Causing So Many Inmate Suicides

What's behind the two-year surge in the number of prisoners in Connecticut lockups taking their own lives? A ballooning percentage of prisoners with mental illnesses and an alarming lack of oversight.

By Mary Beth Pfeiffer

July 31 2005

Connecticut's prisons are grappling with an outbreak of inmate suicide that is testing the mettle of correctional and mental health staff and raising questions about their preparedness.

There were nine suicides in the system last year, and five so far this year. From 1997 to 2003, the annual average was 3.6. Clearly, something is going on.

The latest suicide, last Sunday, was particularly tragic. It involved a 17-year-old inmate at the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire, who used a bedsheet to hang himself - the method used in the vast majority of inmate suicides.

Prison suicides are prone to spike on occasion, but Connecticut's rash - now in its second year - suggests it is no anomaly. Instead, it likely reflects the system's struggle to deal with its fastest-growing population of inmates: those who suffer from mental illness. The share of mentally ill inmates in Connecticut's 18 prisons rose from 5 percent in 1991 to 20 percent currently, or nearly 3,600 inmates. The youth who died Sunday reportedly suffered from bipolar and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Connecticut is taking concrete steps to address its mentally ill population, thanks to an enlightened administration that has recognized the need to act and a lawsuit that helped push the effort along. The lawsuit, filed in August 2003 and settled in March 2004, contended that mentally ill inmates were given "systematically inadequate" mental health care and were subjected to conditions in solitary confinement that "approach the limits of human endurance."

Under the settlement, the state has consolidated and increased care of its most seriously mentally ill inmates at Garner Correctional Institution, a 600-inmate facility in Newtown that once housed gang members. The state also now excludes seriously mentally ill inmates from "supermax" confinement at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers because of its harmful effects. Connecticut is one of only four states nationwide with such a policy.

These are good developments but they are not enough. Beyond Garner's walls are 3,000 mentally ill inmates in 17 other facilities; many are unsentenced people in jails, where the risk of suicide is greater.

Officers need more training in handling ill inmates, and they need more help in monitoring and caring for them. Understaffing is a chronic problem, forcing officers to work overtime and precluding their ability to conduct rounds often enough to intervene in suicide attempts.

In two suicides last year, officers at Bridgeport and New Haven were fired for failing to make scheduled rounds, and a New Haven lieutenant was disciplined. More broadly, the fault extends beyond the front lines. A lawsuit filed in connection with the death in 2002 of an inmate at MacDougall-Walker contends that mental health evaluations before the inmate's death lasted less than a minute and were conducted through his cell door. This is a common practice in prisons that do not have enough staff to serve sick inmates, and it should stop.

The system's inability to handle sick inmates has been tragic and expensive - not only in the case of suicides. In two lawsuits settled in 2002, the state paid $4 million to the families of inmates who died when guards attempted to restrain them. Both had long histories of mental illness that should have altered their course of care while incarcerated.

One died when he was sent to a Virginia prison to relieve overcrowding; mentally ill inmates were supposed to be excluded from transfer. The other died at Hartford Correctional Center - where three of the 2004 suicides occurred - when he suffocated after being held face down with his hands behind his back. Although that case occurred in 1999, another restraint death, involving an inmate with a history of mental illness, occurred at Garner in May 2004. And in three other cases since 2002, the state paid a total of $1.3 million to settle lawsuits filed after inmate suicides.

Connecticut is not alone in struggling with this population. In Iowa, four inmates killed themselves in a recent 21-month period in a unit for mentally ill inmates designed, ironically, to keep inmates safe. Ohio's prisons saw more suicides last year - 11 - than in any previous year, including two in a 24-hour period. Nationwide, 16 percent of jail and prison inmates are or have been mentally ill.

The Connecticut Department of Correction has taken steps to prevent inmate suicide, such as removal of shoelaces and wall hooks, better mental health evaluation at admission and stepped-up observation of inmates at risk. Officers receive a wallet card of suicide warning signs with their paychecks. More than a year ago, the department assured the public that it was "employing the highest level of preventative measures." Yet the problem persists.

Connecticut set the stage for this crisis by starving community mental health care in the 1990s while closing two of its psychiatric hospitals, Norwich Hospital and Fairfield Hills Hospital. Making matters worse, when budget problems hit in 2003, 15 percent of state mental health staff was cut.

Prison expenditures, meanwhile, have tripled in Connecticut since 1991 to more than a half-billion dollars a year.

Lacking decent housing and support in the community, mentally ill people often land behind bars because that's the only bed available.

Connecticut is trying to change course. It was one of few states that saw its prison population decline last year, part of a concerted effort to divert mentally ill people from the criminal justice system and provide alternatives to jail. But the toll of inmate suicides should serve as an urgent reminder that the state's work has just begun - that far more must be done to keep this vulnerable population out of prison and care for those that are there.

Mary Beth Pfeiffer of Stone Ridge, N.Y., a former editor at the Poughkeepsie Journal, was a 2004 Soros Justice Media Fellow. She is writing a book about the mentally ill in prison.
Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-inmatescommentary0731.artjul31,0,285431.story?coll=hc-headlines-

Posted by lois at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2005

Private Prisons Experience Business Surge

By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer 54 minutes ago

Though state governments are no longer fueling a private prison boom, the industry's major companies are upbeat - thanks in large measure to a surge of business from federal agencies seeking to house fast-rising numbers of criminals and detained aliens.

Since 2000, the number of federal inmates in private facilities - prisons and halfway houses - has increased by two-thirds to more than 24,000. Thousands more detainees not convicted of crimes are confined in for-profit facilities, which now hold roughly 14 percent of all federal prisoners, compared to less than 6 percent of state inmates.

Critics, including prisoners rights groups and unionized corrections
officers, contend the policy amounts to a federal bailout of an industry that would otherwise be struggling with a checkered record. The companies and the government say they provide a flexible, economical alternative to building new federal prisons as get-tough policies boost demand for space in
an overcrowded system.

"If the Bureau of Prisons is going to build capacity for themselves, they have to plan eight years in advance," said John Ferguson, chief executive of the Corrections Corporation of America, the biggest company in the field. "It takes a lot longer in the public sector than private sector to get things done."

The industry expanded rapidly in the 1990s on the assumption that business in a tough-on-crime era would grow indefinitely. But escapes and violence at a few private prisons, along with questions about cost savings, tempered enthusiasm.

Saddled with thousands of empty beds, CCA teetered near bankruptcy before new federal contracts helped it rebound. Since 2000, the Nashville, Tenn.-based company has doubled its number of federal prisoners to 18,200 - 29 percent of its overall inmate population.

"The federal government smiled on them just in time," said Judith Greene, a New York-based prison-policy analyst.

Business is certain to grow. Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley said the number of federal inmates is expected to rise from 185,000 to 226,000 by 2010, with private companies likely to be relied on for housing non-citizen immigrants convicted of federal crimes.

The number of people detained by U.S. immigration officials also is
increasing rapidly - up three-fold in the past 10 years to more than 21,000 at a given time. In December, Congress passed a terrorism prevention bill calling for 40,000 additional beds by 2010 for aliens awaiting deportation.

Many of the detainees are housed at facilities run by CCA and its main rival, GEO Group - formerly Wackenhut. Both companies anticipate their detention business will grow.

"Those two are huge beneficiaries of overincarceration in the immigration system," said Lucas Guttentag of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants Rights Project.

The private facilities are required to meet "rigorous federal standards," said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback. Yet critics insist privatization will lead to cost-cutting and accountability problems affecting detainees' welfare.

"They're putting in a system where it's easier to pass the buck," said lawyer Dan Kesselbrenner of the Boston-based National Immigration Project.

Rep. Ted Strickland (news, bio, voting record), D-Ohio, a former prison psychologist, tried unsuccessfully to block privatization approval in Congress. "When the primary goal is profit, that can and probably does lead to a variety of abuse," Strickland said. "I don't see any end in sight."

On the state level, there is no comparable boom for private prisons, but neither is there the bust some industry critics anticipated. As of mid-2004, private prisons housed 74,285 state inmates, compared to 76,763 in mid-2001.

About 30 states use private prisons, notably in the South and West. Texas has the most inmates in private facilities - more than 16,000; New Mexico has the highest portion of inmates in them - 43 percent.

Most states' policies remain unchanged since the 1990s and the bottom line is that overcrowding remains a stubborn problem.

Still, arguments persist over the pros and cons of private prisons, which pay lower average wages than government agencies. Whether this undermines performance is hotly debated, although federal researchers concluded in 2001 that high staff turnover did aggravate security problems at many private facilities.

Industry officials insist they have addressed such concerns.

"For those who think the public employee monopoly should be maintained, and sentencing advocates who believe we send too many people to prison, we're an easy target," said CCA's Ferguson. "But if I'm chief executive of a state, I'd see a value to having competition in my prison system."

The industry's future is bright enough that GEO Group is buying rival
Correctional Services Corp., but prospects hinge largely on incarceration trends. Many states have balked at funding new prisons, and now face crowding problems they could ease by using private prisons or diverting some offenders to alternatives like drug-treatment programs.

"The drug war has been the main cause of profits for private prisons," said University of North Florida criminologist Michael Hallett. "We've gotten so extreme in overusing incarceration that we have for-profit industries with an interest in high crime rates."

Geoff Segal of the pro-privatization Reason Foundation predicted private companies will diversify their state business - offering more health and rehabilitation programs, for example.

"States with private prisons aren't going to get rid of them," Segal said. "It's a tough sell for a state to say it's going to spend more money on corrections rather than on Medicaid."

On the Net:

Prison statistics: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim04.htm

Release Date: 7/28/2005

Posted by lois at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

CT: Rell Will Cloe Training Center for Juveniles

August 2, 2005
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
MIDDLETOWN, Conn., Aug. 1 - Gov. M. Jodi Rell stood inside the troubled Connecticut Juvenile Training School here on Monday and declared it a $57 million failure that the state must shut down.

"It was intended to give the young men the tools that they needed to succeed when they returned home, to strengthen the connections to home, to family and to community and to help them succeed in school and in life," the governor said.

"But it became apparent all too soon that it simply wasn't working, and it simply wasn't happening here. There was too little programming and little opportunity and too much of a prisonlike atmosphere and far too much recidivism. You couldn't help but be terribly saddened by the failure of C.J.T.S. to fulfill its promise."

What Mrs. Rell did not say was that for all the faults of a juvenile detention center many corrections experts say reflected an obsolete approach even before it opened, the school also became a symbol - and hard evidence - of the folly and corruption that eventually put her predecessor, John G. Rowland, in federal prison.

The scandal that led Mr. Rowland to resign last summer amid an impeachment inquiry and later to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge was made sensational with tales of free vacations and home renovations he received. But at its core were connections between the governor and the contractor who gave many of those gifts, William A. Tomasso. His companies built the juvenile center in a "fast-track" process pushed through with the help of Mr. Rowland's former co-chief of staff, Peter N. Ellef.

"A lot of people look back on the impeachment and think it was all about a hot tub," said State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat who is co-chairman of the legislature's judiciary committee. "It wasn't. It was about this."

Now, while Mr. Rowland is serving a year and a day in a Pennsylvania prison, Mr. Tomasso and Mr. Ellef still face federal charges. And Mrs. Rell, a Republican who is expected to announce soon whether she will run for governor next year, has taken a dramatic step to deal with a center some say was fatally flawed even before it opened in August 2001.

Many lawmakers and juvenile justice experts have been saying for years that the school, designed to hold 240 boys under 16 who have been convicted of largely nonviolent crimes, is out of step with evolving approaches to juvenile rehabilitation. They say the state should have smaller, less restrictive facilities with a heavy emphasis on educational programs to prepare the youths for life after confinement - thinking that has led the school's administrators to shrink its population to about 92 under Mrs. Rell.

Mrs. Rell said her decision to close the school was based on the conclusions of a report she ordered in April from the Department of Children and Families. It had nothing to do with hopes of finally banishing the ghost of Mr. Rowland, she said.

"This is not a political issue, and please don't make it one," she said. "We need to do what is best for these boys."

Often echoing the 13-page report, which was released on Monday, the governor proposed phasing out the school by 2008 and replacing it with three smaller facilities, called Treatment and Reintegration Education Centers. Two would house 36 to 45 boys each, and a third would hold about 12 girls. The report also recommends creating 16 places in "therapeutic group homes" and adding 7 places to "therapeutic foster care" homes.

The group homes and the new schools for boys could cost as little as $23.2 million, if the state finds existing sites to renovate. Building two centers on newly acquired land could cost as much as $39.9 million, according to the report. Costs for a girls' center were not estimated.

Running the two new centers for boys, the group homes and new counseling and educational services would cost $29.7 million a year, compared with $32.9 million currently spent to run the training school, said Gary Kleeblatt, spokesman for the Department of Children and Families.

The training school, behind barbed wire on a slope beside the Connecticut Valley Hospital, will probably be converted for use by the department of public safety or homeland security, the governor said, but it will not become a prison.

"You kind of have to scratch your head to figure out what to do with it," Representative Lawlor said.

Despite questions over financing and the future of the current school, Mr. Lawlor praised the decision, as did child advocates. Yet Senate President Pro Tempore Don Williams, a Democrat who has become Mrs. Rell's rival at the Capitol, suggested that Mrs. Rell had not done enough to improve programming at the training school.

Now, he said, she is trying to "put the best possible face on a $57 million disaster."

Several lawmakers recalled on Monday how Mr. Rowland refused to consider a less centralized approach to dealing with juvenile offenders in the late 1990's. The issue became urgent in September 1998, when a 15-year-old girl, Tabatha Brendle, hanged herself at the state's former juvenile detention center, known as Long Lane School, near the Wesleyan University campus in Middletown.

Two months after the suicide, Mr. Ellef, Mr. Tomasso and others in Mr. Rowland's administration, including Kristine Ragaglia, then the commissioner of the Department of Children and Families, went to Marion, Ohio, to inspect a high-security juvenile center viewed as a possible model for a new Connecticut complex. With the prodding of Mr. Ellef, the project was fast-tracked through the legislature the next spring, and the Tomasso companies, armed with inside information from the trip, submitted the winning proposal.

Mr. Rowland learned about the Ohio trip on Nov. 22, 1998, according to the plea agreement he signed two days before Christmas last year. In the eyes of federal prosecutors, his crime, in this instance, was doing nothing.

"Despite having learned that Tomasso and related entities had inappropriately received confidential and inside information about the C.J.T.S. project," the agreement read, "defendant John G. Rowland took no corrective action."

In March 1999, Mr. Rowland and his wife, Patricia, vacationed at Mr. Tomasso's Florida home for what the plea agreement called "a nominal amount" of money. In May 1999, Mr. Tomasso, along with Mr. Ellef and others, arranged and paid for a new heating system in the Rowlands' cottage on Bantam Lake in Litchfield.

Five years later, on June 21, 2004, Mr. Rowland announced his resignation. It was the same day that a legislative impeachment committee was to begin exploring the training school issue.

"I still believe that one of the reasons he announced it that day was to avoid the public presentation of this story," Mr. Lawlor said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

LA: Growing Child Poverty Linked to Incarceration of Parents

"Four employment barriers that experts consider the most difficult to
overcome conspire against these poor families, the Casey Foundation said: substance abuse, domestic violence, depression and a history of
incarceration.

Louisiana has, by far, the nation's highest incarceration rate, with nearly 37,000 people in the state prison system alone. In the United States, more than 2 million men and women are locked up in prisons or jails. "Far too often, particularly for the formerly incarcerated, they can also negatively influence potential employers' hiring decisions," the Casey report said. "Parental incarceration takes an obvious toll on children, which typically reveals itself in lower self-esteem, depression, emotional withdrawal, and disruptive and delinquent behavior. It also has a significant impact on
their economic well-being."

The Times-Picayune
Child poverty in La. grows, study says
State's statistics worsen in 8 of 10 categories
Wednesday, July 27, 2005

By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer

Louisiana's child poverty rate, perennially among the worst in the nation, soared by a staggering 11 percent between 2000 and 2003, according to a major national study. As many as half the state's youngsters live in households with incomes below the poverty level and 30 percent of them are trapped in outright destitution, the study found.

Released today, the Kids Count survey ranks Louisiana 49th in the United States when an array of indicators for child well-being are factored together, among them rates of child death, single-parent homes and households where parents don't hold full-time jobs.

Only Mississippi ranks below Louisiana in the overall compilation by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit agency based in Baltimore that watches over the welfare of the nation's children.

"Louisiana is getting worse faster than the rest of the country," said William O'Hare, the researcher for Casey who wrote this year's study, the 16th produced annually by the foundation.

Of 10 categories that O'Hare studied, Louisiana's statistics grew worse in eight, including infant mortality, high school dropouts and teen deaths. Louisiana made improvements in two of the 10 categories: Teen birthrate and percentage of teens not attending school and not working.

Deadly consequences

The teen death rate was Louisiana's poorest performance in the report, having risen by 18 percent between 2000 and 2002 for those 15 to 19 years old. Louisiana's infant mortality rate jumped 14 percent and the child death rate, ages 1 to 14, rose by 9 percent.

Louisiana's children made progress by reducing the rate of teenagers giving birth, a 6 percent decline in stride with a national trend that began several years ago.

Across the country, child poverty has been on the increase since the late 1990s, the report said. Four million children live in low-income households in which neither a parent nor any other adult worked in the previous year.

Between 2000 and 2004, the number of children living in low-income
households jumped from 2.9 million to 3.9 million, the study found. One million of those children reside in suburbs, while 600,000 live in rural America.

'Moving in wrong direction'

In Louisiana, about one child in 10 lives in a home in which neither parent holds down a formal full-time job. "The data is discouraging since we're moving in the wrong direction," said Shannon Johnson, of Agenda for Children in New Orleans, a child advocacy
nonprofit. "We absolutely have to look at child poverty and the problems facing children in the state in the context of the family. Domestic violence, substance abuse, all of these things are related to the fact that 9 percent of kids live in households where no one works."

Four employment barriers that experts consider the most difficult to
overcome conspire against these poor families, the Casey Foundation said: substance abuse, domestic violence, depression and a history of
incarceration.

Louisiana has, by far, the nation's highest incarceration rate, with nearly 37,000 people in the state prison system alone. In the United States, more than 2 million men and women are locked up in prisons or jails. "Far too often, particularly for the formerly incarcerated, they can also negatively influence potential employers' hiring decisions," the Casey report said. "Parental incarceration takes an obvious toll on children, which typically reveals itself in lower self-esteem, depression, emotional withdrawal, and disruptive and delinquent behavior. It also has a significant impact on their economic well-being."

Douglas Nelson, president of the Casey Foundation, said, "Too many parents want to work their way out of poverty, but are unable to do so. The futures of too many kids, as a result, are severely compromised."

Those who spend their days on the front lines of the poverty battle in New Orleans said disadvantaged children often go home to very young parents -- or no parents at all.

"They are dealing with parents who are absentee," said Sharon Alexis, a program administrator for the Gert Town Family Center, part of the area's Catholic Charities. "The parents who are young parents and don't have the nurturing skills, parents who leave them to fend for themselves -- they don't have the skills to tutor their kids. They are not equipped for today's job market."

Federal statisticians define "poverty level" and "low-income" based on income thresholds. Earning a few dollars more than the standard $18,660 a year, the national poverty benchmark, puts a family of four out of the study's grasp -- yet not out of harm's way, O'Hare said.

"If you make $18,661, you're not 'poor,' " he said. "But we know kids in those families are still needy. As stark as it is, the real story is probably even worse."

Impact of bias cited

The Deep South has lagged behind the rest of the nation in each of the 16 years that Casey has published its Kids Count report. A dearth of good-paying jobs with health-care benefits and the region's history of racial oppression are some of the reasons behind the poor rankings, O'Hare said.

"A segment of the population there was not allowed into the mainstream for years, and we're still seeing the vestiges of that experience," O'Hare said.

Along with home ownership, establishing small businesses in city
neighborhoods is an important step toward helping families out of poverty.

But while many city residents have marketable skills, they lack the bankroll to rise from workers to employers, said Rep. Jalila Jefferson-Bullock, D-New Orleans, an advocate of mixing government and private-sector money to create a business start-up fund. "The point is to help people help themselves, by becoming business owners," Jefferson-Bullock said. "It is just one small
pieces of the pie in creating wealth."

. . . . . . .

http://www.nola.com/news/tp/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news4/11224404441442 0.xml

For the complete report, visit www.kidscount.org. Gwen Filosa can be reached
at gfilosa@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3304.

Posted by lois at 08:53 AM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2005

Prison Health Services: A Company's Troubled Answer for Prisoners with HIV

August 1, 2005, NY Times, Page 1
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
HARVEST, Ala. - If there was ever a prison that needed help, it was Limestone Correctional Facility.

Even within the troubled Alabama penal system, this state compound near Huntsville was notorious for cruel punishment and medical neglect. In one drafty, rat-infested warehouse once reserved for chain gangs, the state quarantined its male prisoners with H.I.V. and AIDS, until the extraordinary death toll - 36 inmates from 1999 to 2002 - moved inmates to sue and the government to promise change.

Alabama's solution was to fire the local company in charge of medical care and hire Prison Health Services, the nation's largest commercial provider of health care behind bars. Prison Health's solution was to recruit Dr. Valda M. Chijide, an infectious-disease specialist who arrived last November with a lofty title: statewide coordinator of inmate H.I.V. care.

She was an unlikely candidate for the job in one sense, having never stepped inside a prison. But it did not take her long to conclude that the chaos was continuing, and that much of the problem was Prison Health itself.

Though the company had promised the help of other doctors, she said, she was left alone to care for not only the 230 men in the H.I.V. unit, but the 1,800 other prisoners, too. Nurses were so poorly trained, Dr. Chijide said, that they neglected to hand out life-sustaining drugs or gave the wrong ones. Medical charts were a mess, she said, and often it was impossible to find such basic items as a thermometer, or even soap.

Dr. Chijide lasted barely three months. After she complained in writing, Prison Health suspended her for reasons it would not disclose, and she quit.

Her short, frantic stint - battling for drugs, hospitalizations and extra food for skeletal inmates, she said - was not unusual in the world of Prison Health Services, which has had a turbulent record in many of the 33 states where it has provided jail or prison medicine. But her story, a rare firsthand account of a doctor in charge of a prison's health care, offers an intimate glimpse of the company's work at a moment when the need for change could not have been more pressing, and the spotlight on Prison Health could hardly have been more intense.

Even then, interviews and the reports of a federal court monitor show, the state and the company made promises they did not keep, settling for care that jeopardized inmates' health. And Prison Health, which often laments the difficulty of finding qualified doctors to work in jails and prisons, searched nationwide for a specialist, only to question her integrity.

"If you bring up a problem that they don't want to hear about, they will attack you," said Dr. Chijide, 45. "I felt better resigning than staying on and bending my principles to their principles."

A Prison Health spokesman said the company "had great expectations" for Dr. Chijide (pronounced CHIJ-i-day), but was informed that she had violated company policy, though it would not say how. She was put on leave, the company said, and before it could investigate, she quit.

Dr. Chijide said the company never told her why it suspended her.

Executives said that Prison Health has greatly reduced the number of inmate deaths - to four during its nearly two years in Alabama - and made steady improvements in a difficult program that had been badly run for years. Its corporate medical director, Dr. Carl J. Keldie, said in an interview last December, while Dr. Chijide was still employed there, that the Limestone program was "excellent," and would eventually become one of the best in Prison Health's sprawling operations.

Around the nation, the company has drawn criticism from judges, government overseers, and whistle-blowers, and has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements. In New York, state regulators have faulted Prison Health in several deaths, and are investigating whether it is even operating legally in the state. Yet the company has continued to grow, absorbing rivals and winning new contracts; its largest, serving New York City's jails, was renewed in January, as Dr. Chijide was lodging her complaints.

A low-key but tenacious woman who had a run-in with an earlier employer, Dr. Chijide says the care at Limestone was far from adequate, and there is evidence to support her. In February, the month she resigned, the court monitor described an H.I.V. unit riddled with rats, where broken windows had been replaced with plastic sheeting that was itself falling apart. Thousands of doses of prescribed medications had never been given, as far as the monitor could tell from the slapdash records. No one was being tested for tuberculosis or treated for hepatitis C, which prey on fragile immune systems.

Limestone is not the only hitch in Prison Health's effort to transform a penal backwater. Two hundred miles south, at the state's Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, another federal monitor reported that Prison Health lacked any "organized and structured medical program," and deplored the care given two inmates who died last year.

There is, of course, a higher authority that Prison Health must answer to: the state official charged with making sure it lives up to its contract. That person is Ruth Naglich, who as associate commissioner of the Alabama Corrections Department is supposed to review the company's work.

Three years ago, Ms. Naglich was a Prison Health executive, vice president for sales and marketing, at the company's headquarters outside Nashville.

Ms. Naglich said her connections to the company helped her coax it to improve care. And though her department has moved to fine Prison Health $580,000 over the last year for failing to meet certain performance standards - the company is fighting the fines - she said, "I'm pleased with the progress they've made."

The progress required of the company is laid out in court documents; in their suit over the deaths at Limestone, inmates won a settlement in which the state - and, by extension, Prison Health - agreed in April 2004 to make dozens of fixes in the H.I.V. unit and allow the monitor to inspect regularly. The monitor's reports show the company has made advances in some areas but little headway on some of the most critical reforms, and at one point tried to cover up its failure to comply by hastily updating patient charts. In fact, Dr. Chijide said, the company never even told her about the court settlement.

The New York Times began asking Prison Health in April to discuss its work at Limestone. The company offered in June to arrange an interview with its president, Trey Hartman, but never made him available, and eventually answered only a small number of questions via e-mail.

"P.H.S. continues to provide evidence-based medical care to the patients of the A.D.O.C. in a timely and professional manner," said Benjamin S. Purser Jr., a spokesman for the company, referring to the Alabama Department of Corrections.

The company would not address the monitor's reports or the troubles Dr. Chijide said she had discovered.

"If I had known all those things," she said, "I never would have worked for them in the first place."

A History Kept Hidden

Ringed by corn and cotton fields, Limestone looks unremarkable, a collection of low-rise cellblocks crouched in the shadow of a watchtower. But it houses something unusual in the realm of corrections: a prison-within-a-prison where Alabama keeps all its male inmates with H.I.V. or AIDS, whether they are killers or petty thieves.

This unit was created in 1985 on the theory that segregation would curb infection and security risks - a notion that fell out of favor elsewhere, but not in Alabama, which says it is the only state that still quarantines them. Many corrections experts today say the practice actually increases the risk of infection, and invites neglect.

That is how it worked out at Limestone, according to inmates in the unit who filed suit in 2002, arguing that their living conditions and medical care, by a Birmingham company called Naphcare, amounted to a death sentence. The doctor they hired as a medical expert, Stephen R. Tabet, dug through the pile of mortality records - the rate of AIDS-related deaths in Alabama that year was more than twice the national prison average, according to the Justice Department - and assembled a gruesome gallery.

An emaciated 39-year-old wasted away after begging a doctor for sandwiches. A 29-year-old with pneumonia was short of breath when he arrived at the unit, but waited two days to see a doctor and get a prescription; he never received the medication, and on the fourth day, he suffocated. A 41-year-old, also struggling to breathe, was sent off to a hospital two hours away in a prison van with no medical help, even after a guard urged that he be rushed in an ambulance. "He'll be fine," a nurse said, but the man had a heart attack on the way and died.

Treatment was not much better for those who survived. Packed into bunks so close that infectious abscesses "spread like wildfire," Dr. Tabet wrote, they were rousted at 3 a.m. to stand in line outdoors, often in the cold or rain, to get their pills.

Naphcare defended its record in a statement, but conceded that many deaths might have been prevented. It blamed the state for limits on food, shelter and medical services.

The state dropped Naphcare and hired Prison Health Services in November 2003, under a three-year, $142.7 million contract for all Alabama prisons. And in April 2004, the 18-page settlement of the inmate lawsuit was hailed as the blueprint the state and company would use to bring the unit into the 21st century. The old warehouse had been replaced by two cellblocks; in another change, prisoners would no longer have to pack dead cellmates into body bags.

The big moment, however, came last November, when Prison Health hired the H.I.V. specialist who would lead the charge: Dr. Chijide, who had answered the company's help-wanted ad in a medical journal.

Though she lacked prison experience, she did not shrink from a challenge, once spending seven years treating native people in Alaska. She also had grown up in Alabama, so moving back with her husband and two daughters would be a homecoming.

The company offered her $180,000 a year and told her, she said, that she could set her own treatment program and hours. She would be assisted by the prison's medical director and another full-time doctor, she said, along with a nurse assigned to the unit.

But the medical director quit, and Prison Health never produced the other help. It did not give Dr. Chijide any orientation, she said, or the written policies and procedures essential to any prison clinic. The only prison training she got was a week in a California prison AIDS clinic run by the expert monitoring the settlement.

Dr. Chijide said Prison Health never mentioned the terms of the settlement and the obligation it placed on the company. It was the court monitor himself, Dr. Joseph Bick, who suggested she look up the lawsuit on the Internet. Returning home from his clinic, she entered the prison's name on Google and found the horrifying death reports.

"Wow," she recalled thinking. "So this is what's going on."

Running on Empty

The inmate complained of chest pains, so Dr. Chijide sent him to the prison infirmary. But when she checked in on him, she said, he was holding a bottle of nitroglycerin pills that a nurse had handed him, to take as he liked. The nurse was nowhere to be found.

Nurses, she discovered, were prescribing drugs and making diagnoses without her consent. "I found cases where nurses had written 'verbal orders, Dr. Chijide' when I hadn't prescribed anything," she said. Yet her own prescriptions often went unheeded; the antibiotics she ordered for an inmate with perilously weak immunity were found days later on a medicine cart.

Lab-test results were lost or ignored, she said. A rat scuttled through her examination room. Inmates, assigned to the H.I.V. unit without any notice from prison officials, simply showed up unannounced. "Nobody said to me, 'These inmates have arrived; you need to see them,' " she said. So she asked nurses whether they had noticed any new faces, or went searching herself.

The prison medical director, Dr. Wyndol S. Hamer, resigned in early December, a few weeks after Dr. Chijide started. The company said his decision was personal, and Dr. Hamer - who Dr. Chijide said had criticized Prison Health during staff meetings - would not comment.

Whatever the reason, his departure left Dr. Chijide the only physician for all of Limestone. Each day became a race to treat inmates in the infirmary, answer sick calls and hunt down missing medical records. The H.I.V. unit had no clerical help, and the prison had no computer system to track patients, she said, so those records were often little more than notes on scraps of paper.

No patients died under her care, Dr. Chijide reflected with relief. But she felt she had merely been lucky.

When an inmate in the unit contracted tuberculosis in January 2004, before she arrived, Prison Health had to put all 230 prisoners, and several guards, on drugs for nine months to prevent the disease from spreading, Dr. Chijide said. Yet nearly a year later, she said, the unit still had no place to quarantine inmates with TB or hepatitis C.

Appeals for anything beyond the routine - treatment at outside hospitals, prescriptions not in the company pharmacy - became tangled in delays and denials, she said. And the dearth of everyday supplies, she said, ventured toward the absurd.

Sometimes, she said, she was forced to write "no thermometer" on a patient's chart - if there was a chart at all. Often, discovering that soap dispensers were empty in the infirmary, where the sickest prisoners were kept, she had to pause between patients and walk to the prison pharmacy, or to a bathroom at the other end of the building. "I had never been in a hospital or clinic that didn't have soap or paper towels," she said.

But, Dr. Chijide said she learned at last, the Prison Health operation was not like any other. "Nobody was really making an effort to run an H.I.V. clinic the way it was supposed to," she said. "They would tell you one thing, but when it came down to it, they didn't provide the resources."

A Reckoning, and a Warning

She was not shy about speaking up. When her complaints drew no response, she started taking notes. And on Christmas Day, her first real break, she laid out her grievances in a 10-page letter to the company.

Dr. Chijide had fought this sort of battle before. In 1993 she sued the Alaska clinic, saying that it had given her an unreasonable schedule and improperly ended her contract. A state court ruled that she had been let go without proper notice, but the Alaska Supreme Court reversed the decision.

This time, she had added backing: the reports of the court monitor, Dr. Bick.

On Jan. 20, nearly a month after her letter, two Prison Health executives sat her down. The timing was significant: Dr. Bick was to return in 18 days. The company had been at the prison well over a year.

Dr. Chijide said the executives blamed her for the unit's troubles, accusing her of seeing too few patients, coming and going as she pleased, and documenting too many problems. If the monitor found Prison Health out of compliance with the settlement, she said they told her, it would not be good for the company - or her.

Undeterred, Dr. Chijide wrote to them again, saying she had been scapegoated. Prison Health suspended her, but prepared for the inspection by granting some of the things she had asked for, including a nurse. The prison staff set out fresh rat traps.

And with Dr. Chijide gone and the monitor about to arrive, a Prison Health doctor raced through more than 100 medical charts in two or three days, jotting notes to make it appear that prisoners had received proper physical examinations.

The monitor was not fooled. "Patients allege that this physician spent a few minutes with each of them, did not touch them, did not answer questions, and rarely looked up from his writing," he wrote. The company's last-minute efforts, he said, "do not meet any reasonable standard of H.I.V. care."

In an interview, Dr. Bick was reluctant to go beyond the statements in his reports, which have commended Prison Health for keeping better records and for stopping nurses from acting beyond the scope of their licenses. He said he believed that the company intended to live up to the settlement, but "you can't be successful when you're trying to hide your warts and not rising to the challenges that you face."

Prompted by his findings, the Southern Center for Human Rights, which filed the original inmate lawsuit, asked a federal judge to hold the company in contempt for violating the settlement; he has not ruled. Human Rights Watch asked Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama to take immediate action to ensure the state's compliance; a spokesman for the governor would not comment.

Dr. Chijide has accepted a job at a Canadian hospital. But she says she still worries about Limestone's fate under Prison Health Services. "They were the type of people who were going to run the facility any way they want," she said. "And they were going to save money any way they can."

On July 1, Prison Health said, it filled her job. But in a report five days earlier, Dr. Bick warned that "the rapid turnover" of doctors was a dangerous problem. He urged the company to stop it.

"Due to the fragile nature of this medical program," he wrote, "I recommend that every effort be made to retain physicians once they are hired."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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