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November 30, 2005

Census to Study How Prisoners are Counted

National: Census inmate count to be looked at.
Census to study how prisoners are counted
Change could have important political changes in Texas
By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, November 30, 2005

A provision in an appropriations measure signed last week by President Bush that directs the Census Bureau to study how prisoners are counted could have far-reaching implications for the distribution of political clout in Texas.
The provision orders the bureau to examine whether it could count prisoners as living at their address at the time of incarceration instead of at their prison addresses.
Currently, under the bureau's "usual residence" rule, which counts people where they sleep and live at the time the census is taken, prisoners are counted as living in the community where they are incarcerated rather than in the neighborhood they call home.

Where prisoners are counted - in penitentiaries usually in remote areas far from home - effectively shifts political power, taking federal and state dollars, and social services, from urban areas to rural ones, and ultimately skews a state's public policy agenda, according to academics and researchers who have advocated for the change.

But one Census Bureau official said he is skeptical about changing the method, and some rural lawmakers said the population numbers prisons bring in is critical for bringing government dollars to their regions.
According to "Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in Texas," a report based on the 2000 census and released last year by the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachu- setts-based research and advocacy group dedicated to reforming prison policies, Texas has two state House districts that have almost 12 percent of their residents behind bars. Ten Texas counties have more than 20 percent of their citizens in prison. Those prisoners hail primarily from the state's urban areas and typically return to those cities after their release.

"If they're from Houston, it doesn't make sense to count them as members of, let's say, Hartley County," said Bill Cooper, a demographer with FairData, a database for education, environment, housing and poverty-related issues. Hartley is a Panhandle county with at least one-fifth of its 5,537 residents in prison.

Compounding the problem is that prisoners don't have voting rights. A county such as Hartley gets a population boost largely from imported prisoners, but Hartley commissioners (or the state representative or U.S. congressman who represent Hartley) are not accountable to them.

Several years ago, state Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, sponsored legislation that would have counted prisoners according to their pre-incarceration address. The bill, which Dutton says would have added another representative to Harris County, failed in the House after stiff opposition from rural legislators.

Prisoners are critical for pulling down federal dollars and maintaining political power in rural districts, said state Rep. Sid Miller, R-Stephenville.
"Rural voting strength is declining every time we do a census," he said. About 6.5 percent of his district's population is incarcerated. "I don't want to give up any of mine."

But changing the way prisoners are counted will lead "to a better count and a more just distribution of public funds," said Kenneth Prewitt, a professor of public affairs at Columbia University who was the Census Bureau director from 1998 to 2001.
Advocates of changing the counting method say there is plenty of time to adjust the rules by 2010, when the country takes its next census.

"Incarcerated people are easy to find," said Patricia Allard, co-author of a report called Accuracy Counts, published by the Brennan Center for Justice in New York. "It's just a matter of finding out where they lived before they were incarcerated. People have enduring ties to particular communities - their physical presence in a community isn't the only factor to keep in mind."

But Ed Byerly, the head of the population and housing branch at the Census Bureau, said he has studied the issue over the past year and "nothing yet points to changing how people incarcerated are counted," he said. "If you've been ordered by a judge to be in prison, that's where you're living at the time of the census."

Home is "not where your mom is," he said. By following something other than the "usual residence" rule, which has guided census takers since 1790, "You open up a Pandora's box, a free-for-all census, where there's no principle for where people are counted."

http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/11/30CENSUS.html

Posted by lois at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

VA: Clemency for Robin Lovitt-Execution Stopped

November 30, 2005
Clemency Stops an Execution in Virginia
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia granted clemency Tuesday to a convicted killer, declaring that the loss of a crucial piece of evidence had persuaded him that the man should not be put to death as scheduled on Wednesday.

Mr. Warner's decision, in the case of Robin Lovitt, blocked what would have been the 1,000th execution in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

The case has been closely watched, because of the milestone Mr. Lovitt's execution would have marked, because the former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr worked on Mr. Lovitt's behalf and because the case was viewed as having possible political implications for Mr. Warner, a Democrat who is believed to be weighing a run for the presidency in 2008.

"I believe clemency should only be exercised in the most extraordinary circumstances," Mr. Warner said. "Among these are circumstances in which the normal and honored processes of our judicial system do not provide adequate relief - circumstances that, in fact, require executive intervention to reaffirm public confidence in our justice system."

The improper discarding of evidence - the pair of scissors that Mr. Lovitt was convicted of using to kill a pool hall manager in Arlington in 1998 - was just such a circumstance, said Mr. Warner, who had never before granted clemency in his four years in office, a period in which 11 men have been executed.

Mr. Warner said before the announcement Tuesday that he had agonized over the Lovitt case like no other. "The commonwealth must ensure that every time this ultimate sanction is carried out, it is done fairly," he said in his clemency statement. "After a thorough review, it is my decision that Robin Lovitt should spend the rest of his life in prison with no eligibility for parole."

Clemency was the last hope for Mr. Lovitt, 42, after the Supreme Court declined on Oct. 3 to hear his latest appeal despite having granted a stay of execution three months before.

The scissors were thrown out by a Virginia court clerk, after Mr. Lovitt's conviction had been affirmed by the Virginia Supreme Court but before he filed a federal court petition. Mr. Lovitt was accused of using them to pry open a cash register drawer and to stab the pool hall manager, Clayton Dicks, who caught him in the act.

The DNA testing available at the time showed the blood on the scissors to be that of the victim but was inconclusive for the DNA of anyone else. Nor were Mr. Lovitt's fingerprints on the scissors. His lawyers argued that a more modern test of the scissors could show that he was innocent, and that losing the weapon had resulted in "profound unfairness."

Mr. Starr also tried to persuade the Supreme Court that Mr. Lovitt's original lawyer had failed to present evidence of severe childhood abuse by a stepfather. "The jury cannot reliably impose the death sentence without considering the petitioner's individual life history," Mr. Starr said in a brief.

Mr. Starr had sought to overturn a ruling last April by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, which concluded that the conviction should stand, despite the discarding of the scissors.

The court noted that two witnesses testified they were almost certain Mr. Lovitt was the man they saw stabbing and kicking; that Mr. Lovitt's cousin testified that the defendant had showed up at the cousin's house in the middle of the night with a cash drawer, and that a fellow inmate testified that Mr. Lovitt had confided to killing Mr. Dicks.

Mr. Lovitt, who had previously worked at the pool hall, has said that he was in the bathroom at the time of the killing, and that he took the cash drawer only after finding Mr. Dicks already dead.

The Fourth Circuit held that Mr. Lovitt's trial lawyers had defended him competently, and under difficult circumstances: had they chosen to have Mr. Lovitt's relatives testify about his background they would have invited cross-examination about the relatives' criminal records, and, most likely, Mr. Lovitt's own convictions for assault, attempted robbery, larceny and other crimes.

Mr. Warner, who made a fortune in the telecommunications industry, has been mentioned as the kind of Democrat who could appeal to business-minded conservatives, especially in the South, if he runs for president. Commuting the death sentence of a convicted murderer could leave Mr. Warner open to being attacked as soft on crime in a general election. But in Democratic primaries in which Mr. Warner would probably be among the more conservative candidates, granting clemency to Mr. Lovitt might be viewed as a plus by the party's powerful liberal wing.

This year's Virginia governor's race may have provided evidence that the death penalty has faded as an electoral issue. The race was won handily by Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who opposes capital punishment on religious grounds, even though his opponent hammered him as soft on crime. Analysts believe the popularity of Mr. Warner, prohibited by term limits from running again, helped negate the attacks.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

Alito Memos Supported Expanding Police Powers

November 29, 2005, NY Times
Alito Memos Supported Expanding Police Powers
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court nominee, played an active role in advancing the administration's efforts to expand law enforcement powers and limit restrictions on prosecutors, documents released Monday by the Justice Department show.

The 470 pages of documents, which consist mainly of memorandums Mr. Alito wrote as a deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel in 1986 and 1987, generally address routine matters or highly technical legal issues. In several of the memorandums, however, Mr. Alito makes a series of arguments espousing a broad view of law enforcement authority and a skeptical view of proposals to protect individuals from legal investigations.

Mr. Alito, who is now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, wrote the memorandums as a lawyer enacting the policies of the administration, not necessarily expressing his personal legal opinions.

But the disclosure comes at a time when liberal opponents of his nomination are buying television advertisements suggesting that as a judge on the Third Circuit, Judge Alito wrote dissenting opinions that would have reduced protections against police searches, including one regarding a strip search of a 10-year-old girl.

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the White House, said those accusations ignored other opinions Judge Alito wrote that protected defendants against improper police searches. "The criticisms by some outside-of-the-mainstream groups are deeply unfair because Judge Alito has shown a great respect for individual rights with regard to criminal prosecutions during his tenure as a federal judge," Mr. Schmidt said. "The attacks that are being directed against him don't bear any resemblance to the reality of his career."

In one 1987 memorandum disclosed Monday, Mr. Alito argued for stronger penalties specifically for violent civil rights violations.

In a 1986 memorandum, Mr. Alito argued that an opinion of the American Bar Association prohibiting lawyers from secretly taping conversations should not block lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service from secretly taping as part of a federal criminal investigation.

In another, he argued against proposed "model rules of professional responsibility" from the District of Columbia that would have precluded investigation of an individual without a "good faith belief" that the person was involved in criminal activity. He argued that the rules were written so broadly that they would cramp the ability of prosecutors to pursue legitimate leads.

In another memorandum, Mr. Alito argued that the Federal Bureau of Investigation should have broad latitude to investigate federal employees, contending that a federal district court decision appearing to limit such investigations was wrongly decided.

He also took a narrow view of an appeals court case, Clark v. Library of Congress, that prohibited an investigation of a government employee on the basis of his membership in a socialist party. Mr. Alito argued that decision still left room for a preliminary inquiry without more evidence, in part to determine if "there is a reasonable possibility that the employee is disloyal" and thus justifying a fuller investigation.

In another case that may prefigure legal issues relating to combating terrorism, Mr. Alito wrote to William H. Webster, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that it would be permissible for the bureau to compile fingerprint and identifying information on Iranian and Afghan refugees who had entered Canada. The Canadian authorities had provided the information.

"In light of the intelligence reports that the bureau has summarized for us, we believe the collection of both fingerprint identification and criminal identification information" in an F.B.I. database was justified, Mr. Alito wrote, citing an executive order with a "broad mandate to protect against terrorism."

In a 1987 memorandum to John R. Bolton, who was then an assistant attorney general and is now ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Alito also took a dim view of a draft of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Mr. Alito argued that the document failed to reflect "the traditional American aversion towards state intervention in child-rearing practices," and faulted it as infringing on the right of state governments to set policies on matters like child welfare standards and the administration of the death penalty for minors.

The United States Supreme Court earlier this year ended executions for crimes committed by minors, ruling by a vote of 5 to 4 in the case of Roper v. Simmons that such executions were cruel and unusual punishment.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:38 AM | Comments (0)

"Don't Discard Youthful Offenders"

Don't discard youthful offenders
By DAVID BERGER

11/28/2005
Children can and sometimes do commit terrible crimes, and when they do they should be held accountable. But life in prison without any possibility or even consideration of parole does not hold children accountable, it holds them disposable. Child offenders should be sentenced in a manner that reflects both the severity of their crime and their special capacity to change and redeem themselves.

A recent report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reveals that 2,225 child offenders in the United States been locked up for life without any possibility of parole. Fifty-nine percent of child offenders serving life without parole are in prison for their first criminal offense, and an estimated 27 percent were sentenced for felony murder - that is to say, they were involved in a crime during which a murder took place, but they did not take part in the murder itself. Sixteen percent of child offenders serving life sentences without parole were between the ages of 13 and 15 when they committed their crimes.

Also striking are the racial disparities, which we find in every area of the criminal justice system but which are perhaps even more pronounced in the sentencing of children to life without parole. Black children are 10 times more likely to receive life without parole than white children are. Sixty percent of the current population of child offenders serving life without parole is black.

Are you the same person you were when you were 14, or 16? Neither are the child offenders who have been discarded into our prison system without any hope of release, but our criminal sentencing laws ignore this obvious fact. As the Supreme Court said in a landmark decision on the juvenile death penalty last spring: ''any parent knows'' and ''scientific and sociological studies ... tend to confirm'' that children possess a ''lack of maturity ... an underdeveloped sense of responsibility ... (and take) impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.'' While a neuroscientist could explain to you the specifics of brain development, it doesn't take a doctoral degree to know that kids act out, often don't consider the consequences and are extremely susceptible to peer pressure.

Often touted as a leader in human rights, the United States lags behind the rest of the world on this important human rights issue. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch were able to identify only 12 child offenders in the entire rest of the world serving the sentence often termed ''death by incarceration.'' That's right - 12 in the rest of the world and 2,225 in the United States.

Judges cannot look into a crystal ball at the time of sentencing. Children are uniquely suited for change: They grow up and mature, often becoming unrecognizable to those who knew them in childhood. Yet in many states, sentencing of children who have committed very serious crimes has become an exercise in fortune telling.

Ironically, in 28 states, even a judge with a crystal ball could not save a child from being discarded into our prisons for life. Instead, in these states, judges' hands are tied by mandatory sentencing laws. Sentencing decisions should be made case by case. A ''one-size fits all'' approach to criminal justice ignores children's inherent ability to change.

Sentencing a child offender to life without the possibility of parole sends a message to that child - who is more likely than not low-income, African American or Hispanic - that his life is less valuable, his potential contributions are less significant and he is not worth the minimal time or effort it would take to revisit his case and evaluate his state of redemption later in life. We can do better for our troubled youth than discarding them forever.

David Berger, a Washington attorney with O'Melveny & Myers LLP, serves as pro bono counsel to Amnesty International USA.

Times-Post News Service

Posted by lois at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2005

Canada: A Prison Makes The Illicit and Dangerous Legal and Safe

November 24, 2005
Bath Journal
A Prison Makes the Illicit and Dangerous Legal and Safe
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
BATH, Ontario, Nov. 18 - The Bath Institution is a long way from Alcatraz.

It is a medium-security federal prison, and its inmates are allowed to keep the keys to their cells. Many have their own kitchens, and they move freely from the gym to the cabinet-making shop. Drug addicts can clean their needles with bleach, and condoms are readily available.

Now the institution has opened a tattoo parlor, and Mark Hewitt, a 37-year-old inmate in jail for breaking into factories, couldn't be happier.

"You're excluded from society, so the way to fit in here is to get a tattoo, to blend in and be one of the crew, to be safer," said Mr. Hewitt, who for years had been clandestinely puncturing prisoner biceps with sewing needles, guitar strings and homemade ink sometimes made from burnt polystyrene.

While he says he has always been careful, such practices have contributed to an epidemic of hepatitis C and H.I.V. in prisons in Canada and around the world. Now Mr. Hewitt has been trained by the government to take his art form out of the dark and seamy corners of the jail and into a sterile-looking cinder-block room that looks almost like a dental clinic.

Mr. Hewitt's parlor is part of a pilot project by the Correctional Services of Canada that began in August and now includes five federal prisons across Canada. A sixth, in a woman's prison, is scheduled to open this month. More than 120 inmates have already taken part, paying about $5 per two-hour session.

Officials here and in the United States say they believe that the pilot project is the first of its kind in the world, another step in a trend of harm-reduction techniques spreading to one degree or another in prisons in many countries. The pilot program, expected to continue through at least 2007, is expected to cost the government roughly $100,000 per prison.

Tattooing has traditionally been banned in prisons because tattoos are often used to identify inmates with gangs and hate groups. But inmates have managed to get around the bans; 45 percent of Canadian inmates acquire a tattoo while in prison, according to government statistics. That rate has held steady over the last decade despite the widespread knowledge that diseases are spread through reused tattoo needles and ink.

"You don't want your prisons acting as a pool of infection for the general population," said Joanne Barton, a senior health officer working on the program. "The prevalence of H.I.V. is 7 to 10 times higher in federal penitentiaries than in the general Canadian population, and for hepatitis C the prevalence is 30 times higher."

Ms. Barton stressed that tattoos connected with hate groups and gangs were prohibited, along with tattoos on the face, neck and genitals. While she acknowledged that illicit tattooing would continue, she said at least now prisons in the pilot project were distributing information on safer techniques.

But the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers strongly opposes the pilot as a potential danger to its members.

"This program is doomed for failure," said Sylvain Martel, the union's national president. "Needles will be used against corrections officers."

Mr. Martel also said "we already have evidence" that inmates are stealing needles, ink and other paraphernalia from the parlors to be used in illicit tattooing. Prison supervisors say that they have no knowledge of that, adding that there is a careful inventory before and after tattooing sessions.

Whether legal or not, tattooing is not going to disappear from prisons. Tattoos serve many functions, aside from gang identification. Inmates typically make their bodies a collage of their life, complete with pictures or representations of loved ones and important events like funerals they cannot attend. To understand the importance of tattoos here, one only has to look at Tracy Rivet's body.

On his right arm is a tattoo displaying a decaying skull with hair flowing out of its mouth. On his chest there is a Christian cross that commemorates his deceased father. And on his left arm there is a wizard and a skull that cover up another tattoo of the name of his former wife. Now he is getting his entire back tattooed with a giant eagle, a symbol of freedom.

Like many convicts with tattoos, Mr. Rivet has hepatitis C, a debilitating chronic infectious disease that costs the Canadian government more than $20,000 a year per inmate to treat.

"I always let doctors, nurses and females know about my disease," said Mr. Rivet, who is serving a five-year sentence for first-degree manslaughter, after killing two people while driving drunk. "But only about 50 percent of the inmates are careful," he added, referring to sharing tattoo needles and reusing homemade ink.

The Canadian experiment is being watched closely by other prison systems looking for ways to control infections. It may work best in prisons like Bath, where inmates say gangs do not have a significant presence. Other Canadian prisons where tattoo programs are being tested, in Quebec and the Prairie provinces, have larger gang problems.

The corrections department in the Spanish province of Catalonia has reviewed the guidelines used in the Canadian program as it prepares to open its own pilot program. One corrections department in Australia has also considered starting a pilot, and the idea could eventually migrate south of the border.

"If there was a way to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks," said Joey Weedon, director of governmental affairs of the American Correctional Association, "it's certainly a model that correctional administrators in the United States would look at and possibly attempt to copy."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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

VA: International Day for Human Rights--From Abu Ghraib to Red Onion State

International Day for Human Rights
From Abu Ghraib to Red Onion State
Stop Prison Abuse!

Saturday December 10th 2:30 PM
Oliver Hill Court House
1600 Oliver Hill Way across from the Richmond city Jail

FedUp! is working with a group called The People
United, a grassroots social justice network that has
members all over Virginia. We are planning an event
for December 10th in Richmond. December 10th is the
International Day for Human Rights. The idea is to
address human rights violations in prisons abroad,
like Abu Ghraib, and make the correlation between the
Human Rights Violations that are taking place here in
Virginia. The people in this country were appalled
when photographs and footage of torture and abuse
found its way to the public. If only we can get the
people in this country to see what has been happening
here in Virginia and in prisons across the United
States, the reaction would be the same – horrified,
ashamed, and outraged. So, please if you can, try to
attend the rally in Richmond on December 10th. It will
take place at 2:30pm at the Oliver Hill Court House
which is located across from the City Jail. There will
be speakers and a march. Keep your evening free for an
evening event is being planned where we will have a
chance to network and strategize about where we want
to go from here. Together our voices our strong. STOP
THE ABUSE! There are also plans for an event on Sunday
the 11th people to gather at one of Virginia’s Super
Max prisons. There will be transportation provided.

Prisoners must be treated with respect for their
dignity as human beings and for their fundamental
rights, whatever their crimes.

For more information contact:
Art at 804-303 3270
or email antiprison@yahoo.com
www.signalfire.org/Dec10

Posted by lois at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)

AZ: Pinal County Wants You

Pinal County wants you
By PRESTON McCONKIE, Staff Writer
November 22, 2005
Terry Altman, jail commander for the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, stands outside the new $42 million, 1,054-bed jail the county is building just east of the present jail in Florence. Altman needs to hire 66 new detention officers, 12 detention aides, one polygraph technician, one criminal investigator, one noncriminal background investigator and two administrative clerks before the first prisoners can be moved into the building.

FLORENCE -

Pinal County is looking both to lure trained prison guards away from the state Department of Corrections and to entice people to make detention work their new career. The reason is simple: The county needs $16 million a year to pay for building and staffing its new jail, but to make the money it first needs the staff.

Certainly the more than 700 inmates in the current 472-bed Pinal County detention center would prefer the elbow room and modern facilities of the three-story, $42 million, 1,054-bed edifice rising to the east. But before anyone moves in, jail commander Terry Altman must find more than a few good men and women. To be precise, right now he needs 83 of them, and by the middle of next year he'll need 189 more.

As of three weeks ago, the Pinal County Board of Supervisors gave the go-ahead to begin hiring and training the first set of detention officers and support staff for the jail.

Although debt service on the loan paying for the jail is $5 million, that's still easier to swallow than the $11 million annual cost of staffing and running it. Altman had expected the hiring to begin in July, but supervisors decided to push that date back, closer to the time the building will be ready physically to start housing detainees from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose rent payments are expected to bring $15 million to $16 million a year once the jail is up to speed.

Before Altman can open the first wing of the jail and welcome the lucrative ICE detainees, he needs 66 new DOs, 12 detention aides, one polygraph technician, one criminal investigator, one noncriminal or background investigator and two administrative clerks.

On Nov. 16, Altman and Sheriff Chris Vasquez held a press conference to explain the advantages of working for Pinal County instead of another detention authority.

Show me the money

The first reason, sensibly enough, is pay. According to a human resources spokesman for the Arizona Department of Corrections, officers in training get an annual wage equal to $26,364 and, after graduating from the Correction Officers Training Academy, that rate goes up by $1,000. Over five years that rate rises to "about $31,000." Those commuting long distance receive an extra 10 percent, or $100 per paycheck, to help with travel.

The Pinal County Sheriff's Office, on the other hand, starts a newly hired officer without training at $32,302.

"Their salary is the same during training," Altman said. "We don't have a cadet salary."

For those concerned with making more money from the get-go, the numbers compare pretty well even with the county's covey of private prisons. Corrections Corporation of America, which has several facilities in Florence and Eloy, pays newly hired DOs $12.72 per hour, just over $26,000 for full-time work. Once they pass a stringent background test, which can take up to six months, they qualify to work with federal detainees at $19.77 per hour, about $41,000 annually.

For the county the rate of pay increase after first hire is more gradual than in both state and private work, though DOs still end up making more than they would for the state; a county DO with five years' experience makes $33,944 today.

Altman said experience gained at other jails or prisons is counted when figuring the starting pay scale for the Sheriff's Office. Also, the county participates in the state's correction officers retirement program. State workers who transfer to the county can keep their years accrued toward retirement, with the hope of retiring at a higher wage.

"We also offer a significant benefit package," Altman said. "That is, the county has a base employee payment of $5,200 annually that the employee can use to select which benefits they wish to purchase for their family. They can tailor it to their own needs - medical, dental, vision - and use it to offset personal cost."

The county also offers a flexible spending program where $2,600 can be set aside before taxes and used to cover co-pays, deductibles and other medical expenses. A new law allows that money to be used until March 31 of the following calendar year instead of having to be forfeited if not spent by Dec. 3. For county workers who already have insurance coverage through a spouse and elect not to buy their own coverage, the county provides the $2,600 for the flexible spending program.

Last of all, there are 10 paid holidays, 10 vacation days for new hires (and more with longevity), 30-day sabbaticals provided after 15 years, plus 13 days of sick leave.

Not such a pain

For those who may have tried to hire on with the county before and been put off by the eight to 12 months waiting for paperwork to pass through the county's bureaucratic digestive tract, Altman said the process has been speeded up.

"Now we believe the maximum wait will be 120 days," Altman said. "We are processing people partially through the application process, and if they clear specific hurdles such as drug analysis, background and medical checks, we will bring them on board with a conditional employment offer - based on if they don't fail anything else on the background check.

"But who better to know their background than the individual, if they're willing to accept conditional employment knowing they will be terminated if we find something in there. They can say wait and see, or they can say, I know my background is clean, and then we can bring them on board sooner."

The basic qualifications to be a DO are being 21 or older, being drug free, having an Arizona driver's license, passing a written exam and having a high school diploma or equivalent. For those 19 or 20, there is also the option of being a "detention aide," a person who sits in an observation booth and communicates with guards and inmates through an intercom.

"They start with a $24,211 per-year salary," Altman said. "The aide doesn't have direct physical contact with inmate populations. They are an extra set of eyes for officers on the floor."

Altman said this is a good way for a recent high school graduate to learn about detention work and decide if he or she wants to go on to be a regular officer.

Altman said job applications are only taken online, at www.pinaljobs.com, but he also hopes people will come down to see the new jail. He invites calls to his secretary at 868-8250 to schedule a walk-through, as well as to chat about the advantages of working for Pinal County.

Sheriff Vasquez added his own invitation:

"This is an exciting time. I firmly believe new hires will find the Pinal County Sheriff's Office is the No. 1 law enforcement agency in Arizona, and a great place to work."

To learn more about working as a detention officer for the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, call the recruiting line at 868-8250.

©Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc. 2005

Posted by lois at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

Florida Opens Third Faith-Based Prison

Published Thursday, November 24, 2005
By Joe Follick
Ledger Tallahassee Bureau

CRAWFORDVILLE -- With guests tapping their toes under a red-and-white-striped tent, the band dressed in prison blues put their repentance to music as they welcomed visitors to Wakulla Correctional Institution on Wednesday with a rough-edged but soulful repertoire.

"I'd rather have Jesus than silver and gold," went one chorus to a song with a convicted murderer sharing the lead vocals.

The prison, located on Commerce Boulevard next to Opportunity Park, was dedicated Wednesday as the state's third, and now the nation's largest, faith-based prison.

The 1,600-inmate facility will become a "faith- and characterbased institution" as inmates with good behavior can move to the facility and receive educational and spiritual opportunities not available at other state prisons. This is the third faith-based prison in the state; there is another in Lawtey, and a female prison is in Hillsborough County.

No other state has entire prisons devoted to faith-based guidelines. The first faith-based prison in Lawtey has been open only two years, not enough time for data to show whether inmates who leave such facilities are more likely to succeed in the real world once released.

DOC officials are extra careful to include the phrase "character-based" in any descriptions of the facilities.

Despite the Christian majority, classes are available for most religious faiths and even, officials say, those with no religious belief at all. Despite some consternation from groups that battle the blurring of religion and government, the faith-based prisons have not brought on any lawsuits, largely because they are a voluntary option for inmates and the religious material and time are donated by volunteers.

Gov. Jeb Bush and others say incidents such as fights have been reduced at Lawtey, but it's unclear how much of that is attributable to religion and how much is because of a clientele of inmates with fewer disciplinary problems in the past with more religious activities to fill their time.

Wakulla CI warden Kenneth Lampp said just having extra programs allows fewer opportunities for mischief.

"Even if (an inmate is) not getting any benefit from (faith-based classes), while he's sitting in that program, if nothing else he's occupied for that moment, so he's not creating a security risk or a threat," Lampp said.

Wakulla inmate Timothy Hardee, 51, said he's been in and out of prisons around the country for more than two decades. He hadn't seen his son, Ryan Palmer, since he was 8 years old until a chance meeting last year in the yard of the Central Florida Reception Center, a prison in Orange County.

"I looked down at this fellow and his ID and he looked back at mine and just said, `Dad,' " Hardee said of his son, who is now 22. "We started going to church right then."

Hardee is scheduled for release in nine months after serving time for driving with a suspended license and grand theft. He hopes to return to Polk County and become a minister and to atone for his past failures as a man and as a father. He said that will be easier with the new programs at Wakulla.

"In this environment right here, you have something beautiful," he said. "Sure, there's going to be some (inmates) who pretend at it, but the seed's in them and they'll come around, too."

Thomas M. Siebert, 51, has a college degree and had a career as a journalist until drugs became part of his life in the 1980s. He was sent to prison for robbery and battery in the early 1990s and was arrested again on cocaine charges in 2001. He has a release date of late 2007, and he thinks the new programs at Wakulla will help him achieve his goal of being an inspirational writer.

"Coming to prison is a dehumanizing experience. I accept responsibility for why I'm here, but it's the kind of place where you're kind of given the message all day long that you're just no good, that you don't have any value," Siebert said. "This place changes that atmosphere. It has the potential to change lives and to change families and to change their communities."

Speaking to inmates, volunteers and others, Bush reminded them that he and his wife pray every morning for "God's blessings" as well as for the welfare of their families and the troops overseas.

"It's no secret that I believe in the power of faith," Bush said. "It makes a big difference to me."

DOC Secretary James Crosby said Wakulla is a different environment for the faith-based philosophy because many inmates there will serve long sentences that may last their entire lives.

"These are human beings," he said. "The biggest point I see to the whole faith-based, characterbased movement is getting and setting an environment for a person who's made a mistake or done something wrong, to still be able to live in a safe, secure place where they can develop as an individual, a person, as a human being."

Posted by lois at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

AZ:"I think the good thing is that it generates a lot of jobs for people living here

Federal prison construction now complete
Facility to house 1,000-plus high-security and minimum-security prisoners
By Patty Machelor
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

The Southeast Side will gain as many as 1,000 new residents in upcoming months, though the newcomers will not move here voluntarily.

Construction has been completed on a new $100 million federal prison that will eventually house up to 960 high-security prisoners, said Traci Billingsley, spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The facility at 9300 S. Wilmot Road will also include up to 128 minimum-security prisoners who will participate in a work camp next to the high-security prison.

Many of the prisoners who will live at this U.S. Penitentiary and Federal Prison Camp will be transferred from West Coast facilities, Billingsley said. "We try to place offenders within 500 miles of their release residence," she said.

The facility will open after the passage of the federal agency's 2006 budget, which could be at any time in upcoming months, Billingsley said.

Construction on the prison began in 2003 on 15 acres. The facility is west of the Federal Correctional Institute and north of the Arizona State Prison.

Mary Lee Swann is a resident of Rita Ranch, a large subdivision east of the prisons. Swann said she is not concerned about the new facility opening.

One reason is that two other correctional institutions are already there, said Swann, a licensed practical nurse who moved to the area in September from Northwest Tucson.

Swann said another reason she is not concerned is that she used to teach girls and young women in detention and feels compassion for people who are imprisoned.

Another resident said he is confident that if an inmate does escape from the prison, people in Rita Ranch will not be in much danger. "Usually when somebody does break out of prison, they quickly leave the area," said Kent Bortz, who has lived in Rita Ranch about six years.

Bortz, who works as an engineer, said he also supports the new prison because of what it means for the Tucson economy.

"I think the good thing is that it generates a lot of jobs for people living here in Tucson, and I know we need that," he said.

The site of the new prison was chosen over other sites in Yuma because Tucson has the population and location to support it.

About half the employees for the new facility will be hired locally, Billingsley said. Between 350 and 400 full-time workers will take the jobs, which include guards, wardens, medical specialists, caseworkers, food service employees and trade workers.

To compete with the new employer, the Pima County Board of Supervisors earlier this month approved 18.7 percent pay raises for its corrections officers. This hike will make their salaries more competitive with officers working in federal prisons.

The raises, which will cost the county $400,000 this fiscal year and $1.6 million to $1.9 million next year, were approved in hopes of discouraging defections to federal jobs.

The plan boosts the starting pay for county corrections officers from $29,094 to $33,696 a year, which is within $1 per hour of federal corrections employees, said County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry.

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

November 23, 2005

TX: Encinal Economic Development Corporation Takes Stand Against SuperJail

Encinal Economic Development Corporation
Resolution # 08-22-05
August 22, 2005

A RESOLUTION OPPOSING THE EXPANSION OF THE LA SALLE COUNTY REGIONAL DETENTION FACILITY OR THE CREATION OF ANY OTHER PRISON OR DETENTION FACILITY IN OR NEAR ENCINAL

WHEREAS the Encinal Economic Development Corporation was created by the City of Encinal to promote and invest in the economic well-being of the City of Encinal;

WHEREAS the existing La Salle County Regional Detention Facility, which houses detainees for the US Marshals Service and is located less than a mile outside of Encinal city limits, was undertaken by the County of La Salle and private interests without input from Encinal city officials and without response to Encinal community member concerns;

WHEREAS the study published in Social Science Quarterly in March 2004, "The Prison Industry: Carceral Expansion and Employment in U.S. Counties, 1969-1994." (Greg Hooks, et al.) shows that small, rural communities such as Encinal, contrary to popular belief, do not see long-term economic benefit from prison projects;

WHEREAS the existing La Salle County Regional Detention Facility has failed to provide any demonstrative positive economic impact to the City of Encinal;

WHEREAS the recent addition of the La Salle County Regional Detention Center to the water/sewer system of the Encinal Water Supply Corporation, which provides water and sewer services to the community of Encinal, has left insufficient water/sewer infrastructure to support additional businesses and residences without considerable expense (estimated at over $4 million);

WHEREAS the City of Encinal has a population of 629 (US Census, 2000) and the creation of a large-scale detention facility, with a detained population (2,800) far greater than the town population will cast the image of Encinal as a prison town.

WHEREAS the Encinal Economic Development Corporation supports a diversified economy for the Encinal community and envisions a community that is not reliant on any one sector of the economy or any one industry;

NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Encinal Economic Development Corporation opposes the expansion of the existing La Salle County Regional Detention Facility or the creation of any other prison or detention facility in or near Encinal.

PASSED AND APPROVED this 22nd day of August, 2005.

SIGNED BY:
Donna Lednicky
Chairperson

ATTEST:

Joann Wells
Secretary

Posted by lois at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)

NYC Begins Distributing Naloxone (Narcan) to Treat Overdoses

November 22, 2005
NYC Begins Distributing Naloxone to Treat Overdoses

The New York City health department has provided about $200,000 to the Harm Reduction Coalition to distribute the opiate antidote naloxone(Narcan) to needle-exchange visitors, Newsday reported Nov. 21.

Naloxone distribution began about seven months ago in the city; the drug, which is effective in preventing fatal overdoses, can't be misused and is easy to administer by syringe. "It's sort of a revolutionary idea, in a way, to put a medicine in the hands of anybody," said Sharon Stancliff, medical director for the Harm Reduction Coalition. "Overdose is really preventable in many, many cases."

Needle-exchange clients are taught how to detect an overdose and how to administer the antidote and perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, if necessary; they also are advised to call 911.

About 700 people die of opiate overdoses in New York each year. In addition to allowing the Coalition to distribute naloxone directly to addicts, the health department is considering giving the drug to New York Fire Department EMTs so it can be used when they respond to emergency calls.

"We know about 80 percent of the time people shoot up with a peer. It's like drinking, people don't do it alone," said Department of Health official Andrew Kolodny said. "Historically, heroin users do all the wrong things when they witness an overdose -- there are reports about injecting people with milk, putting ice on people. They are scared to call 911."

ISIT THIS PAGE ONLINE for accompanying web links and resources: http://www.jointogether.org/y/0,2521,578644,00.html
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Posted by lois at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Bill Would Give People with Drug Convictions Earlier Parole

By Emelie Rutherford/ Daily News Staff
Wednesday, November 23, 2005

BOSTON -- Approximately one-tenth of the inmates at Framingham's notoriously overcrowded women's prison would be eligible for parole under a measure backed by a MetroWest lawmaker who drew dozens of supporters to the State House yesterday.

The bill to grant parole eligibility for the first time to inmates serving mandatory minimum drug sentences would reduce overcrowding in Massachusetts' prisons and save the state millions of dollars, supporters said.

"This is not being soft on crime, it's being smart," bill sponsor state Sen. Cynthia Creem, D-Newton, said after it was weighed by the joint Judiciary Committee, on which she sits.

Of the 671 inmates at MCI-Framingham, 65 of them were serving mandatory minimum drug sentences as of Monday, according to state Department of Correction spokeswoman Diane Wiffin.

Across the state there are approximately 10,300 inmates in DOC facilities, with 1,592 serving mandatory minimum drug sentences, she said.

Creem's parole bill would allow such drug offenders to go before the parole board once they have served two-thirds of the maximum sentences for their crimes. The measure would not ensure those inmates are sent home and monitored on parole.

"It won't open the gates, it won't let them out," said Leslie Walker, director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which aids indigent prisoners. "It just lets them see the parole board," which she added is "not a notoriously liberal body."

According to Walker, many of the women serving mandatory minimum drug sentences at MCI-Framingham are "wonderfully eligible for parole." That's because many of those women are repentant, lacking of criminal histories and nonviolent, she said. While sentencing judges cannot take such factors into consideration, the parole board can.

MCI-Framingham is the most cramped housing unit in the state's system, and has an overcrowding rate of 331 percent in the awaiting trial unit, Walker said.

Creem's parole bill made its way into a working version of the state budget last year before dying. Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey declined to publicly endorse the bill during yesterday's Judiciary Committee hearing, telling Creem she would talk about it in a more "personal" setting.

Healey was at the hearing to testify in favor of Gov. Mitt Romney's bill to require post-release supervision of felons.

Norwood native Sean Glynn said Creem's parole bill could help his 30-year-old brother, Patrick, who is three years into a five-year sentence for trafficking cocaine, his first-ever offense.

Patrick Glynn is a model prisoner with a job, supportive family and girlfriend waiting for him, Sean Glynn said. Patrick Glynn's continued incarceration is costing the state thousands and causing heartache for his loved ones, his family said.

"I don't think there is a parole board in this country that would not release him," Sean Glynn said.

The Boston Bar Association and League of Women Voters were among the groups that spoke in favor of Creem's parole bill. While no one testified against it, a lawmaker on the committee predicted it would be hotly contested if it advanced to the full Legislature.

Creem said her bill would save the state $10 million to $15 million a year and is supported by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. It costs approximately $43,000 to incarcerate an inmate for one year, Healey said.

(Emelie Rutherford can be reached at 617-722-2495 or erutherford@cnc.com)

Posted by lois at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)

The Moral Importance of Clemency

The Moral Importance of Clemency
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet
Posted on November 22, 2005, Printed on November 22,
2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/28580/

LOS ANGELES--As California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
ponders the fate of death-row inmate Stanley "Tookie"
Williams, he might examine the political fortunes of
Sen. George Allen, former governor of Virginia.

In 1990, residents of Danville, Va., were shocked at
the execution-style murder of a local businessman
during what police described as a bungled drug deal. A
jury swiftly convicted William Saunders of the
killing. The betting odds were that Saunders would get
the death penalty. The odds were even greater that
he'd be executed. Virginia ranks close to Texas as an
"execute em' quick, and in large numbers" death
penalty state.

Guilt was not an issue in his case -- Saunders
purportedly killed in cold blood. But later he had a
jailhouse epiphany, and had become a strong advocate
against drugs and violence. There were also hints of
improprieties in his sentencing. Authorities praised
Saunders as a changed man.

Governors are scared stiff of being tagged as soft on
crime and of subverting the people's will. They
routinely duck and run from granting clemency to
convicted murderers. Yet, in Sept. 1997, conservative
Republican Gov. George Allen did what many thought
unthinkable: He spared Saunders' life.

Six months after granting clemency to Saunders,
Allen's approval rating was far higher than a year
earlier. Allen's clemency grant may not have caused
his approval rating to climb, but the act didn't hurt
him. This defied the conventional wisdom that outraged
voters punish governors who grant clemency to death
row inmates. Allen's political career didn't miss a
beat. He left the governors post, then ran and won a
Senate seat.

Allen is no aberration. In the decade since 1993, 15
governors have granted clemency in capital punishment
cases, mostly on humanitarian grounds. Only one of the
governors failed to win re-election. In nearly every
case, the approval ratings of the governors who
granted clemency remained steady or climbed.

That's no guarantee that if California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger grants clemency to Stanley "Tookie"
Williams, scheduled for execution Dec. 13, there'll be
an instant numbers reversal in his plummeting
popularity. But clemency won't be the death knell for
Schwarzenegger's re-election bid.

Nor was it for the governors who granted clemency
during the 1950s and 1960s, when the death penalty was
commonly used. In those years, governors granted
clemency to roughly one in four death row inmates.
California Gov. Pat Brown topped that rate. During the
late 1950s and 1960s, with no public outcry, Brown
granted clemency to one out of three death row
inmates.

That abruptly changed after the Supreme Court
reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Since that
time, governors have cringed at being branded as soft
on crime and insensitive to victims, and they also
believe they will go down in flaming political defeat
should they grant a clemency appeal. They distort,
ignore or misread the legal and moral importance of
clemency.

Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, never
one to be mistaken for a bleeding heart on crime and
punishment, put clemency in the right frame. In the
1993 Herrera v. Collins decision, he called clemency
the "fail-safe" that governors have at hand to right a
legal wrong or prevent a miscarriage of justice. It's
also their legal means to simply do the humane thing
when it serves justice.

Rehnquist's apt read of what clemency is supposed to
be about is doubly important because the Court in that
same case severely narrowed the grounds in which
federal courts could intervene and grant habeas corpus
to a prisoner who claimed innocence in a capital case.
That further added to the burden held by prisoners who
seek legal relief in courts. Judges are loath to
overturn lower court convictions in death penalty
cases even when there are outrageous examples of
prosecutorial misconduct, witness tampering or the use
of flimsy or non-existent physical evidence to obtain
convictions.

In many death row cases today, governors act only when
there is ironclad proof that a death row inmate was
legally insane when he or she killed. Despite some
evidence of mental impairment, Schwarzenegger refused
to grant clemency to Donald Beardslee earlier this
year. He flatly said that clemency should not be used
to undo the judgment of the people, and that he'd
spare a life only when there is absolute legal and
clinical proof that a condemned killer was insane.
That shoves the clemency bar past the point of
relevance.

Tookie Williams doesn't come close to passing
Schwarzenegger's clemency test. William's appeal comes
down to whether his good deeds and commendations --
including one from President Bush and other world
figures -- convince Schwarzenegger that he deserves to
live. Good deeds in prison haven't been enough to sway
most governors to grant clemency. Still, the few times
that governors have bucked the death penalty crowd and
spared a life, it has not been the political kiss of
death for them. It won't be Schwarzenegger's, either.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political
analyst. He is the author of 'The Crisis in Black and
Black' (Middle Passage Press).
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/28580/

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

November 21, 2005

MI: Prison's Closing Economic Bust for Town

November 21, 2005
Prison economic bust for town
Corrections facility closure puts growth on hold.
CAPITOL FOCUS
By AMY F. BAILEY
Associated Press Writer
BALDWIN, Mich. -- Brian Smith is the kind of person who officials in this small northwestern Michigan town had in mind when they agreed in 1996 to be the home of a new, high-security prison for young offenders.
The 37-year-old corrections officer had been working in a privately-run Pennsylvania prison when he and his wife decided to move out of Philadelphia to find a better area to raise their young children.
He took a job at the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility and bought a home down the road from where he worked. But the 480-bed prison run by GEO Group Inc. closed last month and Smith now drives 140 miles a day to and from his new job at a state prison in Muskegon.
"I wish I could go back home now," Smith said as he stood outside the local Michigan Works office where he was getting information about state aid for his higher gasoline costs.

It has been just a month since the prison emptied out, but its loss has taken a toll on new business ventures in Lake County. Without an anchor in the area, a number of projects and renovations have been put on hold, including a new hotel and a manufactured housing community, said Jim Truxton, village of Baldwin president and owner of a few H&R Block offices in the area.
"We didn't see the prison as being 'the thing,' but we saw it as a base to build on," Truxton said.
What state and local officials didn't count on was fewer violent young offenders than projected. Young inmates who had been in the Lake County facility were moved to other prisons last month. The state's prison capacity is just short of 49,000 and isn't expected to hit capacity until March 2008, according to Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan.
"We saw these young offenders committing violent acts so this facility was intended, designed and constructed to house those offenders," Marlan said. "Six years later, we have not seen that population we thought was going to develop. It was just a business decision."
Located about 90 miles from Grand Rapids and 36 miles from Lake Michigan, Baldwin has a modest tourism industry but not much else. It's on the way to the ferry stop in Ludington and local officials are creating a museum in nearby Idlewild to mark the former resort area popular among blacks during the Jim Crow era. But it's not expected to be finished for another year.
The area doesn't have an agricultural base because the land is too sandy -- only jack pine and scrub oak can grow. No major manufacturing facilities exist for fear they will pollute the river basin, which could mean fewer visitors during the summer and the hunting season.
"We're not near the markets, we're not near the raw materials and we don't have a trained labor force and no infrastructure, so how would you attract anything else?" asks Debi Smith-Olson, president of Lake-Osceola State Bank. "It's just not possible and we've been trying."
Marlan says prisons shouldn't be used as tools to promote economic development because they are expensive to operate and are intended to do only one thing: protect the public.
Tracy Huling, a consultant based in upstate New York who has researched the economies of areas near prisons, said the situation in Baldwin shows short-term thinking by both state and local officials. She said the two sides should have been working together to determine whether there were other options for the prison.
"States have been creating penal colonies for years and there are consequences," she said. "It's understandable to see how folks get into this situation, but someone has to take the leadership role and say there's got to be a better way."
Community leaders insist they tried to attract new businesses to the area during the six years the prison was open. They applied for and received a $3 million federal grant to develop a strategic plan for the area and Baldwin received a Renaissance Zone designation from the state to encourage development.
"We've had lots of ideas and we've tried them all," Connie Theunick-Perley, director of the Michigan State University Extension in Baldwin, said before a recent meeting among community leaders.
Local officials met with Gov. Jennifer Granholm last month to talk about the future of the area.
Since then, they have been working on a list of projects they think would help alleviate the loss of the prison. Although they want to diversify their economy, their top recommendation to the governor is reopening the prison.
Without it, they said the area will lose out on hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue and fees for the area school district, local governments and the water and sewer systems, which were built to accommodate the large facility. They also said they may have to shut down the water system and drain the water tower because there won't be enough flow to keep the water from becoming stagnant or freezing in the winter.
Despite their efforts, reopening the prison appears unlikely. The state budget remains tight and the state is being sued over its decision to end its lease with the GEO Group by the Boca Raton, Fla.-based company, the Village of Baldwin and Webber Township.
http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/2005/11/21/local.20051121-sbt-MICH-B1-Prison_economic.sto

Posted by lois at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

MS: Prison's Economic Impact Difficult to Track

Prison's economic impact difficult to track
By Stewart Smith / staff writer

Saturday, November 19, 2005 10:44 PM CST
It's the mid-1990s. The number of inmates in Mississippi's penal system is increasing, and state officials need to build more prisons - or contract with private companies to build more prisons. Meanwhile, Lauderdale County and Meridian officials are looking for ways to improve the local economy and create jobs.

It seemed like a good match. The state needed a place to build a prison and Lauderdale had a readily available workforce and land that needed no rezoning.

When city and county officials began putting together a proposal, they hoped the new prison would provide an influx of jobs that would only increase over time.

They also hoped it would help Naval Air Station Meridian. New U.S. Navy regulations prohibited student pilots from performing maintenance tasks at the base. It was hoped that non-violent prisoners could do some of the work - saving the base $300,000 to $500,000.

The Wackenhut Corp., now The Geo Group Inc., won the contract to build and operate East Mississippi Correctional Facility in southwest Lauderdale County's Lost Gap community. The facility accepted its first prisoners in April 1999.

Measuring outcomes

District 2 Supervisor Jimmie Smith said the initial estimate was that the facility would create up to 350 jobs. It currently employs 220 people in positions ranging from security officers to medical staff to administrators.

The partnership between the Navy base and the prison never happened, according to Susan Junkins, public affairs officer at NAS Meridian.

But Hank Florey, former District 1 supervisor who supported the facility during the initial votes, said the prison has delivered the boost local officials envisioned.

“The initial economic impact was around $5.5 million..., and that's back when it was only a 500-bed facility,” Florey said.

“It provides a lot of jobs, and it also has a lot of visitors, who in turn sleep in our hotels, eat in our restaurants and shop in our stores. It brings a lot of money into our community.”
Florey's optimism isn't completely shared by others. Some local hoteliers said they haven't noticed any significant increase in their business.

“To the best of my knowledge I have seen no impact that it has made to my business,” said David Hamilton, owner of the Best Western in Meridian.

Ray Joyner, manager of the Howard Johnson motel in Meridian, concurred: “I can't tell any difference in business. It certainly doesn't seem any different, but I wouldn't call it a major tourist attraction or industry, either.”

This could be due to the fact that, according to Darryl Anderson, interim warden at East Mississippi Correction Facility, the prison averages only four visitors a month.However, Hamilton said keeping tabs on where his guests come from isn't easy.

“There is really no way to track where people are coming from. If someone does check in to my hotel, they aren't going to tell me they are off to visit an inmate,” Hamilton said. “So it could have had an Hamilton also spoke of his personal experience in visiting prison inmates - an overnight stay or a shopping trip isn't usually on the agenda.
“When I went to go visit someone up at Parchman, we weren't going there to spend the night, it was going to be a day trip,” Hamilton said.
“We got up early in the morning, went there and then came back. We might have gone to a fast food restaurant or something, but we certainly weren't going to be spending any time hanging around there.”
State perspective
Wayne Gasson, chief of labor market information with the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, said given the relatively small number of jobs available, it is hard to gauge the prison's economic impact.
“If a facility like this one opened or closed, it would be significant to the people that worked there - but as far as it impacting an entire area, it probably isn't going to have much of an impact,” Gasson said.
“Plus, when you have an employer come in, that rate of employment is based on the county and its residents. But in the case of that facility, you might have people from Alabama or other areas that work there and it would not be reflected in Lauderdale.
“But it really is hard to pin down. The only exception is when a really big employer comes around, like a casino on the Gulf Coast, and you can actually see a big change.”

Bright spots
Ambiguity may cloud the exact economic impact, but at least one local business has no trouble measuring success.
Spaceway Truck Plaza - on Highway 80 just off Interstate 20 and fewer than 150 yards from East Mississippi Correctional Facility - opened in March 2001. Clerks there see a daily stream of customers in beige uniforms bearing The Geo Group Inc.'s logo, grabbing a cup of coffee or a plate lunch.
“There are no downsides to having it near us,” said Richard Lewis, general manager of Spaceway Truck Plaza.
“We get business out of them on a regular basis. We certainly appreciate their trade and we certainly haven't had any problems with any of the employees. It has been very good for the location.”
Supervisor Jimmie Smith added that, while the prison has admittedly not flooded the market with jobs, what it does offer should not be sneered at.
“What we have to remember is that we cannot discount any work that comes here. Jobs are jobs,” Smith said.
“Yes, jobs that produce tangible products are going to immediately bring more money that will stay in the community. But regardless, even with a service industry like the prison, it is important on any level.
“Even if the money is not going right back into the county, it is still providing an opportunity to feed a family and take care of them when they are sick and that is important on any level. Diversity is a very good quality in economic development and that is what we have here.”
LOST GAP JOBS
The East Mississippi Correctional Facility at Lost Gap employs 220 people. Interim Warden Darryl Anderson reports that the annual turnover rate at the facility is 65 percent. Here's a look at positions available and their hourly pay range.
Security posts $7-$10.95
Clerical staff $7-$10
Food service $7-$15.35
Program staff $11.06-$18.45
Maintenance staff $9-$17
Medical staff $7.35-$20.95
http://www.meridianstar.com/articles/2005/11/20/local_news/news_stories/a1-prison.txt

Posted by lois at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2005

House Backs Bill to Add 32,000 cells for "Homeland Security"

DAILY BRIEFING November 17, 2005
House panel backs bill to tighten border security
By Chris Strohm
Govexec.Com

The House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday approved a sweeping bill that would stiffen the nation's border security.
The 2005 Border Security and Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 4312) authorizes the hiring of 8,000 more Border Patrol agents and 1,000 new inspectors at ports of entry over the next four years. It also would allow for the addition of 32,000 beds to detain illegal immigrants and the construction of more physical barriers along the border.

The act requires increased use of military surveillance technology along the borders. Starting next October, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau would have to detain all illegal aliens.

Union leaders, however, said the bill falls short because it does not merge two of the Homeland Security Department's law enforcement agencies and fails to give border inspectors the status of law enforcement officers. It also does not provide for stronger enforcement of laws barring employers from knowingly hiring illegal aliens or address the economic roots of illegal immigration, unions said.

"This is kind of like chicken soup," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council. "It doesn't hurt, but does it help?

"I would hope this is not the flagship bill that the House is considering to secure our borders, because it does very little," he added.

Under the bill, the DHS and the Defense Department would need to develop a plan to provide the Border Patrol with Defense surveillance assets, such as unmanned aerial vehicles.

DHS also would have to submit a national strategy to Congress within a year after the bill is passed "to achieve operational control over all ports of entry into the United States and the international land and maritime borders of the United States."

In addition, the act would require DHS to report on the progress of cross-border security agreements signed with Mexico and Canada.

And the bill would place DHS' Air and Marine Operations division directly under the authority of the secretary, in the hopes of creating "a more flexible, coordinated air program capable of providing tracking, deterrence, rapid response, and investigative support to multiple DHS agencies."

"We must establish operational control of our borders and swiftly remove illegal immigrants once they arrive," said committee chairman Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "The time to act is now."

Democrats on the committee introduced several amendments that either failed by vote or were withdrawn.

An amendment by Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Fla., called for merging Customs and Border Protection and ICE; it was withdrawn.

The department's inspector general issued a controversial report earlier this week citing numerous problems between CBP and ICE and calling for the two agencies to be merged.

"The department's inspector general's recent report has identified problems in organization, management, information sharing and operations that prevent CPB and ICE from efficiently and effectively carrying out their responsibilities for enforcing our laws and protecting the American people," Meek said.

DHS, however, is opposed to a merger. Department officials say many of the issues cited in the IG report were the result of financial problems at ICE and say most of the problems are being addressed. The current organizational structure should be given more time to succeed, they argue.

Meek withdrew his amendment because it was apparent it would not pass and because he was assured by King that the committee would continue to examine whether the agencies should be merged.

The bill, however, requires the department's secretary "to take immediate action to address the inefficiencies and poor communication between [ICE and CBP]."

The act also would require a review of the One Face at the Border program within CBP.

"This will be the first, comprehensive review of the program, which we are confident will show that the security of this nation depends on Congress doing away with the One Face program," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees.

An amendment offered by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, to give CBP personnel the status of law enforcement officers also failed. Law enforcement officers are eligible to retire earlier than standard federal employees, and with more generous annuities. Unions argue that CBP officers are uniformed, carry guns and have arrest power, so they should have the same benefits as other federal law enforcement officers.

In early November, some Republican House and Senate lawmakers released a joint concept paper which seeks to bring pay parity to federal law enforcement, including CBP officers. Unions said they oppose the proposal, however, because too much decision-making power is given to the Office of Personnel Management.

The border security bill now must be approved by the House Judiciary and Armed Services committees.

This document is located at http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1105/111705c1.htm

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

2,000 + more cages coming to AZ

Pinal County may add 66 detention officers

Josh Kelley
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 19, 2005 12:00 AM
With more jail cells coming to Florence, more detention officers are on the way, too. The Pinal County Sheriff's Office laid out plans this week to hire 66 detention officers by the end of January, the first wave of a recruiting effort aimed at staffing an expansion of the county's Adult Detention Center. In all, the Sheriff's Office has requested permission to hire 272 people, including 211 detention officers, to staff the expanded jail, which is planned to open by April, said Terry Altman, chief deputy over detention for the Sheriff's Office. advertisement

The annual cost to pay for those new positions is about $11 million, Altman said.
Pinal County plans to cover that cost from rent it hopes to collect for housing in its jail from up to 625 detainees awaiting deportation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a bureau of the Department of Homeland Security.
So far, the Pinal County Board of Supervisors has approved funding for 83 new positions at the jail, including the 66 detention officers and 12 detention aides. They will join about 4,000 other people who work at county, state, federal and private detention facilities and prisons in Florence, said Jess Knudson, a spokesman for the town. Roughly 25 percent of those workers live in Florence, according to Knudson. "It's a lot of jobs," Knudson said. "Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of them that reside in Florence. We realize we don't have a lot of housing developments as of yet." The town's population is estimated to be 21,000, but it's only 6,000-plus if you subtract the inmate population of about 15,000 housed at eight facilities within the town limits, Knudson said. Florence's population is projected to swell up to 200,000 over the next 10 to 15 years, Knudson said. Meanwhile, the jail and prison cells keep coming. The Arizona Department of Corrections contracted earlier this year with the Correctional Services Corp. to build in Florence a 1,000-bed private prison facility for sex offenders. The county is adding a 100-bed juvenile detention center, and the Sheriff's Office is expanding its jail by 1,034 beds. By March, Altman hopes to gain approval to begin hiring for 87 positions, most of which will be detention officers. Pinal County's starting annual pay for a detention officer with five years experience is $33,945. It's $33,113 for those with one to five years of experience, and $32,302 for one year or less. Pay is the same during and after training. Maximum pay is $44,657.60.
http://www.azcentral.com/community/gilbert/articles/1119gr-moreguardsnewZ12.
html>

Posted by lois at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)

US-Mexico: Cross Border Prison Industries, Inc.

by Kent Paterson

The chain gang of yore is getting a globalized make-over. Enjoying what is literally a captive labor force, Chihuahua state authorities are laying the groundwork for export-oriented factories, or maquiladoras, in the state's prisons. For correctional officials involved in the industrial project, the buzzword is rehabilitation. "Idleness is the mother of all vices," said Juan Federico Fernandez, the warden of the Ciudad Juarez prison. "Here it could encourage prisoners who don't work to become easy prey to drug trafficking."

Warden Fernandez recently attended a Chihuahua City meeting with other state authorities and the Tijuana-based company Ceinre in order to discuss the possibility of having maquiladoras operate in the state’s penitentiaries. Fernandez said a plan is under review to initially employ 500 prisoners in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City and Parral, for the purpose of making room furnishings for the international hotel industry. In order to obtain extra space for the Ciudad Juarez site, the prison administrator added that using land now controlled by the Mexican Defense Ministry is under consideration. Private and public backers of the project hope tourists, in the comfort of their favorite resort, soon will be relishing the refreshing rugs and cool curtains made by Chihuahua's convicts.

A North Carolina-born businessman, Joe Robertson Ervin Jones, is the private sector's frontman for the Chihuahua maquiladora prison project. A one-time textile worker, Robertson began manufacturing products for a Hilton hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1975. He later ran plants in Orlando and Dallas before closing up US shop in 1997, laying off 600 workers and moving to Mexico. Now a nationalized Mexican citizen, Robertson is associated with two Mexican companies, Ceinre and JoeVilla.

Robertson's companies operate, or plan to operate, maquiladoras in Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Baja California and Chihuahua. A factory line employing about 50 workers who assemble blankets and other hotel furnishings was rolled out last September at a Quintana Roo state prison. Robertson's enterprise has been awarded the exclusive supplier contract for Marriott's Latin American hotels.

In an interview with the Mexican press at the recent maquiladora industry convention held in Acapulco, Guerrero, Robertson laid out his plans to have factories operating in virtually every Mexican prison, employing tens of thousands of workers.

"We want to motivate the prisoner to help his family and reintegrate (into society) with honor and integrity so he can recover his self-esteem, which is one of the biggest problems inmates have," Robertson said. "We want prisoners who are close to release not to return."

Robertson is pursuing a twin-plant strategy for Mexican prisons. The goal is to build a twin plant right outside the gates of the jail, allowing prisoners' wives to be employed in addition to the inmates themselves once they are released. Prisoners will be paid the minimum wage of about $4 dollars a day. One-third of the wage will go to the prisoner, one-third to his family and one-third to the prison administration. It’s not known if the twin plants will pay the traditional punctuality and attendance bonuses of the maquiladora industry, or if unions will be permitted to represent the inmate-workers.

Robertson contended that prison factories could serve to reduce crime and wayward social behavior by providing an income to prisoners who sell drugs on the inside in order to survive, as well as to their wives who sell their bodies on the outside. "This program is going to eliminate those type of problems and bring the family together when the prisoner completes his sentence," Robertson said.

Robertson and Company have an ambitious agenda. In addition to the Chihuahua plants, the prison industry investors have plans for jailhouse factories in other nations of Latin America, Canada, Spain, and Indonesia.

* * *

Sources: El Diario de Juarez, November 9, 2005. Article by Javier Saucedo. Norte, October 31, 2005. Article by Francisco Cabrera. www.unidaddelvocero.com, September 15, 2005.

Reprinted with permission from Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Posted by lois at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: National Legal Aid Resource Center

National Legal Aid Partners Launch “Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center”
Date Monday, November 07 @ 05:09:02

Tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents face devastating legal problems as they struggle to rebuild their lives in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but many people cannot afford and do not know where to get the legal assistance they need. To help address this problem, four national allies in the legal aid and public defender communities have launched “Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center,” a Web-based clearinghouse of legal aid, pro bono and public defender information for persons affected by the hurricanes and the lawyers and advocates helping them.

Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center, is the result of a partnership among the American Bar Association (ABA), Legal Services Corporation (LSC), National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) and Pro Bono Net.

“So many people have suffered tragedies beyond comprehension as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Sadly, many of those people are from the low-income community whose need for legal assistance has only escalated in the wake of these disasters. The daunting task that many of our legal aid and public defender colleagues face as they prepare to assist a growing number of clients is overwhelming,” said Jo-Ann Wallace, NLADA president and CEO.

Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center offers a significant number of legal aid, public defender, pro bono and referral resources to persons affected by the hurricanes who must navigate a maze of legal, government and insurance issues, and to advocates and lawyers committed to helping them. The site also offers private attorneys information on how they can assist the many legal aid lawyers and advocates in their efforts to serve communities devastated by this unprecedented tragedy.

“LSC and its partners are working tirelessly to ensure that those impacted by Hurricane Katrina and Rita and the lawyers and advocates who support them have the resources they need to rebuild the many lives that have been shattered by the devastation wrought by Katrina and Rita,” said LSC president Helaine M. Barnett. “We intend to increase the number of resources we offer to the Gulf Coast evacuees, but are hopeful that the information presented thus far will provide some relief as the task of rebuilding lives begins.”

“These hurricanes have exacted an enormous human toll, but they also are shaping up to be one of the greatest legal services crises in the history of our country. Persons affected by the hurricanes need legal assistance and the ABA and its members will make sure they have free legal services as long as it takes to help them rebuild their lives,” said Michael S. Greco, president of the ABA.

The template for Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center is based upon one developed by Pro Bono Net to coordinate the New York legal community’s response to the events of September 11th in New York City. Debevoise & Plimpton assisted in the development of the local pro bono section and Mule Design provided design services pro bono. The site focuses on three broad areas of help:

For People Who Need Help
The site provides state by state links and information on how to receive assistance with a number of legal and non-legal problems, including finding a legal aid or pro bono lawyer, locating emergency and temporary housing, filing insurance claims, and understanding their legal rights and what they can do to protect them.

For Legal Aid and Public Defender Programs
Legal aid and public defender lawyers on the front lines can find information and links in a broad array of issues. Some of those resource categories are: Child Welfare; Disability; Food Program Resources; Government and Government Services; Health Law; Housing; Immigration; License / Identification; Prisons; Social Security; State Disaster Manuals; Unemployment Compensation / Unemployment Insurance; and Welfare Resources. These pages also allow for posting of news about specific legal services (civil and defender) programs and individuals that have been affected by the hurricane and that are working hard to rebuild their physical structures as well as their personal and professional lives.

For Pro Bono Volunteers
Lawyers who want to offer pro bono assistance to persons in affected areas may register online through an ABA database that matches lawyers with volunteer opportunities most suited to their expertise and interests. Private lawyers may also find a listing of opportunities to volunteer in numerous states and localities, along with information about lawyer training programs to prepare them to assist persons affected by the hurricane. The site also provides information for lawyers who want to provide assistance to evacuees who have been relocated to other states, including Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, New York and the District of Columbia.

The coordinated substantive response to those in need as a result of Katrina and Rita has been extraordinary. In addition to the Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center, the ABA, LSC, NLADA and Pro Bono Net continue to work hard with a number of substantive support centers and emergency legal assistance experts in ensuring that: local advocacy efforts have the backup needed; volunteer advocates have access to substantive resources to assist their efforts; national advocacy responses are adequate; and substantive communications on cross-cutting issues are effective.
For more information, please visit Katrina Legal Aid Resource Center.

This article comes from PNNOnline
http://www.pnnonline.org

The URL for this story is:
http://www.pnnonline.org/article.php?sid=6319

Posted by lois at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

New York County Votes for Rockefeller Drug Reform

New York County Votes for Rockefeller Reform
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Last week in upstate New York, Tompkins County voters took a stand in favor of Rockefeller Drug Law reform when they elected a new district attorney, Gwen Wilkinson.

Wilkinson beat out 16-year incumbent George Dentes for the position in the wake of a campaign that prominently featured discussion of Rockefeller reform. Wilkinson publicly declared her support for repealing the draconian laws in speeches and writing, while Dentes maintained that the laws had already been sufficiently reformed. Debate swirled in the pages of the Ithaca Journal, with Alliance supporters writing letters to the editor in support of Wilkinson's position.

Wilkinson's victory marks the second year in a row that an incumbent DA in New York has been defeated in part due to support of the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws.

In a bitter fight last year, political upstart David Soares defeated incumbent Paul Clyne in the race for Albany County District Attorney, sending political shockwaves throughout the state. Soares sailed to victory on a platform that included repealing the failed Rockefeller Drug Laws and calling for expanded judicial discretion. In his concession speech, Clyne said he would have won were it not for his longtime opposition to reform of the laws. In recent polls, over 83% of New York residents said they think the Rockefeller Drug Laws should be repealed.

"Wilkinson’s victory shows that Soares was no fluke," said Alliance executive director Ethan Nadelmann. "Sitting DAs should beware: Support for the Rockefeller Drug Laws could bring you a short-lived political career."

Drug Policy Alliance

Posted by lois at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

Broken Justice: Alabama: ACLU Report Reveals What We Already Knew

From AxisofLogic.com
Death Penalty
BROKEN JUSTICE: ACLU REPORT REVEALS WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW!!
By Charlotte A. Clark- Frieson
Nov 13, 2005, 04:18

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has released a report that startles most, but according to many black leaders, merely confirms what most blacks in Alabama have always known. “Alabama Justice is broken and needs fixing.” This statement sums up the heart of this 32 page report, released by the ACLU just last month (October).

The report comes after an exhaustive study of the judicial system in Alabama, concerning the application of the death penalty. The death penalty, also referred to as Capital Punishment is the legal infliction of death as a penalty for violating criminal law.

Throughout history, people have been put to death for various forms of wrongdoing. Without question, the death penalty is the most controversial and debated penal practice in the modern world. Other harsh, physical forms of criminal punishment—referred to as corporal punishment—have generally been eliminated in modern times as uncivilized and unnecessary. In the majority of countries, contemporary methods of punishment—such as imprisonment or fines—no longer involve the infliction of physical pain. Although imprisonment and fines are universally recognized as necessary to the control of crime, the nations of the world are split on the issue of capital punishment.

There are many individuals and groups on both sides of the death penalty issue.

Many hands were involved in the origination and completion of the ACLU study, which was sponsored by several organizations including: Alabama Arise, Alabama CURE, Alabama Committee to Abolish the Death Penalty, Alabama Democratic Conference, American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, Alabama New South Coalition, Alabama Prison Project, Amnesty International, Alabama State Conference of NAACP Branches, Project Hope To Abolish The Death Penalty (PHADP), and lastly the Restorative Justice Team, North Alabama Conference, United Methodist Church.

This ACLU study was authored by Rachael King, with the assistance of several ACLU Capital Punishment interns, most notably Katie Dahlen, Liza Grote, Katherine Grubbs, and Claire Lunman, and a long list of other individuals, who played various roles in conducting the study and compiling the report. Lucia Penland, of the Alabama Prison Project provided the majority of the data, which was expanded and improved upon by Olivia Turner, Kimberly Parker, and Kathanna Culp of the ACLU of Alabama. Also, Jim Carnes and Kimble Forrister of Alabama Arise contributed to the writing and editing.

In its opening statement the ACLU report states that “…Of all the actions carried out by the state, none warrants more cautious implementation and stringeht review than the imposition of the death penalty. Yet in Alabama, this most solemn responsibility remains fraught with inconsistencies and inequities….The structure of the state’s criminal justice system and the power given to its trial and appellate judges compromise and limit the ability of capital defendants to get a fair trial and appropriate sentencing..”

The report begins by giving an interesting overview of the history of the death penalty in the U.S. dating back to 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all death penalty statues in the United States, citing their application as arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory. As a result of the action by the Supreme Court, 629 death sentences were commuted. Then, the states scrambled to re-write their capital punishment laws. Four years later, the Supreme Court then re-instated the death penalty after states re-wrote their statutes, and executions resumed in 1977. Thus, the period after 1976 is now referred to as the modern death penalty era. So, this report mainly deals with the application of the death penalty since that time. Some of the more outstanding facts in the report include the following: As of August 2005, 981 people have been executed. During this same time period, Alabama has executed 33 individuals, including three in 2005. Seven people have died on Alabama’s death row before their scheduled execution date, three from suicide. According to this report, Alabama has the 6th highest execution rate in the country, as well as the 6th highest death-sentencing rate. In 1999, Alabama sentenced more people to death per capita than any other state. Yet, unlike many states, Alabama has no statewide public defender system. At least 30 current death row inmates have no lawyer. Alabama’s death row occupants are overwhelmingly poor—95% are indigent --- and minority.”

The report clearly points out several of Alabama’s short comings in the application of the Death Penalty. There are several broad discussions of these short comings titled as follows:

1. The State of Alabama Does not Provide Adequate Indigent Defense

2. Innocent People have been Wrongfully Convicted and Possibly Executed

The report makes note that as of August of 2005, 121 prisoners throughout the country have been exonerated and released from death row during the modern era because they were innocent of the crime. During this same period, 972 people have been executed. This means that for every eight executions, one person is released from death row because they have been proven innocent. These people spent an average of 9 years in prison before their sentences were overturned. “This is a terrible tragedy for the person who was wrongfully convicted, but it also means the guilty person remained at large, perhaps harming others.”It was interesting to note that during this “modern era” Alabama has had five prisoners exonerated of all charges. Another, Daniel Wade Moore, was released from prison after the trial court dismissed all charges against him; but the state is appealing that dismissal.

3. The High Cost of the Death Penalty

4. Prosecutorial Misconduct

5. Judicial Overrides and Death Sentencing

6. Mentally Retarded Defendants and the Death Penalty

7. Juveniles and the Death Penalty

8. Race and the Death PenaltyThe report concludes that “The people of Alabama want a criminal justice system that is fair and effective. We remain skeptical that the unfairness that has plagued the death penalty in Alabama and other death penalty states for so long can ever be completely eliminated. But as long as the death penalty remains public policy, basic decency requires that all citizens of good will to try.

The ACLU study concludes with 11 strong recommendations which include ways that the process can be made fairer. It urges the Alabama Legislature, the courts and the Governor to consider the following action:

1. Impose a moratorium – a temporary freeze – on all executions in Alabama, at least until the recommendations of this report are in effect. During this moratorium, the State should undertake an exhaustive study of the death penalty in Alabama, conducted by an independent commission appointed by the Legislature, with members from the Legislative, executive and judicial branches, in addition to criminal justice experts. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, members of non-governmental organizations, and family members of murder victims and of people on death row should also take part in this study.

2. Establish a statewide public defender system, insuring that all defendants are represented by qualified attorneys at trial, appeal, and post-conviction proceedings.

3. Improve the quality of capital representation.

4. Institute meaningful checks on prosecutorial power.

5. Alabama Court System should begin

6. Establish a process for reviewing claims of mental retardation

7. Establish a post-conviction DNA testing procedure.

9. Abolish judicial override in capital cases

10. Recruit, retain and promote minority personnel to create a more diverse group of judges and prosecutors. Judges should make efforts to appoint people of color to represent indigent defendants in court-appointed cases.

11. Institute a meaningful review process to ensure that death sentences are meted out in a fair, rational and non-discriminatory way.

Right on the heels of the ACLU report, on Sunday, November 7, the Editorial Board of The Birmingham News, Alabama’s largest newspaper, also came out publicly against the Death Penalty, which has certainly affirmed the position of those who have long been proponents of abolishing the Death Penalty.

In it’s November 7th Editorial entitled “A Death Penalty Conversion,” The Editorial Board Of The Birmingham News writes: “It’s a matter of law that deeply troubles The News’ editorial board. After decades of supporting the death penalty, the editorial board no longer can do so. Today and over the next five days, we will explain our change of mind and heart.”

Just what does this ACLU report mean for the State Of Alabama? What does it mean for those who are fighting to abolish the death penalty?

Esther Brown serves as the Executive Secretary of Project Hope To Abolish The Death Penalty (PHADP). In an interview, Brown stated: “There have been several positive developments recently. First there was the independent opinion poll conducted by Dr. Gerald Johnson that found that 57% of Alabamians are in favor of a moratorium. This was followed by the ACLU report, Broken Justice, the Death Penalty in Alabama which explored the issues of unfairness that surround the application of the death penalty. To quote attorney Richard Jaffe of Birmingham, it is better to be guilty and rich than innocent and poor. And to that statement I would like to add that it is a whole lot better if you are white and your victim was black! And now this week the Birmingham News has come out against the death penalty in a series of articles. We are delighted, and when I say we, I was just on the phone with my board, I mean the board of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty and myself. We salute the B’ham News for its courage and the painstaking research that went in to their stand. They talk about a conversion, may there be many more in Alabama! And, while I have a chance to say this, the support of the Peoples’ Voice is one of the other very positive developments that gives us hope.

Judith Collins Cumbee of Lanett who is the first vice-president of Alabama New South Coalition was reached by phone and when asked for her reaction to the Birmingham News stated, “I think it is one of the most positive things that has happened in all the years that Alabama New South Coalition has been lifting up the issues of injustice in Alabama’s administration of the death penalty.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is the nation’s premier guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

Any individual or group interested in obtaining a copy of “Broken Justice: The Death Penalty in Alabama” is welcome to contact the writer of this article and a copy will gladly be forwarded to you.

Posted by lois at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)

"We Are All Suspects Now: Exploring The Human Cost of Post 9-11 Immigration Crackdown

MotherJones.com / News / QA

We are All Suspects Now
Exploring the human cost of the post-9/11 immigration crackdown

Lisa Wong Macabasco
November 16 , 2005

In the months after the September 11 attacks, the lives of most Americans returned to something like normalcy. But for Arab, South Asian, North African and Muslim communities, life changed fundamentally—and irrevocably. Early morning visits from the FBI became routine; thousands of people were detained, most often without charge or access to a lawyer; deportation ripped families apart, and virtually every member of those communities became a suspect. Nevertheless, not one of the immigrants caught up in post-9/11 sweeps and detained was ever shown to have been involved in terrorist activities, though many were eventually charged on minor immigration violations.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It's important to remember, though, that the anti-immigrant clampdown after Sept. 11 only exacerbated an environment already made hostile by a raft of immigration laws, passed in 1996, that mandated the detention and deportation of whole categories of people, and made all immigrants, from green card holders to refugees to undocumented migrants, subject to deportation even for relatively minor offenses, like shoplifting or possession of marijuana. Since 1996, more than 1 million immigrants from 120 countries have been deported, and immigrant detainees are the fastest growing portion of the US prison population.

In We Are All Suspects Now, Tram Nguyen examines the human cost of the country’s domestic war on terrorism in the four years since 9/11—a cost borne by communities not in some far-off, dust-ridden land, but here within our very own borders. Nguyen, whose own family fled Vietnam in 1978 as part of the largest resettlement in U.S. history, tells detailed, compelling stories of those whose lives are missing from the media—the silent, the “disappeared.” Taking readers on a harrowing journey through targeted immigrant communities from Brooklyn to Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Canada, Nguyen provides a ground-level view of federal policies implemented in the name of the war on terror, and tells the deeply intimate stories of thousands of immigrants caught up in the immigration and criminal justice system. She sheds light, too, on an immigration system that sets up arbitrary and reductive distinctions between “good immigrants” (the hard-working, penny-saving souls who work in our back rooms, kitchens and taxicabs) and “bad immigrants,” those who, for breaking the law even in trivial ways, can expect to suffer harsh penalties.

Nguyen is the executive editor of Colorlines, one of the only magazines in the country to focus exclusively on all communities of color in America. She recently spoke with Mother Jones from Colorlines’ office in Oakland, CA.

Mother Jones: What motivated you to write this book?

Tram Nguyen: Right after September 11, I heard stories of people disappearing, especially in the East Coast. I heard from a South Asian organization in Brooklyn called DRUM—Desis Rising Up and Moving—about increasing numbers of people being picked up off the streets or from their homes, and no one knew what happened to them.

A few months after September 11, I was able to go along with some DRUM volunteers on a detention visitation. I had a really intense experience visiting Passaic County Jail in Patterson, New Jersey. We took the bus from Port Authority, and I was with a family—a mother, her three little kids, and a grandmother, who were with a DRUM volunteer. We had this very dehumanizing experience waiting in the jail to go see their dad, who had been arrested at his convenience store and detained for five months without charges. He was undocumented; his visa had expired, so he was still being held. I went with them to visit, and it just reminded me so much of the experience of visiting political prisoners, specifically when I was a kid going with my family to visit my dad when he was put into a political re-education camp in Vietnam. It seemed really different from the standard in the criminal justice system, where at least you have some sort of system. This was totally chaotic at the time and very secretive, and there was no accountability on the government’s part. It really chilled me.

Colorlines is tied to the Applied Research Center, which is more of an advocacy, organizing, and policy institute. ARC put together five hearings in different cities to start creating a public discussion of this issue. We would talk about secret detentions, and people would be really shocked. Some communities would be intensely affected, but if you weren’t in that community, you could not know it was happening. That was the driving force—[the] need to put these stories front and center and let people see the wide effect of it.

MJ: What were some of the emotions you picked up on in the people you spoke to? Were there some intangibles you weren’t able to capture in words?

TN: At one point while I was writing, I remember really wishing it was a novel. If these people were fiction characters, I could express a lot that I sensed was part of the story but didn’t have the facts to back up. One thing that was difficult to make concrete is the sense of surreal-ness, the sense of the government really having the power to reach in and take people away and change your life in really drastic ways. That comes across in the details: worrying that in your Friday mosque sermon there might be undercover FBI agents—which was not just a fear; it was really happening in some places. Or in the parking lot, agents taking down license plates and following people after they left. All of that added up to a more threatening kind of environment, and it’s hard to show that in a way that was more concrete.

MJ: In the book you talk about the almost scripted role immigrants play in the U.S.—how they are assumed to be either part of a fifth column or almost cardboard cutouts illustrating the American dream. Talk about how these two images informed the writing of the book.

TN: I really was consciously trying to work against that. As the story began to crack open more, the mainstream media were pretty sympathetic on how they covered it. There were a lot of “sob stories” that told the same kind of narrative again and again: hard-working immigrant family and so on. It always had to fit the “good immigrant” model, where you had to be grateful or talk about [how] “I came here for freedom.” It was a real typical master narrative about what kinds of immigrants were wronged and deserved our sympathy in this system. But of course, the more complicated, messy part of the picture is that the system is the problem. It’s because they’ve built this very entrenched detention system and they’ve enlarged criminalization.

The guy in the first chapter, Ali [Raza], he was a small time thug in Queens. He was undocumented and was working in the underground economy, doing what he could to get by. At one point, he was doing fake credit cards and small petty crimes. There is a lot of that within our immigrant economy. You can say these aren’t the model good immigrants. Southeast Asian gang members do not fit the Asian American immigrant model minority thing. How do we talk about those people, these “bad immigrant” archetypes? And how do we get around this “We need to be sympathetic to the good people”?

Sadruddin Noorani in the Chicago chapter was one of my favorite stories in the book because he’s so complicated. He tried to be the “good immigrant,” and it reminded me a lot of my parents and their friends—really trying to be good Americans, obey the law. But he occupied a gray area, too. His response to special registration was to organize hundreds of people to register, ruining the lives of a lot of people. He could even be seen, arguably, as an unofficial agent of the INS. That brought up for me the importance of showing immigrants as real people, [showing] the humanity of people’s choices and the rules for who gets to be an American and what you have to do to earn your place here.

MJ: Why is the “good immigrants-bad immigrants” dichotomy problematic?

TN: You have, on one hand, the fight for immigrant rights at the broad level: saying that immigrants built this country, that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, and that we have to make room for the good immigrants but crack down on the criminal immigrants. That has been a real challenge for people in the immigrant rights movement, because in order to advocate for good immigrants, you have to sell short the bad ones and say, “We don’t want to fight for reform of the 1996 immigration law [the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act] that increased the criminalization and detention of immigrants.” You can’t advocate or talk about that because it would endanger the “good immigrants” trying to get their driver’s licenses.

MJ: In some of the stories, there was almost a sense of morbid absurdity about what was happening to targeted immigrants.

TN: It’s hard to capture that now, four years down the line. Even the organizers, lawyers, and advocates’ heads were spinning about how this was going down. We’re able to look back, and it’s all been well-documented now. I remember at the time this whole overwhelming sense of crisis. I really wish I’d been able to write something about Texas. Texas has huge detention prisons, and a lot of people from all over the country are flown there and warehoused. I was talking to a lawyer who was working on a one-man detention project out of Dallas, talking about so many people getting picked up and flown in from other places that there was a detention prison that used to be a meatpacking plant. The basically built bars over it and turned it into a big cage to house people. It was really terrifying and surreal.

MJ: You write about how post-9/11 issues have been framed mainly within a civil liberties and national security framework. What does this framework leave out?

TN: It doesn’t capture the real, far-reaching impact in immigrant communities and lives. They didn’t know what civil liberties meant. They didn’t care about due process, because they weren’t getting anything. How do you capture what was happening in a way that’s more true to that level of experience?

If I say “civil liberties,” for a white general audience, they tend to think of the PATRIOT Act and the library sneak ‘n’ peek, or surveillance—can the government spy on us, that type of concern, which are real concerns. But what needs to be raised up are also the human rights of immigrants, who are on the front lines of being affected by this. It’s not just a matter of surveillance or having library books monitored. It’s much more than that.

MJ: You write briefly about your own family’s immigration experience as refugees from Vietnam. How did that personal history inform the book?

TN: I had some struggle over whether to include myself at all in this book, because I really wanted to make it about the people who were directly affected. Then it became clear to me later the usefulness of enlarging the circle of people that we’re calling on to stand up and be involved in this. More of us should be thinking of that and repudiating the mentality that it’s them and not us. In the beginning, people were saying, “Oh, we’re Sikh, we’re not Muslim.” Well, that’s understandable, but what if you were Muslim?

There are so many pieces of me in it, in terms of really identifying with the families. So much of it is about family separation, about breaking up families, locking up mostly the men of the family, and deportation. I really know what that’s like—to be concerned about staying together and where you are headed next, where you can find your home. All of those things were at the core of my experience, and I really empathized with these other families in doing the reporting and writing.

MJ: In terms of media coverage of the war on terror, do you think sometimes there is too much focus on people and events outside of the country, as opposed to within the U.S.?

TN: If you look at some of the coverage of the war on terror, it’s either focused on Iraq and what the U.S. foreign policy has been, or Guantanamo. For a long time, when we were talking about secret detainees, the general public thought it was about Guantanamo. I don’t think there’s enough linking of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo to how the U.S. criminal justice system operates. A few organizers have been talking about the similarity between driving while Black and Brown, racial profiling, and the mass incarceration of African Americans. They’re comparing the police’s gang databases, for instance, with the databases set up to go after immigrant absconders. That’s the domestic face of the war on terror. It’s not just about detainees in Cuba in Guantanamo Bay. It’s [about] your neighbor next door having the FBI come in and visit.

MJ: What do you think about what’s happening in London since the bombings, as compared to what has happened here?

TN: What I find really interesting from London is they seem to have a much more integrated campaign around suspect communities and really articulating the failures of the war on terror domestically. They have a really strong critique of the U.S. response, as well. Right after the London bombings, you heard more politicians saying we need to shift from calling it the war on terror to the global struggle against violent extremism. George Lakoff wrote a useful piece on AlterNet about this, about how they’re acknowledging that the foreign policy focus, the invasion of Iraq, that military response is really not adequate in preventing attacks at home. London is an example of that.

Now of course the drum beat moves on to more talk about [how] we need to focus on homeland security more, and fighting terror is about crime fighting, more law enforcement. It’s a real danger. U.S. communities of color and U.S. immigrant communities can really raise our voices and say what homeland security operations have meant thus far, showing they have been deeply flawed, deeply misguided, and made a lot of people insecure in these targeted communities. They have arguably not contributed very much to national security overall. How much more secure does it make us if mostly what they’re doing is shipping off taxi drivers and restaurant workers and petty criminals?

MJ: You claim that what began as a post-9/11 anti-terrorism round-up devolved into a broader anti-immigration crackdown. What was the government’s thinking? Was it simply, ‘Hey, let’s expand our policies to entrap more immigrants’?

TN: If you want to be cynical or conspiracy-minded about it, a lot of people do think that [the government] knew it was a chance to do an immigration clean-up. There was almost a PR benefit, too, being able to say, ‘We are doing something about national security,’ and these are the easy targets to get. It was a calculation in terms of being able to show that you’re doing something about homeland security and going after the people that you could round up the most easily and show the most arrests and process them in a system that doesn’t have a lot of judicial protections.

MJ: The premise of We are All Suspects Now is that all immigrants have become both possible victims and suspects. Does this idea of everyone as a possible suspect apply to White people too? And where do non-immigrant blacks fit in?

TN: We can all be affected, at varying levels. White activists have been targeted on the no-fly list. In that sense, as a society, we do have something to lose collectively. It’s useful to build a bigger movement. But I remember giving a talk at a church with a mostly White audience. Afterwards, a woman said to me, “Yeah, we should all worry because maybe I could be taken from my bed in the middle of the night next.” I highly doubt that would ever happen [laughs]. There is that privilege that a White citizen would have. The title is adapted from a quote in the first chapter where Mohsin Zaheer said in his community everybody was seen as a suspect.

The question of African Americans—that was a key question. There are such parallels to the laws, policies, and sentencing structure for African Americans in U.S. prison system. But, at a community level, it’s been difficult. We’re often pitted against each other, immigrants and African Americans. There’s the overlap around the war on drugs and the war on crime. African Americans have this conflicted response. There was a surge of patriotism among everybody after September 11. This one artist I worked with for the magazine, he would see all these Black people waving flags after September 11. They want a country, too, they want to be able to claim this country too. It’s important that blacks and immigrants don’t get divided in this.

MJ: What is there to be done? What can we do to help these targeted communities? And what can we do to ensure this doesn’t happen the next time?

TN: More community connections are being developed now. More alliances are being built. Families for Freedom is doing a good job of crossing ethnicities and multiracial lines, organizing Caribbean immigrants, as well as South Asian, Arab, and Latinos. Hate-Free Zone in Seattle was a good example, with Somali and Middle Eastern immigrants.

At the local level, the urgent fights are around stopping the collaboration of law enforcement and immigration enforcement agencies. The community defense part of organizing has been critical, including organizing pro bono legal responses, where there is such a shortage, and organizing protests of detention conditions. They’re critical in calling attention to the human rights violations and the detention system, making that visible. Organizing the families of detainees, giving support to family members, and having them speak out in the media is also important.

Lastly, we really need to fight the big picture fight for public opinion. We’re losing that fight. This may be a critical point in the anti-war movement. The Bush administration is on the defensive about Iraq. On the media front, we need more investigative work exposing what they are actually carrying out in terms of homeland security. We need the media to put pressure on government agencies. A good example is Nina Bernstein’s work in the New York Times--I think she’s just brilliant. We need to get at this question of legal status. It’s become such a dividing line. People look at those who were detained and say they’re not terrorists, but they’re still illegal. They still don’t belong here. We need to say status does not trump human rights. So much erosion has happened in dehumanizing migrants that a lot becomes acceptable. Does a human being’s legal status determine what human rights they have? People are rotting in jail and families are being broken up for administrative infractions.

Lisa Wong Macabasco is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones.

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Posted by lois at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)

New Report: Incarceration and Crime: A Complex Relationship

A new report by The Sentencing Project challenges the widely held misperception that the decline in crime rates since the 1990s resulted from an increasing reliance upon incarceration. Incarceration and Crime: A Complex Relationship provides a comprehensive analysis of research conducted on the relationship between incarceration and crime, and concludes that assertions of prison’s impact on criminal offending have been overstated. As policymakers continue to struggle with the legacy of a prison population that has been growing steadily for more than three decades, this report suggests an urgent need for the reconsideration of the punitive sentencing and parole policies that currently dominate the criminal justice landscape.

Important findings of the report include:

Key elements leading to the decline in crime include the economy, changes in drug market patterns, strategic policing initiatives, and community engagement in public safety efforts
Incarceration exhibits diminishing returns on crime rates as a larger proportion of prison space is occupied by persons convicted of non-violent and low-level offenses
There is no correlation between increasing rates of incarceration and reduced crime rates; during the 1990s Texas increased incarceration levels by 144% while New York’s rate only grew by 24%, yet both experienced similar reductions in crime
Record incarceration rates have a corrosive impact on families and communities by destabilizing personal and professional bonds and increasing the risk of recidivism
The full report is available for download on The Sentencing Project's website.
The Sentencing Project
www.sentencingproject.org

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

"Judge Constance Baker Motely: A Significant Life"

Issue 159 - November 17 2005
Judge Constance Baker Motley:
‘A Significant Life’
by Donita Judge
Guest Commentator

On a Friday morning in early November, I, along with hundreds of others, attended the memorial service at Riverside Church in New York City for Judge Constance Baker Motley. Unlike the services of Mrs. Rosa Parks, held earlier in the week, there was little fanfare. There was no two-hour wait to join the many persons who came to pay respects, rather there were seats for all who chose to attend. There were many judges, scholars, civil rights activists and politicians who attended this moving memorial, but it was your ordinary people who just "stopped by" to remember and honor Judge Motley that remain etched in my mind. One woman said she heard about it at the last minute, cut short her morning errands and came to pay respect to a woman who worked tirelessly and quietly to eradicate some of our country's worst injustices. I sense some of the persons in attendance were there because maybe they had met her walking the streets of New York or like me, met her for the first time when she was honored last year at the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in Washington, D.C., for her lifelong work. There is great significance to Judge Motley's life and her passing.

Judge Motley’s life is significant because while a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., she worked determinedly to end segregation in public education, won 9 of 10 cases tried before the U.S. Supreme Court, became the first African American woman to be elected to the New York State Senate, first woman elected as Manhattan’s Borough President, and the first African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Her life is significant because she was not viewed solely as an icon but as a woman, who happened to be black, who not only sat as a jurist on the federal bench but also stood for “Equal Justice Under Law” and brought black women’s participation into full view.

This period in time is noteworthy because in the past four weeks, our country and our community have lost the voices of four women who stepped forward to move our country closer to equality when the possibility of equal opportunity appeared an impossibility: Judge Constance Baker Motley, C. DeLores Tucker, Vivian Malone Jones and Rosa Parks. It is important because in many ways these women were linked to one another and to all of us. Judge Motley represented Vivian Malone Jones in her successful attempt to gain admission to the University of Alabama. Mrs. Jones went on to become the first African American woman to graduate from that University. C. DeLores Tucker fought tirelessly to increase opportunities for black women, stood firmly and would not be moved when she objected to lyrics of music that she believed denigrated black women. Rosa Parks, among other contributions to our community, sat down for a moment in time that altered the course of history. These contributions are significant because these women shared courage of conviction and understood they could and should make a difference. It is appropriate and important that we honor each of them.

I would like to be privileged to the conversations between these women when they finally have an opportunity to meet again: I imagine “DeLores” holding open the door to allow all the sisters to enter; “Vivian” will offer a resounding statement, “it is only important to be first when there are others coming up behind you;” I am sure “Rosa” will quietly add, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around” and finally, I imagine “Connie” remarking, “we have fought a good fight but the struggle is far from over . . . ”

For whatever the reasons hundreds came together on a beautiful fall morning to remember Judge Constance Baker Motley and to bid her farewell, it was a fitting and poignant tribute by family, friends, and acquaintances who sat quietly as she was honored and remembered.

Rest peacefully Judge Constance Baker Motley, for yours was a significant life.

Donita Judge is a NJ Local Advocate/Staff Attorney for Advancement Project in Washington, D.C. She is also an adjunct professor in the African-American and African Studies Department at Rutgers University in Newak, New Jersey. She can be contacted at DJudge10l@aol.com.

Posted by lois at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2005

Where Are the Voting Rights for Ex-Felons

DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Where are voting rights for ex-felons?
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | November 16, 2005

AS WE claim to be spreading democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, we continue to deny full voting rights at home. This week the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the Florida law that bars felons who have served their time from voting.

The law goes back to 1868 when white political forces did everything they could to block freed slaves from voting during Reconstruction. A class-action challenge to the law was filed on behalf of 600,000 former felons in Florida just before the bitter 2000 presidential election, one marred by bitter claims of hundreds of black people mistakenly purged from voter rolls in Florida, many of them because they were listed as felons.

President Bush was handed the presidency by the high court, which froze the Florida recount with Bush holding a 537-vote lead.

The state of Florida argued that it modernized the law in the 1960s in such a way that it had no ties to the racism of 1868 and said that felons today can appeal for clemency to restore their vote.

A lawyer for the ex-felons, Catherine Weiss, saw it much differently. ''The court not only missed an opportunity to right a great historic injustice, it has shut the courthouse door in the face of hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised citizens," she said.

The court not only missed an opportunity, it reaffirmed an American hypocrisy. We are a nation that claims you are innocent until proven guilty, but the high court lets states declare you guilty forever.

Fortunately, most states have now rescinded permanent bans on voting by ex-felons.

Only Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, which all happen to be former Confederate states, cling to lifetime bans that can only be changed through individual appeals.

But for even three states to have the ban risks tipping the hand of democracy, especially when the disenfranchised people with prison records may be majority white but disproportionately black. No one knows where we would be at this moment if all ex-felons had the right to vote in Florida in 2000.

The high court's latest statement of disinterest in ex-prisoner rights comes as the Sentencing Project, the nation's think-tank that believes America has abused incarceration as a solution to crime, is publishing a report this week that finds that the nation continues to incarcerate people despite dramatic drops in violent crime.

The report, using federal statistics, found that violent crime and property crime have declined by 33 percent and 23 percent, respectively, since 1994. But incarceration rates since 1994 shot up in 24 percent. Some get-tough-on-crime proponents use such simple figures to claim their policies work.

The Sentencing Project looked beneath the surface to find something else. It found that from 1991-1998, states that were below the average national rate of incarceration saw crime decrease by 17 percent. States that were above the national rate of incarceration saw crime decrease by only 13 percent. That means there are factors much more complex than just throwing away the key that account for drops in crime, such as an improved economy, church organizing, and community policing.

With the declines in violent crime, the jails are being filled with nonviolent offenders, most of whom would be better served by education, rehabilitation, and maintaining connections with families than being isolated and being taught how to become more mean.

The number of drug offenders in jails and prisons has grown eleven-fold since 1980 to 450,000. The imbalance has reached unconscionable levels. In federal prisons, only 13 percent of inmates are there for violent crimes compared with 55 percent who are there for drug offenses. In 1980, only 25 percent of federal inmates were drug offenders.

In a system in which the prison-building boom of the 1990s demands fresh inmates, the percentage of low-level street sellers and couriers -- who are often under severe threats of intimidation -- shot up dramatically. Even though Americans use illegal drugs at roughly the same percentage as their racial group, African-Americans and Latinos -- because they have been easier to sweep off the streets than a suburban white coke snorter behind a fenced-in lawn -- remain vastly overrepresented in the system.

Even though crime has gone down, the prison population has risen to 2.1 million from 330,000 in 1972.

Even though felons have served their time, the Supreme Court says Florida can still ban them from voting.

If you are to judge a nation by how it treats the lowest among us, the United States still refuses to take the highest road to democracy.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

Posted by lois at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)

As Background Checks Get Big, the Little Guys Get Bigger

16, 2005, NY Times

Security
By JEFF BAILEY

AS long as employers have wanted to check up on job applicants, an industry of tiny background-checking companies has existed, prowling courthouses to check criminal records and working the phones to verify employment and education.

November Driven by post-Sept. 11 wariness and the spread of public databases that enables more efficient checking from distant locations, the industry is now rapidly consolidating. A handful of national companies is bulking up by buying smaller competitors, seeking dominance in a business expected to double in sales over the next five years to $4 billion.

So the question is, does the little guy stand a chance? The answer appears to be yes, with enough capital and some smart investments in technology.

Sterling Testing Systems in the Chelsea section of Manhattan is betting that though bigger may be better, biggest is not necessarily best.

Sterling got by on sales of less than $1 million a year for two decades, but it has bulked up, too, in recent years, expecting 2005 sales of about $50 million, said William M. Greenblatt, the founder and chief executive. Sterling has also raised $9.5 million in capital to help pay for investments in technology to become more efficient, and now employs 700, including about 100 lower-cost workers in India.

At first glance, the industry appears to favor size over the hustle and grit of entrepreneurs. Expensive technology, as Sterling knows, is crucial.

The industry is going global, both in checking up on people who have moved around internationally and in sending repetitive tasks (phone calls, checking databases and the like) offshore to reduce costs, as Sterling has done as well. And there is the brand-name factor. A foul-up for the customer - imagine the headline announcing that your company hired a convicted sex offender because of a botched background check - is so horrible to contemplate that many employers instinctively choose a big, well-recognized provider to soothe the hiring manager's nerves.

ChoicePoint and First Advantage lead the pack, each buying in recent years smaller background-checking companies in a consolidation play known as a rollup.

Yet Mr. Greenblatt, 48, thinks that Sterling has enough scale to compete profitably against the larger companies, but it is not adding bulk for bulk's sake. "The very large companies are driving a cruise ship through icebergs," he said. "We're on a Jet Ski."

It will probably be years before the sinkers and the swimmers are clearly identified in background checking. But the record of more than 40 years of rollups in other major industries suggests that Mr. Greenblatt's skepticism of his biggest competitors is warranted. Rollups in trash hauling and funeral homes failed to effectively integrate acquired companies and ultimately their once high-flying stocks, which had been the currency to finance acquisitions, came crashing down.

Knowing that history emboldens smaller players in any industry now to say no to buyout offers, or to insist on cash for their company instead of stock. An abundance of investment capital means even smaller players can attract money to finance their growth and therefore remain independent.

Much of the background-checking industry's growth is owed to a paradox of the corporate human-resources function. Companies want to know all about their new hires, but they typically refuse to disclose much of anything about their former workers. So, stymied on their own, they hire background checkers.

Meanwhile, the cost of some elements of background checking have been falling, thanks to searchable databases. With the price lower, and with Sept. 11 and well-publicized instances of convicted felons being hired for sensitive jobs, there are fewer excuses for not ordering a check.

"There's wind at the back of the industry," said Mark Jennings, a partner at Generation Partners, a private equity firm that has invested in Sterling.

Still, criminal and other public records remain a patchwork. Some states have consolidated records, some haven't. People move around. There are more than 3,000 counties in the United States and some 5,000 separate court systems, said Bob Schlossnagle, an executive vice president at Kroll Background America. Depending on the breadth of the search, his company charges $25 to several hundred dollars for a standard check.

What does it find? About 20 percent of the entry-level work force has at least been arrested at some point. And about 30 percent puff up work experience or credentials.

Like its competitors, Sterling taps into databases and also hires some shoe leather.

Maria Calle, 36, who works in the San Diego County district attorney's victims assistance program, moonlights for Sterling by checking criminal records. One recent day, 9 of the 25 names Sterling sent her had an arrest record, Ms. Calle said. She bumps into other runners for competing background checker at the records department.

"It's a nice little side gig," she added. "My check comes every 15th and 30th."

In a study published earlier this year, KPMG, the accounting and consulting firm, found that employers rank the price of the service as the most important consideration when choosing a background-checking company. That pushes prices down. Profit margins, however, have strengthened as investments in computer systems have meant more efficiency.

Amid the consolidation, the KPMG study found that 27 percent of background-checking companies had mulled selling their business in the last year, and more than half had been approached by a potential acquirer.

Still, Cherie Smith Homa, a KPMG managing director, said the biggest firms were not necessarily going to win out. Integrating computer systems on acquisitions has been a problem, she said, which can be frustrating for clients trying to buy a range of background services from a single company.

"The reality is - First Advantage, ChoicePoint - they are running a number of different disparate systems," Ms. Homa said. "They have yet to come out with a solution that is commensurate with their position in the marketplace. That's not to say they won't."

She cites Automatic Data Processing, the payroll company that also conducts background checks, and Sterling as two with high-quality technology that is easy to use.

Still, she said, "No one ever got fired for saying I'm going to give this to ChoicePoint." The Top 5 background-checking companies, she added, are in that enviable position. Employers are increasingly worried about hiring mistakes.

Carmike Cinemas, a movie-theater chain, agreed in September to pay $765,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which accused a male supervisor at a theater in Raleigh, N.C., of sexually harassing young male employees there. According to a related lawsuit filed by parents of some of the young men, Carmike hired the supervisor, a convicted sex offender, without checking his background.

Judy Russell, a Carmike spokeswoman said that since October 2003 the company has regularly done background checks on new employees 18 and older, and has also gone back and checked on current workers. Before that, she said, "We did not do background checks on theater-level employees." She would not comment on the E.E.O.C. lawsuit itself.

About 40 percent of ChoicePoint's 2004 revenue of $918.7 million came from business services, which include pre-employment background checks. And about two-thirds of First Advantage's 2004 revenue of $266.5 million came from business services that include background checks.

Mr. Greenblatt of Sterling said he wants to hit $400 million in sales and see what happens then. "I'm not in this thing to make a quick buck and retire," he said. "I've been doing this since I was 19. I hope to die here."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/business/businessspecial/16bailey.html?pagewanted=print

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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

Arrested Development...Nell Bernstein's "All Alone in the World"

Arrested Development

By Kelly Hearn, AlterNet

Posted on November 15, 2005, Printed on November 15, 2005

http://www.alternet.org/story/28151/

Dear Judge, I need my mom. Would you help my mom? I have no dad and my grandmom have cancer I dont have innyone to take care of me and my sisters and my niece and nephew and my birthdays coming up in October the 25 and I need my mom to be here on the 25 and for the rest of my life. I will cut your grass and wash your car everyday just dont send my mom off. Please Please Please don't!!!" -- Phillip (from Nell Bernstein's All Alone in the World.

When former Enron executive Andrew Fastow and his wife Lea were convicted of wire and securites fraud, the judge staggered their sentences so not to leave their children without a parent.

Millions of other American kids aren't so lucky.

A reprehensible number of children of prisoners in the United States have been left parentless in recent years thanks in large part to overreaching mandatory sentencing laws. Often poor, psychologically scarred and prone to generational cycles of criminality, their numbers grow with the industrial prison complex, itself an offspring of fear, profit and politically motivated "wars" on drugs and crime.

More than 2.2 million citizens are behind bars, a fivefold spike over three decades. The Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C.-based watchdog group, reports that the lifer population in U.S. prisons has more than tripled in the past two decades. One in every 11 federal and state prisoners now carries a life sentence. And one in four is serving a sentence of 20 years or more.

And the children bear the costs. Many must rely on grandmothers, elderly women who are often in poor health and financially struggling. Other kids fall into bureaucratic mazes or shuttle between foster homes. Too many take to the street, uncorrected problems becoming fountains for new ones.

2.4 million American children have a mom or dad in jail.

Three in every hundred American children have a parent behind bars.

The number of incarcerated women (many of them mothers) increased more than sevenfold between 1980 and the end of 2003, from 13,400 to over 100,000, according to the General Accounting Office.

In an age of fear factor politicking, can the U.S. combat crime while keeping families together? Can society protect family bonds by softening mandatory sentencing laws passed during America's crack hysteria of the 1980s? In short, can the American criminal justice system be taught to think?

Journalist Nell Bernstein says yes. In her new book, All Alone in the World, Bernstein deftly uses studies, interviews, policy recommendations and tragic personal stories to map the damage our criminal justice system has done to the people it may too likely house in the future.

You note that some have called over-incarceration the civil rights issue of the 21st century. You've suggested it may also be the children's issue of our time. If a new civil rights movement is to emerge, where does it best begin and who is most likely to start it?

I think the interesting thing is that civil rights movements only work when led by those affected. There is definitely a movement brewing on the part of former prisoners looking at lots of things including the legal denial of civil rights. But when it comes to children it's hard. Obviously young children can't lead or participate. There are teenagers, young adults, who have experienced this who are powerful leaders and voices, but there is still a lot of stigma. Almost more than anything else I've written about, there is a hesitancy to talk about it.

You report how overly punitive drug laws are responsible for leaving many children parentless. What in your opinion has lead to the contemporary American hysteria that prefers retribution to rehabilitation?

I think there are lots of things that contribute to it. But I also don't think most people think that way anymore. What's really interesting is that recent polls have showed people turning toward rehabilitation. That wasn't true 10 years ago when there was a real lock-em'-up attitude. The politics hasn't caught up though.

One problem is that people don't know who's in prison. People assume if you go to prison you are dangerous and you should be in prison. They don't realize that a large percent of prisoners are drug offenders or people who committed nonviolent crimes. Politicians explained to me that you can oppose a tough-on-crime law when it is being voted on, but once it is enacted it is immovable. Polls are showing a shift in public opinion and my hope is that it will filter into politics.

You mention psychologist Robert Coles' theory of the "moral jeopardy" faced by children. Can you expand on that?

I tried to talk to young people to see how they developed morally when they felt their family had been treated unjustly by law enforcement or the criminal justice system. Besides the sentences, these are kids who sometimes have been treated roughly themselves. Some say kids living in extreme hardship run the risk of losing their moral compass. I wanted to look at this in kids who had reason not to trust social contract. And I found that they were morally complex, struggling to do the right thing and understand what was right even in the face of complex circumstances.

You call for arrest protocols that support and protect arrestees' children, the idea being to train police to comfort children during the psychologically dangerous moments of a parent's arrest. How would you describe the current state of police preparedness in this regard?

I am not sure police could comfort them. It could be difficult to draw comfort from the people who are taking your parent away. But they can help them at the most basic level. People have told me several stories of kids literally left alone in an apartment after the parent was arrested. There has been national and statewide research looking to see if police have protocols or policies about what to do and the great majority don't.

It comes down to common sense. Many police do exercise common sense and wouldn't leave kids alone. But it's hit and miss. Some departments think twice about breaking doors. They think twice. If you handcuff someone, can you do it outside? Do you have to draw weapons? Lots of kids face weapons during arrests and experience trauma. Police always put safety first but police who have really thought about this understand that not making yourself into an enemy is a means of ensuring safety.

You also call for sentences that encourage accountability to children. Can you expand on that? Are there examples of courts and judges taking these steps?

This is kind of the great irony of indiscriminate use of incarceration. You hear accountability given as the reason. But being locked up and forced to sit idle doesn't allow you to do anything for your victim or kids.

Because very many of their parents have drug problems, the kids I interviewed helped keep me real. Five years ago I would have said using drugs is victimless crime. But the kids let me know the degree to which they were harmed by it. I would have said five years ago it was nobody's business. I don't feel that anymore.

Take Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison (DTAP) program in New York, for example. It's a diversion program, a deferred sentencing program, for "predicate felons," people with multiple serious priors and a drug problem who would otherwise be serving long sentences. They sentence them but defer it and send them to drug rehabilitation and job training. Part of that involves family visits and counseling and requires people to get better, to learn a trade and come to terms with the damage done in families.

Prisoners and their families are currently forced to subsidize the state and private industry through exorbitant collect call rates. You suggest inmates be given the ability to buy market-rate phone cards and that collect calls should be billed at standard rates. Are you optimistic that phone companies will ever make those changes? Are there any laws or activist movements that have gained ground on this issue?

By phone tax I am referring to the fact that phone companies get exclusive deals and charge twenty times the regular rates. Some of that money goes to prisoner welfare funds or, in some cases, general funds. You would have to take it on at the state level because I don't think phone companies could unilaterally lower rates since they bid for the contract. But for example in the federal system, or in Oregon, which is a family conscious state, someone in prison can take earnings, buy a phone card and call their family. The women I talked to said that means so much.

Like a lot of the problems with the system, it would not take rocket science to fix them. It would be easy if people were committed to it. And it would mean a world of difference for these children and these families.

Kelly Hearn is a former UPI staff writer who divides his time between the U.S. and South America. A correspondent to The Christian Science Monitor, his work has appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect and other publications. He is a regular contributor to AlterNet.
C 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/28151/

Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

Banned From the Barbershop: The Quiet Death of A Fighter for Civil Rights

Caution!!!!! This is a very, very sad and infuriating article.

Banned From the Barbershop: The quiet death of a fighter for civil rights

by Jennifer Gonnerman Village Voice November 8th, 2005

On the day that Rosa Parks's casket was on display in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building, here in New York City the body of another battler for civil rights lay in the city morgue. Nobody seemed to notice that Marc LaCloche had died; 12 days after his death, his body was still unclaimed.

Marc never inspired a boycott or sparked a movement, but he fought for a precious, and seemingly simple, right: to work as a barber. The prison system had trained him to cut hair while he was locked up for first-degree robbery, and he'd worked in prison barbershops for years. But after his release in 2001, the state refused to allow him to work as a barber.

Few ex-prisoners who are rejected for a barber's license fight back. Marc did. An administrative law judge reversed the state's decision, and Marc worked in a midtown barbershop for three months until the state appealed his case and took away his license. He found a lawyer and brought his cause to State Supreme Court in 2003.

Marc's court battle attracted the attention of the local media. Few people knew that the state was training prisoners to perform a job they couldn't legally do once they were freed. The judge ordered the state to hold a hearing about Marc's application. At the hearing, he'd have to prove he had "good moral character."

Marc collected glowing letters from two barbershops that wanted to employ him, but the hearing officer still denied him a barber's license, insisting
he "tried to minimize his guilt" when asked about his crime. (Marc's
friend had killed a woman at the scene of the robbery, and over the years he had flip-flopped about whether he was in the room.)

At the same time that Marc was fighting for a barber's license, he was waging another battle, this one against AIDS. Very few people knew he was sick; one of the few who did was Ezell Turner (whom Marc called by his last name). The two men were unlikely friends. They'd met in 2001, when Turner was a caseworker at the city's Division of AIDS Services and Marc was his client.

Over the years, they had grown close. Marc phoned Turner once a week, to give an update on his life or ask for help. By mid October, when Turner hadn't heard from Marc in three weeks, he started to worry. He called Marc’s new caseworker, and she told him the news.

Now, it seemed, Marc needed one last favor. His body would be buried in potter's field on Hart Island, unless Turner could find money for a funeral.

The first glimpse Ezell Turner caught of Marc LaCloche was through a Plexiglas window at a welfare office near Penn Station. "Marc had a briefcase with his barber's shop equipment and his important papers in it," Turner says. "Most of the people are nodding or cursing or fighting, but he was just a cool guy. He really stood out. He was very polite." Turner helped him sign up for Medicaid, cash assistance, and food stamps. a basement apartment in the Bronx. He put a barber's chair in a side room, transforming it into a makeshift barbershop. Whenever he was broke, he called his friend. "Turner, don't you need a haircut?" he'd say. He charged $10 or $15 for a cut, but Turner always gave him $20. "He was fast and good," Turner says.

Over the years, Marc revealed bits of information about his past. His parents had abandoned him at the hospital when he was born, and he'd grown up in the city's foster care system. At one point, he'd had to fight off an adult's attempts to molest him. He aged out of foster care at 18 and started selling drugs to support himself. By 24, he was on his way to state prison. He stayed there until he was 35.

In prison he learned that he was HIV-positive, and after his release, he dated only HIV-positive women, most of whom he met on the Internet. Turner knew many HIV-positive men who had unprotected sex, but Marc was more ethical. "He was a very nice-looking guy," Turner says. "He could've just not even told the women he had it, but he wouldn't do that."

Even without a barber's license, Marc continued to cut hair in at least two Manhattan barbershops. Still, he desperately wanted the certificate other barbers display on the wall by their chairs. He needed a license not only to cut hair legally, but also to pursue his entrepreneurial dream. His goal was to use his haircutting abilities to help other young people stay out of trouble. "All he wanted was to open his barbershop and to have contracts with foster homes and cut the little kids' hair," Turner says, "and they wouldn't let him do it."

After Turner quit his job and began working at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center earlier this year, Marc continued to rely on him. By then, Marc's biggest complaint was his apartment. The heat never seemed to go on, neighbors stole his electricity (sending his Con Ed bill soaring), and rats crawled over him when he tried to sleep. By this point, four years after leaving prison, many people would have already given up. It would've been easy for Marc to sell drugs again ­and make enough money to move ­but he was determined not to. Eventually, with

Turner's help, he managed to find another subsidized apartment.

He continued to battle for a barber's license and found a lawyer to file a suit. And he kept searching for work, preparing yet another résumé and cover letter this past spring:

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Marc LaCloche and I am desperately seeking employment. And I have been seeking employment for some time . . .

When I was released [from prison] I found that New York State would not issue me an official barber's license due to my incarceration. I spent years developing this skill so that when I came out I would have a marketable skill and would be able to be employed so that I could support myself, legally.

I have not let this legal snafu discourage me and while I am disappointed that I have not been able to capitalize on my training, I am still determined to be gainfully employed.

I have enclosed my resume for your consideration. If you have any employment that you feel I can be considered for, please contact me . . .

Marc turned 40 years old on September 14, and by then he seemed despondent. One day, Turner checked his voice mail and heard Marc sobbing into his machine. Turner thought he might be suicidal, and he dialed the police. "I don't think he was taking the medicine," Turner says. "I think he had started giving up." He had lost so much weight, Turner says, "he was a toothpick."

After Marc died, Turner found a funeral home in Harlem that would cremate his body for $700. The only problem was that Turner didn't have $700. He called a mutual friend named Fire, who cuts hair at a barbershop on West 38th Street. Fire passed the news of Marc's death along to the other barbers who knew him. The news stunned them all; Marc had never told them he had AIDS.

Turner didn't ask the barbers for money, and nobody offered any. He figured one of Marc's old girlfriends might be able to come up with the $700, but he didn't know any of their names. And he didn't think Marc had any other close friends. The city morgue usually holds bodies for two weeks, and ­barring some sort of miracle­ Marc's corpse will soon be on its way to Hart Island.

There, the men who dig his grave will be wearing the same uniform he once wore: the forest-green pants and jacket of the city jail system. Marc's body will be placed in a pine box and buried in a ditch with 149 others. There will be no gravestone with his name, nothing to indicate that he spent the last four years fighting for the right to cut hair.

Posted by lois at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2005

MA:House Vots to Allow Sale of Syringes--Gov. Romney May Veto Bill

House votes to allow sale of syringes
Foes see state encouraging use of drugs
By Scott Helman, Boston Globe
November 15, 2005

The Massachusetts House voted yesterday to legalize over-the-counter
sale of hypodermic needles to curb the spread of HIV and other
blood-borne infections, potentially setting up a political showdown withGovernor Mitt Romney over whether the bill will save lives or promote drug use.

The controversial measure, which would bring Massachusetts in line with47 other states that allow syringes to be sold without a prescription,has long been championed by public health advocates, infectious disease doctors, and substance abuse specialists, who argue that it would vastly reduce incidence of AIDS, hepatitis C, and the sharing of needles.

''This legislation is long overdue in this Commonwealth," RepresentativePeter J. Koutoujian, a Waltham Democrat and lead sponsor of the bill,said on the House floor. ''As soon as this legislation passes, it willsave lives."

But it drew opposition from several-dozen other lawmakers, who said thechange in state law would essentially encourage people to use drugs by making it easy for them to purchase needles at drugstores across the state.

The House passed the measure, 115-37, after almost three hours of
passionate debate. It now goes to the Senate.

Representatives of Senate President Robert E. Travaglini's office couldnot be reached for comment last night.

But Senator Susan C. Fargo, a Lincoln Democrat and cochairwoman of the
Joint Committee on Public Health, said she's optimistic her colleagues
in the Senate will approve the bill.

''I don't think people should be afraid of it," she said. ''I am
delighted it's moving forward."

The state Department of Public Health backs the bill, but Romney does
not, saying he believes that allowing access to needles will facilitatedrug use by addicts.

Romney spokeswoman Julie Teer declined to say whether the governor would veto the measure if it reaches his office.

''The governor has expressed his opposition to the legislation," Teer
said in an e-mail. ''When the bill reaches his desk, he will give it a
full review."

The bill would allow anyone 18 or older to purchase a syringe from a
pharmacy without a prescription.

It also would decriminalize possession of a hypodermic needle, which isa misdemeanor, and require pharmacists to hand out information about
treatment programs and about proper use and disposal of syringes to
needle-buyers.

Supporters cited a litany of statistics in making their case. Koutoujian said that more than 39 percent of all people living with HIV or AIDS in Massachusetts were infected because they or their partners used a dirty needle.

The state has the ninth-highest rate of AIDS infection by needle use inthe country, he said.

Supporters, who included several House Republicans, acknowledged duringyesterday's debate that the bill would not solve the problem of drugabuse in Massachusetts, which is particularly acute in urban
neighborhoods such as Charlestown and South Boston where heroin use is
high.

But the supporters framed the legislation as one important way to
address a public health issue that affects not just drug users but theirpartners, family members, and others in their communities.

''I don't know what the answer is to the war on drugs, but I do know onething," said Representative Eugene L. O'Flaherty, a Chelsea Democrat.''If one person can be saved by not getting hepatitis or not gettingAIDS . . . that's a pretty positive message to send."

O'Flaherty, who spoke at length yesterday about drug abuse in
neighborhoods he represents, was one of several lawmakers who said they initially had reservations about legalizing needles sales, but had been swayed after seeing firsthand how disease spread by intravenous drug use has ravaged lives in their districts.

Representative Brian P. Wallace, a Boston Democrat, explained that three years ago he would have thrown someone out of his office who suggested the state needed the bill. ''Well, we do need it," he said yesterday.''The kids who are dying in my community need it."

The bill is also backed by four district attorneys, including Martha
Coakley of Middlesex County and Daniel F. Conley of Suffolk County, who testified at a legislative hearing in the spring.

A representative of Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole also testified in support of the bill.

Opponents said yesterday that the House was making a grave misjudgment.

''I cannot believe that the people in Massachusetts are listening to
this garbage that is being touted at this microphone," said
Representative Philip Travis, a Rehoboth Democrat, arguing that the
Legislature is effectively sanctioning drug use. ''My God, what does
this say to the young people?"

An answer was proposed by Representative Elizabeth Poirier.

''I wonder what kind of message we're sending to 18-year-olds and older,that it is illegal to use drugs, but it's perfectly all right to go inand buy a clean needle with which to do it?" said Poirier, a North Attleborough Republican. ''I think this is one of the most convoluted things I've ever heard."

But supporters say that every state but New Jersey and Delaware has
passed a similar law and that studies have shown a drop in transmissionof disease by needles. Connecticut and Rhode Island, for example, both saw transmission decline significantly in the years after they enactedsimilar legislation, according to Koutoujian's office.

A few communities in the state, including Boston and Cambridge, have
adopted needle-exchange programs to combat the spread of disease, but
supporters of the House bill argue the problem requires a statewide
solution.

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.
(c) Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

FL: Broward-based Armor Correctional Health Services has Sheriffs Riding Shotgun

Private firm has sheriffs riding shotgun
With behind-the-scenes help from sheriffs, including BSO's Ken Jenne,
Broward-based Armor Correctional Health Services is making millions.

BY DAN CHRISTENSEN, dchristensen@herald.com
Tuesday, Nov 15, 2005 A year ago, Coconut Creek-based Armor Correctional Health Services was
an upstart in the business of providing healthcare for jail inmates.

The company had formidable political connections but no track record, no active contracts and not a dollar in sales.

But Armor, owned by Miami physician Dr. Jose Armas, has bulked up fast.

Today, with behind-the-scenes help from several current and former
Florida sheriffs, Armor has signed multiyear contracts with Broward,
Brevard and Hillsborough counties worth about $221 million over five
years. A fourth contract, with Martin County, is being finalized.

County sheriffs do their own hiring and set the rules that competing
bidders must follow.

In Broward and Brevard, rules were changed in advance of bids in ways
that helped Armor qualify for contracts.

And in Hillsborough, Armor's bid was millions of dollars higher than
three others. It got a boost from a late decision to eliminate price as a consideration.

Two sheriffs who bypassed Armor said fellow sheriffs have called them
and plugged the company. They identified those sheriffs as Ken Jenne of Broward, Ric Bradshaw of Palm Beach and J.R. ''Jack'' Parker of Brevard.

Ex-Hillsborough Sheriff Cal Henderson told The Herald that Armor hired him as a ''consultant'' shortly after he left office in January.

His duties, he said, have included lobbying sheriffs in at least six
counties -- Marion, Collier, Sarasota, Manatee, Leon and Lee -- where
healthcare contracts were pending or anticipated.

According to company spokeswoman Dana Clay, Armor won the contracts
because of its ability to perform, the value it offered and the
experience of its staff.

''If sheriffs are talking to each other, it's been completely on their own initiative,'' Clay said.

The privatization of medical, dental and mental health services for
prisoners is on the rise across the country as governments seek to cut costs, limit liability and avoid caring directly for an often sickly population, experts say.
LOBBYING QUESTIONED

In Florida, opportunity exists for more rapid growth. The state
Department of Corrections is now seeking bidders for a five-year
contract to provide comprehensive healthcare services to about 18,000
inmates in 13 prisons in South Florida.

Bids for that contract, estimated to be worth about $385 million, will be opened Nov. 29.

While Armor has no plans to go public, Clay said, it has positioned
itself to do so by registering itself and obtaining a trading symbol,
AHSV.

Florida law generally allows public officials to lobby agencies other
than their own.But behind-the-scenes lobbying by sheriffs raises ethical questions, a University of Miami ethicist said.

''The use of surreptitious lobbying that is unknown to the public and
unregulated by the public seems to be both unwise and arguably wrong,'' said Anthony Alfieri, director of UM's Center for Ethics and Public Service.Three sheriff's offices changed bid specifications for prison healthcare service contracts in ways that helped Armor win.

• In Broward, BSO opened the door for Armor during the bid process by
dropping its requirement that companies have experience providing
healthcare to inmates. Armor had no experience, and was just three
months old, when Jenne awarded the company its first $127 million
contract in October 2004 to provide healthcare services to Broward's
5,000 inmates during the next five years.

And Armor is owned by Armas, who, through his companies and associates, has been a major contributor to Jenne's reelection campaign.

• In Brevard, Armor won a five-year, $19.9 million contract from Sheriff Parker in May, after Parker's office slightly altered the wording in bid specifications about corporate experience. The changes allowed fledgling Armor to qualify by giving it credit for the experience of individual executives.

• In Hillsborough, Armor snagged a three-year, $65 million contract
following a decision late in the process to eliminate price as a
consideration in picking a winner. Three competitors submitted bids that were millions of dollars less than Armor's. The county's detention chief acknowledged in an interview that the decision was ''unusual,'' but it is not illegal.

Two Florida sheriffs who chose not to hire Armor, St. Lucie's Ken
Mascara and Lee's Mike Scott, said other sheriffs attempted to influence them to hire Armor.

Mascara told the Daily Business Review in March that Jenne called him
last year and recommended Armor.

''He said he knew the guy running it and asked if I would entertain
their bid,'' Mascara recalled.

''We were talking. I brought it up,'' Jenne told the Review. ``I told
him our people were very satisfied with them.''But Jenne offered his favorable opinion before Armor had begun work for BSO.

Jenne has not recommended Armor to other sheriffs, his spokesman said, and the sheriff doesn't believe his statements to Mascara amounted to a recommendation of Armor.
Mascara declined to comment.

LOTS OF PHONE CALLS

Lee County's Sheriff Scott said fellow sheriffs, state senators and a
lobbyist for the Florida Police Benevolent Association, James M.
Spearing Jr., peppered him with calls boosting Armor when Lee County bid out a multimillion-dollar jail healthcare contract in May and June.

''You could call it lobbying,'' said Scott who named Palm Beach's
Bradshaw and Brevard's Parker, as well as ex-Hillsborough Sheriff
Henderson as the ones who called him.

Scott said Armor chief executive Doyle Moore also ``suggested I give Ken Jenne a call, too, but I didn't need to. By that time, I'd made up my mind.''

Scott, who chose to keep his county's incumbent provider,
Tennessee-based Prison Health Services, said some sheriffs, including
Jenne and Parker, had helped Armor by lowering corporate experience
requirements in bid documents.

''As a sheriff, you can relax those things and others did,'' said Scott.

Palm Beach Sheriff Bradshaw ''may have talked about this company'' with Sheriff Scott, said Bradshaw's spokesman Paul Miller.

MIND MADE UP?

Bradshaw, who took office in January, is reviewing all contracts in
search of savings, Miller said. The existing jail healthcare contract
with St. Louis-based Correctional Medical Services has a clause that
would allow Bradshaw to opt out early and seek new bids, Miller said.

In September, The Palm Beach Post reported that Bradshaw had sent a team of Armor executives into the jail to review CMS's operations. Sheriff Scott thinks Bradshaw had already made up his mind on a successor''I talked with Ric at length. It was my understanding he was going to shut it down and go with Armor,'' said Scott.

An aide to Brevard Sheriff Parker, Tom Jenkins, acknowledged that Parker talked with Scott about Armor. ''He remembers it more as a reference report on our experience up to that point,'' Jenkins said.

But Armor didn't start work in Brevard until July 1 -- after Scott's
decision.

Jenkins said the bid was modified not to benefit any particular company, but ``to allow companies with experienced personnel to be considered.''

''Nobody asked for it,'' Jenkins said.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13169144.htm

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

Vine Deloria, Jr. Champion of Indian Rights, Dies at 72

November 15, 2005

By KIRK JOHNSON, NY Times
DENVER, Nov. 14 - Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux who burst into the American consciousness in 1969 with his book "Custer Died for Your Sins" and later amplified his message through 20 more books about the Native American experience, died on Sunday, a family friend said.

He was 72 and lived in Golden, just west of Denver, and had recently been hospitalized with an aortic aneurysm.

Mr. Deloria, who was trained as both a seminarian and a lawyer, steadfastly worked to demythologize how white Americans thought of American Indians. The myths, he often said - whether as romantic symbols of life in harmony with nature or as political bludgeons in fostering guilt - were both shallow. The truth, he said, was a mix, and only in understanding that mix, he argued, could either side ever fully heal.

And while his Custer book, with its incendiary title, was categorized at the time as an angry young man's anthem, Mr. Deloria's real weapon, critics and admirers said, was his scathing, sardonic humor, which he was able to use on both sides of the Indian-white divide. He once called the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were defeated by a combined force of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne in 1876 in the Montana territory, "a sensitivity-training session."

"We have brought the white man a long way in 500 years," he wrote in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 1976. "From a childish search for mythical cities of gold and fountains of youth to the simple recognition that lands are essential for human existence."

In "We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf" (1970), Mr. Deloria argued that technology and corporate values were destroying American life, and urged a return to the tribal standards of Indian culture as a window to salvation.

In "God is Red" (1973), he took that position of deliverance-through-Indian-ways further, arguing that American Indian spiritual traditions, far from being dated, were in fact more in tune with the needs of the modern world than Christianity, which Mr. Deloria said fostered imperialism and disregard for the planet's ecology.

But Mr. Deloria often said he was writing for Indian audiences most of all, hoping, he said, to instill belief in a culture had been shattered by history, and by deliberate government policy.

"If you mark down the great figures of the American West in recent times, he belongs there because of his role in reshaping Indian country," said Charles F. Wilkinson, a professor of law at the University of Colorado and a longtime friend. "I think in the last 100 years, he's been the most important person in Indian affairs, period."

Vine Deloria Jr. was born in the depths of the Great Depression, on March 26, 1933, in one of the poorest parts of the nation, then or now, in the town of Martin, S.D., near the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation, the son of a Indian Episcopalian clergyman. The family name, according to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, was derived from the name of a French fur trapper called Des Lauriers, who was taken into the tribe around 1800.

He was educated initially in reservation schools, and after a stint in the Marines in the 1950's, received a degree in general science from Iowa State University.

But religion and spirituality at the border of Indian and white ways was a running theme in the Deloria family - an ancestor, the encyclopedia entry says, was one of the earliest Sioux converts to Christianity, in the 1860's - and Mr. Deloria eventually followed his father's path and received a master's degree in theology in 1963 from the Lutheran School of Theology in Illinois.

From there, from 1964 to 1967, he worked for the National Conference of American Indians, where even before the book that made him famous, he became a leading spokesman for Indians in Washington as the group's leader. He often testified before Congress at time when the ferment of ideas and social movements in civil rights and ethnic identity were in full boil.

He took a law degree at the University of Colorado in 1970, and later, in 1990, joined its faculty, teaching history until his retirement in 2000.

His first book, "Custer Died For Your Sins," made him a national symbol. The book was not a history, but rather a personal, passionate statement. The New York Times reviewer John Leonard said it was Mr. Deloria's emergence as a real person through the book's pages that was the ultimate power of its argument.

"We have fashioned a style for accommodating our guilt, for eating statistics," Mr. Leonard wrote. "We haven't yet been able, and hopefully never will be, to posture successfully in front of a real person."

Mr. Deloria's other books included "Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties"(1974) and "The Metaphysics of Modern Existence" (1979).

Mr. Deloria is survived by his wife, Barbara, of Golden; three children, Philip, Daniel and Jeanne; a brother; a sister; and seven grandchildren.

Posted by lois at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

David Ruiz, 63, Prisoner who Struggled for the Rights of Prisoners

November 15, 2005
David Ruiz, 63, Convict Who Won Reform With Handwritten Lawsuit, Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON, Nov. 14 (AP) - David Ruiz, the convict whose handwritten lawsuit more than three decades ago led to court-ordered improvements in Texas prisons, died on Saturday at the prison hospital in Galveston. He was 63.

His death was announced by Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

He was serving a life term for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and perjury, and most recently had been housed in a unit south of Huntsville.

Among the numerous grievances and legal challenges Mr. Ruiz filed while incarcerated was a lawsuit in 1972 saying Texas prisons were overcrowded and understaffed, with poor medical care and rampant violence that denied inmates their civil rights.

In 1980, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court ruled in favor of Mr. Ruiz and ordered changes. The State Legislature passed laws to reduce the inmate population, but by the mid-1980's the prisons were among the most dangerous in the country, with gang violence and fatal stabbings routine.

Judge Justice threatened the state with huge fines, and in early 1987 he found the state in contempt. Late that year, voters approved a half-billion dollars in bonds for prison construction, the first step in a building program that today includes more than 100 prisons housing an estimated 154,000 inmates.

"We are still human beings and should be treated in a humane manner, and there are laws supporting that," Mr. Ruiz said in a 1992 interview. "If you cage an animal and kick him every day, one day that animal is going to attack."

Over the years, Mr. Ruiz had spent time in more than a half-dozen Texas prisons and later some federal lockups.

In April 1988, he was knifed in a federal prison in Indiana in what his lawyer at the time said was a hit ordered by a prison gang in retribution for the lawsuit that ended the "building tender" system, where dominant convicts served as guards. At his request, he was returned to Texas custody.

He was serving life for a robbery committed during a brief parole in 1983.

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

November 13, 2005

NM: At this rate of growth a new prison will be needed every three years

"Sentencing Commission officials have said that if growth projections by the Department of Corrections are accurate, the state will need to build a new 600-bed prison every three years to handle number of prisoners flooding into the system."

First in a series: Richardson on crime
By Walter Rubel Santa Fe Bureau Chief
Nov 13, 2005

SANTA FE -- The voice coming from the radio this past June was unmistakably that of Gov. Bill Richardson.

"If you think New Mexico's DWI laws are tough now, they're about to get even tougher," Richardson warned -- followed with what has become an ubiquitous catch phrase in the governor's crusade against drunken driving, "You drink, you drive, you lose.

New laws, combined with an increase in checkpoints and other enforcement, have resulted in a drop in DWI accidents in each of the last three years, according to numbers provided by the state. But, defense attorneys say they have also created an economic hardship for many New Mexicans and their families.

"Tough" is not a word that many would have used to describe New Mexico's DWI laws at the time Richardson took office. The law at that time provided no way to identify and deal with chronic repeat offenders. Once a person was convicted a fourth time, they had reached the maximum of the state's penalty scale -- a fourth-degree felony with a minimum mandatory sentence of six months and a maximum sentence of two years. Stories of people being arrested for the 15th time or more became common, and they faced the same penalties as someone arrested a fourth time.

Richardson helped push through a bill in 2003, his first legislative session, toughening penalties for repeat offenders. In 2004, the Legislature made it a felony for an adult to provide alcohol to a minor. This year New Mexico became the only state in the nation to require that all first-time DWI offenders have an ignition interlock device installed in their car.

But not everyone is pleased with the progress.

Senate Majority Floor Leader Michael Sanchez, D-Belen, an attorney in private life, warned throughout the last session of what he called the ever-widening net being cast by the state. And, as a result of tougher penalties for not only drunk driving but a number of crimes, the state's prisons are now full.

Sentencing Commission officials have said that if growth projections by the Department of Corrections are accurate, the state will need to build a new 600-bed prison every three years to handle number of prisoners flooding into the system.

Senate Minority Whip Mary Jane Garcia, D-Doña Ana, sponsored two bills in the last three years that have resulted or will result in longer jail sentences being handed out -- the hate crimes bill of 2003 and a bill this year mandating life sentences for child abuse resulting in death. But Garcia said she's concerned by the growing prison rate.

"We need to build more schools rather than build more prisons. That's always been my feeling," Garcia said. "We have so many nonviolent inmates, both in the adult and the juvenile corrections facilities, and if it's going to be our desire to just throw everybody in jail for DWIs or whatever, then we are going to need a lot of prison space."

Richardson described his strategy on DWI as "a two-pronged approach, with a crowbar" - with the first prong being enforcement, and the second treatment.

Bob Schwartz, Richardson's crime policy analyst and a former prosecutor, said the state knows it can't "imprison our way out of these problems.

"But, if somebody presents a danger, this governor has absolutely not one nanosecond of hesitation for him to lock someone up to keep the rest of New Mexico safe," Schwartz said.

Along with DWI, Richardson has also called for and received changes toughening the laws for domestic violence, sexual assault and crimes against children.

"Obviously, DWI and domestic violence rank among the governor's highest priorities, not only because their consequences are so drastic and so damaging to people's lives, but because they're crimes of scale," Schwartz said. "There are thousands and thousands and thousands of cases of these types of crimes, so they really have an impact on the system that's not just financial, but it frustrates what the system should be doing about that particular crime."

DWI

On the Web site for New Mexico Mothers Against Drunk Driving there is an entry titled "Bill Richardson's Campaign Pledges" listing 14 specific actions then-candidate Richardson vowed to accomplish if elected.

The pledges were both specific goals, such as 10 percent increase in DWI arrests in 2003, and general goals, such as increasing DWI checkpoints and cooperation between law enforcement agencies. DWI arrests jumped from 4,537 in 2002 to 5,714 in 2003, Richardson's first year in office, representing a 26 percent increase in arrests.

"I'm pretty sure most of the things that are on that list, he's delivered on those, plus," said Terry Huertaz executive director of New Mexico MADD. "He's taken a strong stand on this issue."

Huertaz said one of the most important things Richardson did was to bring coordination to the many different state and local agencies working on the drunken-driving problem by naming a "DWI czar." Rachel O'Connor was one of three "czars" named by Richardson. Former State Police Deputy Chief Herman Sylva was named drug czar, and substance abuse expert Leslie Tremaine was appointed the treatment czar.

O'Connor said that after three years of pushing to get DWI laws toughened, the focus will likely shift to ensuring that those laws are implemented correctly.

"The Richardson administration has pushed through a fair amount of large, tough new reforms. Where we're headed, I think, is refining those reforms," O'Connor said. "For example, with ignition interlock, we're working to make sure we're collecting the data, and we're working with the courts to make sure they're implementing it in a way that is most effective and make sure that all convicted drunk drivers get ignition interlock."

The ignition interlock bill passed in this last session is one example of how the state's new laws are creating an economic hardship for its citizens, Las Cruces defense attorney Mario Esparza said.

"The only ones benefiting from that are the ones who are doing the installations. It's expensive," Esparza said. "You've confronted the DWI problem, but have caused an economic backlash."

Esparza said that the new law will force many first-time offenders living in poverty to chose between paying for the interlock device or putting food on the table. While there is an indigent fund to help those sentenced pay for the device, it will only cover part of the cost.

"I'm talking about first offenders," Esparza said. "I can see the difference with somebody who hasn't learned. But when you're talking about first-time offenders, it's really a hardship."

Treatment

Schwartz said one of the first things he did after being named the governor's crime policy analyst was try to determine exactly how many beds were available in the state for those needing drug and alcohol treatment, and how great a shortfall there was.

"The first thing I found was nobody knew the answer," Schwartz said.

He said they eventually decided there were not quite 300 beds. He said addicts who finally decided they were ready for treatment were being put on 90-day waiting lists.

Schwartz said the newly formed Behavioral Health Collaborative, which has contracted with the private firm Value Options to coordinate all of the state's services and purchases dealing with substance abuse and mental health issues, will be able to increase the treatment capacity.

Tremaine said for the state to really address the problem, it must do more than merely add beds.

"It's like with prisons, you can have as many beds as you want, and you're going to continue to fill them," she said. "Just increasing the bed numbers is not going to cut it."

Tremaine said that along with working to add treatment facilities, the state has also increased the number of drug courts, which provide intensive, coordinated supervision for those convicted of drug or alcohol crimes.

She said they've also beefed up the parole and probation staffs, funded transition programs to help those coming out of prison and formed numerous partnerships with others working in drug and alcohol abuse.

"We are working with Value Options to enhance bed capacity, but we realize that unless we complete the rest of the picture, we'll never have change," Tremaine said. "The same people keep filling the same beds. Something needs to happen to break that cycle."

She said when she was first hired, the state was expending 70 percent of its treatment resources on 10 percent of its population.

"What really needs to happen is we need to sustain these programs for several years, and then we'll know how much of a difference we've made," she said. "It's not as sexy as saying we've doubled our bed capacity, but it will help in the long run."

A proposal by the Sex Offender Management Board to increase funding for sex offender treatment at the State Hospital in Las Vegas did not pass this year in the Legislature. Richardson said he supported the proposal, but didn't know about it in time to include it in his budget.

Asked if the treatment component is lagging behind the enforcement component, Richardson replied, "Yeah, possibly.

"Treatment and education have to go hand-in-hand with tougher penalties, but I do feel, in the tougher penalties area, we were very weak," he said.

Other crimes

Schwartz said the governor's focus in addressing both DWI and other crimes has been to offer protection to the most vulnerable.

"This administration is about helping people that don't have the ability to necessarily help themselves. We're talking about children, citizens with disabilities, the elderly," he said. "If you're the type of criminal that would pick out the most vulnerable victim, then you're the type of criminal we want to give the most serious sentence."

He said the mandatory sentences called for in many of the laws, and resulting limitations on judicial discretion, are warranted.

"There are certain areas of judicial discretion that haven't been exercised well in the past, that haven't kept New Mexicans safe, and that is going to be controlled by the Legislature," Schwartz said. "Like with the Sexual Predator Act. It's not a very difficult formula for (Richardson) -- you commit a sexual crime against a kid, you're going to go to prison."

The state also toughened its notification and registration requirements this year for sexual offenders. It added to the list of crimes for which someone must register and required that some offenders remain on the list for the rest of their lives.

Jane Gouche, legislative coordinator for the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers, said at the time the bill was being debated in committee that it would not produce the results its sponsor had promised.

"It can have negative consequences for the families of sex offenders," Gouche said. "And, the publication on the Internet can prevent sex offenders from stabilizing their lives, which should be the goal, to prevent recidivism."

Las Cruces defense attorney Jose Coronado said he was recently hired by an 18-year-old man wrongfully charged with criminal sexual penetration of a minor. Coronado said it wasn't until after the man had turned down a proposed plea agreement that it was discovered the age difference between he and the girl was less than the required four years.

"What concerns me is he would have been a sex offender. The guy would have been stuck with that ball and chain around his neck," Coronado said.

Coronado said it's not uncommon for young men to have sex with younger girls, and that the law should better distinguish between that kind of mistake and a more violent crime.

"They may be a first-time offender, but they get that label of sex offender. And sex offenders are the pariah of our society," he said. "They're all painted with the same brush. There's no distinction. They just throw them all in together."

Esparza said he also has concerns with the new law that allows police to charge people with a felony for giving a can of beer or a glass of wine to a minor in their own homes.

"It's a difficult issue, but I think slamming people with a third-degree felony is not the solution," he said.
http://www.daily-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051113/NEWS01/511130
309/1001

Posted by lois at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2005

WI: Prisoners Help Build Wal-Mart

Prisoners help build Beaver Dam Wal-Mart
By Anita Weier
November 10, 2005
State prison inmates on work release are helping to build a Wal-Mart distribution center in Beaver Dam. Local residents are worried about unsupervised convicts getting loose in the area, and some think that area residents should have been hired.

Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, asked the state Department of Corrections to look into concerns of nearby residents about possibly violent inmates from the Fox Lake Correctional Institution. Prison guards drop the inmates off at the site and pick them up after work, but they are supervised by the employer at the work site, authorities said.

"I am asking the Department of Corrections to ... ensure that no inmate convicted of a violent or drug-related crime is being permitted to work in such close proximity to a residential area," Fitzgerald said Wednesday. He had not yet received a response to his Tuesday letter.

John Dipko, a spokesman for Corrections, said that about 130 of Fox Lake's 1,330 total inmates participate in work release - an important way of preparing them for life outside prison walls. He said they are chosen from minimum security inmates with less serious offenses who are getting closer to release time.

Inmates at the site do jobs such as moving items, hauling tools and working on the roof and doors, Dipko said.

Numbers of inmates at the Wal-Mart site vary by day, he said, and a few have been removed from the site because their work did not meet the demands of the job, he said. However, some of those removed appear to fit Fitzgerald's criteria for concern.

The placements started in October and were scheduled to end in December. There were originally seven inmates working at the Wal-Mart site, but four were removed. Daily numbers appear to vary from five to eight.

Those who were removed were serving sentences for burglary, battery, armed burglary/battery and the manufacture and delivery of cocaine, Dipko said. Those at the site since have convictions for operating a vehicle under the influence, operating a vehicle without the owner's consent, and criminal damage to property/resisting arrest, he said.

The average wage for Fox Lake inmates is about $9 per hour, depending on the type of work, Dipko said. The earnings go toward room, board and transportation reimbursement for the institution, and for child support payments, restitution and fines. Inmates can refuse to work.

"When wages are worked out, they are based on what the employer would pay somebody hired off the street," Dipko said. "They are having a tough time hiring enough people from the general public to get the job done."

But Ann Breuer, who lives near the site and was part of a group that sued Beaver Dam and Wal-Mart about annexation procedures for the project - and then settled in return for Wal-Mart's agreement to highway and landscaping improvements to lessen the impact of heavy truck traffic - said she did not recall ads for such jobs. She also said that a corrections officer told her that one of the inmates involved had committed a very serious violent offense in the past, but the officer denied that.

Mike Grater, business agent for Laborers Local 330 based in Menasha, said that he would prefer that local residents be hired to do the work that the inmates are doing - for a good wages with benefits.

The building contractor that hired the inmates is Hansen-Rice, a nationwide general contracting company based in Idaho. Lafe Herrick, the project manager for the company at the site, said that Hansen-Rice was the only company using inmates there, but that he could not comment further without getting an OK from Wal-Mart, which is its own general contractor for the project. After doing so, he said that Wal-Mart had instructed him not to speak to reporters.

Calls to Wal-Mart headquarters in Arkansas were not returned.

Rose Lynch, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Workforce Development, said prevailing wage rules do not apply to privately done projects.

"A private entity such as Wal-Mart is not covered," she explained.

But city of Beaver Dam projects around the site such as sewer and water connections are covered, because they are being done by a public entity and cost more than $200,000.

Most work release inmates work at food plants or do assembly work in factories, Dipko said. The total number of state inmates on work release is more than 1,100, he said.

"These offenders gain valuable work experience. They can build good work habits and learn what it takes to be successful on a job. The ultimate goal is being gainfully employed, productive members of the community upon release from prison," he said. "Stable employment is directly linked to a lower likelihood of re-offending, so it ultimately helps promote public safety."

Questions were raised last spring by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign about the level of Wal-Mart contributions to candidates for state political offices, and the fact that the company has received $2.2 million in state commerce and transportation aid and $7.8 million in local aid and tax breaks since 1999 to open facilities in Tomah and Beaver Dam.

Wal-Mart Stores employees and the Wal-Pac political action committee have given a total of $87,775 to Wisconsin legislative candidates, party committees and Gov. Jim Doyle during the past two fiscal years, from July 1, 2003 to June 30, 2005, according to Democracy Campaign files.

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/index.php?ntid=61112&ntpid=3

Posted by lois at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2005

WI: bill requiring 25-year terms for sex offenders moves forward

November 09, 2005
Bill requiring 25-year terms for sex offenders moves forward
By Ryan J. Foley, Associated Press
MADISON, Wis. - A proposal to require minimum 25-year sentences for serious child sex offenders won Assembly approval Tuesday night despite an estimate it would add at least $165 million to state prison costs per year by 2030. The plan would add 9,000 prisoners to the state's prison system in 25 years, requiring construction of additional prison space or housing inmates in other states, the state Corrections Department said. In a memo to lawmakers, the department warned the annual price tag by 2030 would grow to as high as $232 million, plus a potential $400 million to build new space.

Despite the price tag, the Assembly voted 82-13 Tuesday evening to approve the bill. The vote sends the bill to the Senate. It would also need Gov. Jim Doyle's approval to become law. The bill would require a minimum 25-year sentence for those convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child, currently defined as sexual intercourse or sexual contact with a child under 13. Judges in Wisconsin now have broad authority to sentence first-time sex offenders of children, and sentences can range from no prison time to 40 years. The bill is known as "Jessica's law," named for 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, the Florida girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender earlier this year. Conservative supporters are pushing similar measures around the country in an effort to keep sex offenders behind bars so they cannot reoffend. Assembly Speaker John Gard, R-Peshtigo, said he wasn't shocked by the price tag, but by the estimate that an additional 9,000 sex offenders would be locked up in 25 years. He said the costs were significant, but nobody wants sex offenders convicted once to be living in their neighborhoods. "The best thing to do to protect these kids is to make sure after they violate a child, that they never get a second chance," Gard said. Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said Wisconsin should join three states that have approved such a bill. Thirteen others are considering similar plans, he said. "This is about protecting children and making certain these monsters do not reoffend," he said. "This is a nationwide crusade." Rep. Marlin Schneider noted that groups representing prosecutors and judges both oppose the bill, saying it takes away judges' discretion. He said it would lead to other costs on the criminal justice system because most of the sex offenders would go to trial. "A future Legislature - and some of you will be here - will have to pay the price," said Schneider, D-Wisconsin Rapids.
http://www.gazetteextra.com/lxr_sexoffbill110905.asp

http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/nov05/369428.asp

GPS bill passes Assembly

Worst sex offenders would be monitored for life

By STACY FORSTER and STEVEN WALTERS sforster@journalsentinel.com

Posted: Nov. 9, 2005

Madison - The state's worst sex offenders would undergo lifetime monitoring by a global positioning system, under a bill passed Wednesday by the Assembly.

The bill (AB 591) passed 96-1 and now heads to the Senate for action.

Reps. Scott Suder (R-Abbotsford) and Joel Kleefisch (R-Oconomowoc) said the measure would give the state Department of Corrections the ability to keep better tabs on the "worst of the worst" sex offenders, many of whom re-offend once they are released.

"Child sex offenders have been watching and preying on our children for years, and it's time we start watching them back," Kleefisch said.

In September, Gov. Jim Doyle ordered the Department of Corrections to use GPS monitoring on as many sex offenders as current resources will allow, and "if the Legislature is coming forward with additional resources, he's supportive of that," said Doyle spokesman Dan Leistikow.

If the bill becomes law, Wisconsin would join a dozen other states that have laws allowing for GPS monitoring, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Under the Wisconsin bill, active GPS tracking technology would monitor a sex offender's whereabouts 24 hours a day. The measure would apply to those who are on probation or parole for committing a serious child sex offense or who are put on conditional release after being found not guilty because of mental disease. Also subject to the bill would be those who are found to be sexually violent and placed on supervised release under the state's Chapter 980 statute, which allows for post-prison civil commitment.

The bill says the law also would apply to those convicted under federal law or by another state. It would apply only to those who would be paroled in the future, Suder said; those already released would continue to be monitored under the existing system.

Cost questioned

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison), the only member of the Assembly to vote against the bill, said its purpose was to grab headlines and not be part of a serious discussion about how to handle such criminals. Instead, the state would spend too much money on a system that has a "Big Brother" effect and hasn't been proved to work yet, Pocan said.

"At what point do you stop getting tough on crime and start getting smart on crime?" Pocan said, adding that he didn't think lawmakers had received sufficient public input.

The Department of Corrections put the cost of the bill at $4.8 million to $8.6 million a year. But Suder said it would cost far less - $1 million to $2 million in the first year to monitor an estimated 600 people a year. Those with sufficient income would be asked to shoulder some of the cost, he added

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

Hurricane Katrina: Congressional Black Caucus Hurricane Relief Bill

Congressional Black Caucus
Katrina Relief Bill
The following is based on a November 3 press release from the Congressional Black Caucus.

All 42 House members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) today introduced HR 4197, the Hurricane Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act of 2005. The bill is designed to provide for the recovery of the Gulf Coast region and for the reunion of families devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

During the press conference, the CBC also called on President Bush and on Democratic and Republican members of the House and Senate to support its comprehensive legislative response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and to make a commitment to eradicate poverty.

A summary of the bill follows:

BILL SUMMARY

HURRICANE KATRINA RECOVERY, RECLAMATION, RESTORATION,

RECONSTRUCTION AND REUNION ACT OF 2005

HR 4197

The bill introduced on November 2, 2005 by all 42 House members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is called the Hurricane Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act of 2005. HR 4197 emphasizes two critical objectives the CBC and many others have considered most important since Hurricane Katrina -- the desire to see the Gulf Coast restored fully and the desire to see the residents of the Gulf Coast reunited with their families. The following is a summary of some of the important provisions of the bill.

Title I – Victim Restoration Fund: Uses the model approved by Congress after the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- having a Special Master make an individual evaluation of the amount each claimant is to receive. Instead of making a determination of the amount due for each claim as a result of death as was the case under the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, however, under the Victim Restoration Fund the Special Master's job would be to determine what compensation is necessary to restore each individual Hurricane Katrina claimant to his or her pre-Katrina condition. The Special Master would be required to offset recoveries to each claimant from collateral sources (insurance, government sources, etc) and would be authorized to accept non-government funds to help reduce the financial burden on the Federal government.
Title II – Environmental Provisions: Requires the EPA to develop, in consultation with state officials, a comprehensive environmental sampling and toxicity assessment plan (CESTAP) including public health assessments and monitoring, training of clean up workers, notification to the public of risks, a step-by-step process for allowing residents to return to their property, a process of compensating those unable to return to their property because of environmental conditions and independent review of determinations.

Title III – Health Provisions:

Subtitle A authorizes grants to rebuild and repair medical facilities destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina and to help close health access and outcome disparities between minorities and others and provides coverage under Medicaid for each survivor of Hurricane Katrina whose income does not exceed 100% of the poverty line.
Subtitle B authorizes 100% Federal payment for states to provide emergency Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits to survivors of Hurricane Katrina who meet eligibility standards regardless of where they are.
Subtitle C provides 100% Federal coverage of unemployment benefits (marked up 25% or $100 per week, whichever is greater) to Katrina survivors for 26 additional weeks.
Subtitle D provides for Federal payment of private health insurance premiums for at least 12 months for employees and employers whose ability to continue payment of premiums was severely impaired as a result of Katrina and prohibits cancellation of policies by insurance providers who receive premium payments under the program.
Title IV – Housing & Community Rebuilding Provisions: Authorizes additional Federal funds for the Hurricane Katrina disaster area for the following purposes and in the following amounts:

Public Housing Capital Funds -- $100 million;
HOPE VI Community Revitalization -- $100 million;
HOME -- $1 billion;
Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) -- $1 billion;
CDBG Section 108 Loan Guarantee Funds -- $10 million;
YouthBuild -- $200 million;
HUD Demonstration Act Funds -- $4.5 million;
Funding for 300,000 additional tenant-based rental assistance (Section 8) Vouchers;
$10 million for Fair Housing Enforcement; and
$10 million for Housing Counseling for families in temporary shelters.
Title IV also prohibits placement of persons displaced by Katrina in substandard housing, provides for more vigorous enforcement of Fair Housing laws, gives people displaced by Katrina preference for HUD inventory and foreclosed properties, and establishes a mortgage payment fund for payment of mortgages similar to the fund authorized under Title III for the payment of private health insurance premiums.

Title V – Education Provisions: To help meet the educational needs of the Katrina areas and evacuees from these areas:

Subtitle B provides additional emergency funding for Child Care
Development Act Block Grants and Head Start Services;
Subtitle C provides additional funding for elementary and secondary schools to help students relocated as a result of Hurricane Katrina and school systems to which they were relocated, to help rebuild and restart the operation of schools in the Katrina areas, to help homeless youth, for community learning centers, for construction, modernization and repair of school facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina and for teacher incentive programs; and
Subtitle D provides loan forgiveness for college students, grants for reconstruction and renovation of colleges damaged by Hurricane Katrina and grants for recruitment and retention of students and faculty at colleges impacted by Katrina.
Title VI – Voting Rights: Provides Katrina evacuees the same absentee ballot and registration provisions available to military personnel and authorizes up to $50 million in grants for the restoration and replacement of election supplies, materials and equipment damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Title VII – Financial Services Provisions: Waives certain regulations, capital requirements, fees and customer identification requirements to facilitate financial transactions for persons displaced by Katrina, provides technical assistance to minority financial institutions and allows CDFI Fund resources to be used for disaster relief in the Katrina areas.

Title VIII – Expanded Opportunity and Small Business Provisions:
Subtitle A reinstates Davis-Bacon wage requirements, sets small and minority business, local (Gulf Coast) business and local employee participation goals in post-Katrina contracting, requires financial incentives to be provided to meet these goals, requires contractors to provide apprenticeship opportunities and reinstates affirmative action requirements suspended by President Bush after Hurricane Katrina.
Subtitle B authorizes additional funding for new SBA disaster loans and increases loan caps on SBA loans to small businesses impacted by Hurricane Katrina, allows the SBA to defer payments and refinance existing loans, authorizes additional funding for business counseling, small business development centers and HubZones and increases the surety bonding threshold for Katrina related procurement contracts.
Title IX – Tax Provisions: Provides tax credits of up to $5,000 for persons or families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who purchase or construct homes in Hurricane Katrina area, increases the low-income housing credit dollar amount and allows the issuance of federally guaranteed, tax exempt bonds for reconstruction of the Katrina disaster area.

Title X – Bankruptcy: Exempts victims of natural disasters from most provisions of the Bankruptcy reform law that recently became effective.

Title XI – Miscellaneous Provisions: Requires FEMA to reimburse entities that performed services that should have been performed by FEMA following Hurricane Katrina if the entity requests reimbursement and allows retroactive purchase of flood insurance by victims of Hurricane Katrina who did not live in a designated flood plain.

Title XII – Eradicating Poverty: Expresses the sense of Congress that the President should present within 6 months a plan to eradicate poverty in the United States within 10 years.

SOURCE Office of Representative Melvin Watt, Web Site: http://www.congressionalblackcaucus.net.


from Black Commentator

Posted by lois at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

November 09, 2005

Graduate Students at Yale Organize CCA Divestment Campaign

The Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale has begun a divestment campaign, aiming to push Yale and other univerisities to pull all the $1.5 million endowment investments from CCA.

The GESO report on Yale and CCA is available online at:

http://www.yaleunions.org/geso/reports/CCAreport.pdf

The petition asking Yale to divest is available at:

http://action.unitehere.org/campaign/cca

GESO is asking other organizations to endorse the campaign and to gather signatures on their petition. I've pasted a letter from two GESO organizers
below:

*************

November 9, 2005

Graduate Employees and Students Organization
425 College Street
New Haven, CT 06511

Dear ____________________:

On 5 October 2005, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization
("GESO") at Yale University initiated a campaign demanding the university to divest its approximately $1.6 million stake in Corrections Corporation of America ("CCA"), one of the largest owners and operators of private prisons in the United States. GESO launched the campaign with a rally and press conference that was attended by students, faculty, staff, community organizations, and members of the New Haven community to call for an end to Yale's investments in the incarceration of people of color for profit and the destruction of our communities. Local anti-prison activists and organizations spoke alongside graduate and undergraduate students. Speakers included: Barbara Fair of the New Haven Organization, People Against Injustice; Roger Vann, Director of Connecticut Civil Liberties Union; Carolyn Nyah, President of Bridgeport NAACP; and Jacquelyn James, a New Haven alderwoman.

GESO also released a report titled, "Endowing Injustice: Yale University and the Private Prison Industry," which details Yale's investment in CCA as well as the company's sordid history of human rights violations, egregious labor practices, and legislative influence. Since the campaign's initiation, GESO and UNITEHERE's locals 34 and 35, which comprise the clerical technical, maintenance and service employees at Yale, have gathered hundreds of signatures for a petition demanding divestment from CCA.

We are now reaching out nationally to our allies in the labor, civil rights, human rights, and anti-prison movements to ask that you join in this campaign. As a corporate-university with national and global influence, Yale's divestment can set a powerful example in ethical investments for all levels of higher education. By refusing to invest in incarceration, Yale can make clear that the principles of prison industry and mass incarceration contradict those of critical inquiry, academic freedom, and community development. We urge you to support the divestment campaign by signing the enclosed petition. Your support is critical to the success of this campaign.

If you wish to sign an online petition, please refer to http://action.unitehere.org/campaign/cca. If you choose to sign a hardcopy of the petition, you may mail it back to GESO at the address set forth above. You may also obtain a copy of "Endowing Justice" at www.geso.org.

For your convenience, please find attached a copy of the report and petition for your review. We will continue to update you with information about the campaign as well as opportunities for collaboration with your organization on future actions regarding this issue.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely yours,
Sarah Haley
Sam Vong
GESO-UNITEHERE
sarah.haley@yale.edu
sam.vong@yale.edu

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

Labor Dept. Awards $20M to Faith-Based Programs

November 8, 2005
Labor Dept. Awarding $20M to Aid Ex - Cons
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) --The Labor Department is awarding nearly $20 million in grants to religious and community groups to help people released from prison find jobs and smoothly make their way back into society.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao announced the grants in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. The money will go to 30 organizations to fund projects in 20 states.

''Everyone deserves a second chance,'' Chao said in the interview.

Job training and placement, mentoring and counseling are among the types of services that the groups will provide to ''nonviolent'' ex-offenders, she said. That's defined as an adult who has never been convicted of a violent or sex-related offense.

The department hopes to help some 6,250 released prisoners through the grants, Chao said.

''When ex-offenders return to the community they need help,'' Chao said. ''Faith-based organizations in urban centers -- because they are so much part of the community -- can be of tremendous assistance in reintegrating these ex-offenders back into the community. What we hope will happen is that there will be a holistic approach in helping these ex-offenders.''

The grants are being offered through President Bush's prisoner re-entry initiative, which emerged from the president's 2004 State of the Union address. The initiative aims not only to aid ex-prisoners find employment when they return to their communities but also to help urban areas that have large numbers of returning ex-prisoners deal with these challenges.

Approximately 549 applications were submitted to the department for a slice of the grants, which total $19.8 million. Most grants were in the range of around $660,000 a piece.

Recipients include: Metro United Methodist Urban Ministry in San Diego, Calif., $665,935; Odyssey House Louisiana, $684,250; and Goodwill Industries of San Antonio, $663,045.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Job-Grants.html

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

November 07, 2005

Holler to the Hood- Calls From Home

Prisoners, Families, Artists, Friends, Community Radio and You.

Dear Friend,

On December 12th voices from rural and urban communities will come together though the airwaves to speak to the incarcerated of our country and to educate the public about the effects of the growing prison industry in the United States.

Holler to the Hood, an Appalachia-based human rights media project, is producing Calls >From Home , a special holiday radio call-in show that broadcasts greetings from families of prisoners live on the air. After the program is recorded on December 12 th it will be offered free of charge for re-broadcast to radio stations across the country. We are asking you to suggest stations for us to approach, reach out to family members who might want to participate, and help spread the word. Visit our website at www.appalshop.org/h2h/calls to see how you can help us.

Calls From Home will air on December 12th from 7-11pm (Eastern). We encourage you to call. The toll free number to call is 888-396-1208. You can learn more about Holler to the Hood and its other cultural activist projects visit www.appalshop.org/h2h

For more information, please call Nick or Amelia at 606-633-0108 or email us at callsfromhome@gmail.com

Sincerely,
Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby
Holler to the Hood
91 Madison Ave
Whitesburg , KY 41858

Posted by lois at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)

New Report: "No Turning Back: Promising Approaches to Recduding Racial and Ethnic Disparities for Youth of Color in the Jusitce System"

The Building Blocks for Youth initiative has released its final report, "No Turning Back: Promising Approaches to Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities Affecting Youth of Color in the Justice System." The report discusses the Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, the W. Haywood Burns Institute, and campaigns in 12 cities, counties, and states to reduce disproportionate youth of color contact within the justice system.

Resources: The report is available online at: http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/noturningback/ntb_fullreport.pdf.

Posted by lois at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2005

2 books reveal the effects of incarceration

From outside the walls, a locked-down family
By PAUL GRONDAHL, Staff writer
Sunday, November 6, 2005, Albany Times Union, NY
There are more than 63,000 inmates incarcerated in 70 correctional facilities across the state.

Except for passing glimpses through tinted windows of state Department of Correctional Services buses churning up the Northway, shuttling prisoners between New York City and maximum-security prisons in the Adirondacks, this vast river of prisoners remains largely invisible to most of us.

Perhaps you've noticed a few of the short-timers -- those in minimum- and medium-security facilities serving "good time" and about to be released -- trimming bushes or mopping floors at the Empire State Plaza. They remain silent phantasms in their green work-release shirts and slacks, staring blank-faced into a middle distance, prevented by prison rules from speaking to passers-by. We, the free, avert our eyes and walk briskly past as if they belonged to an untouchable caste.

Even more imperceptible than these invisible men living behind prison walls are their wives, girlfriends, fiancees and significant others on the outside. There are no reliable statistics that enumerate how many women -- not to mention children and other dependents -- are waiting for the release of a loved one from a state prison. There are surely thousands of such women living among us in our cities, suburbs and rural communities, existing on the uncharted margins of the state's prison economy.

Stewart O'Nan creates an indelible portrait of one such woman in "The Good Wife" (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 308 pages; $24), an elegiac and deeply affecting novel set in Elmira, Owego and the Southern Tier.

O'Nan has written a gritty survivor's tale about Patty Dickerson, a small-town, low-achieving, working-class girl who married Tommy, a high school sweetheart, a few years after graduation. Tommy's parents died and he was raised by a grandmother, but had been living on his own in a crummy apartment since his senior year. Tommy supplements his lousy pay as a carpet installer by selling pot on the side. He often drives home drunk in his pickup after a night out with the boys at a local tavern. He seems to aspire to nothing more than scoring a goal in his rec hockey league.

Patty works hard to make their hardscrabble life and difficult marriage work, mainly as an affront to her embittered and critical mother, a joyless and tough single mom, and in defiance of the I-told-you-so attitude of a snooty, social-climbing older sister.

One night after a hockey game and bout of drinking, Tommy and a buddy decided to rob the house of an elderly widow who was supposed to be away. They ended up startling and killing the woman and setting fire to her house to try to cover up their crime. Tommy and his accomplice were quickly apprehended. His buddy saved his own neck by fingering Tommy as the murderer. Tommy is convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life.

Patty, who is in her early 20s at the time, is pregnant with her first child, Casey, who is born shortly before Tommy is processed and sent to Auburn Correctional Facility.

Left behind

Writing about the crushing weight of incarceration on the family left behind is where O'Nan -- author of eight previous novels, including the highly acclaimed "A Prayer for the Dying" -- is at his heartbreaking best.

O'Nan expertly captures the dehumanizing effect of the vast DOCS agency, which shifts inmates among prisons without first notifying the family. He describes long bus rides and excruciatingly long waits in the visitors' area on a weekend prison visit. He relates the awkwardness and humiliation that a father, bound and shackled, feels in meeting his young son on visiting day. He portrays the humiliation family members feel during searches and interrogations by cold-hearted prison guards.

O'Nan writes in spare, unflinching prose and paints riveting scenes of family prison visits: the bitter stares of guards, heated arguments punctuated by long silences, and the constant clink of quarters being fed into vending machines in order to indulge a prisoner in the rare luxury of consuming junk food.

It's hard to find hope about rehabilitation in this bleak landscape of criminal justice. There's an unrelenting grimness to the life that Patty's left with while Tommy serves out the maximum sentence after repeatedly being denied for parole. A single mother, she has to abandon her own apartment and move back in with her surly mother while raising a son with serious emotional problems. She earns paltry wages as a flagger on a town road crew. She puts all her hope and energy into applying, and eventually being approved for, overnight conjugal visits in a trailer within the prison walls. But these artificial matrimonial encounters prove unsettling, too-brief and a different form of torment.

Years later

The years pile up for Patty and develop a depressing sameness, except for when Tommy is willy-nilly relocated to a different prison, adding hours to Patty's exhausting weekend commutes for visitation. After awhile, back home, it's as if Tommy no longer exists. Relatives stop asking about him at holidays.

And yet Patty, a kind of upstate Everywoman, fiercely endures the 28 years Tommy spends behind bars. She is neither hero nor victim in O'Nan's unsentimental portrayal. She is flawed and often less than sympathetic, but she is resilient and committed to her son, her husband and his eventual freedom.

A graduate of the Cornell University MFA program, O'Nan, who lives in Connecticut, combines a novelist's touch with a journalist's knowledge of his material. In his acknowledgments, the author thanks Alison Coleman of Albany, director and founder of Prison Families of New York, a support organization for women like Patty. In the book's dedication, O'Nan also mentions Coleman, whose husband was sent to prison in 1981 for third-degree robbery involving $18, with no weapon or resulting injuries, according to his wife's account. Coleman's husband is serving 25 years to life. She is raising their two children.

From the inside

After finishing "The Good Wife," anyone interested in a gritty, inside view of the New York state prison system should get a copy of Ted Conover's book, "New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing," published in 2000. The immersion journalist spent a year working as a state correction officer after being denied access by state Department of Correctional Services officials to write a magazine article about the job.

Together, "The Good Wife" and "New Jack" offer a clear-eyed view of the dangerous, spirit-crushing, soul-destroying and corrosive half-life of the prison system, which taints both those left waiting on the outside and those toiling inside its high walls.

http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=416077&category=ARTS&news
date=11/6/2005&TextPage=1

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Prisoner Has Name and a Marathon Number

November 6, 2005
Prisoner Has Name and Marathon Number (49997)
By JERE LONGMAN
MALONE, Fla., Nov. 2 - In a recent letter to the director of the New York City Marathon, Jim Deupree asked to run the 26.2-mile race on Sunday. His would be an unlikely entry. He is incarcerated at a state prison here among the cotton and peanut farms of the Florida Panhandle, midway through a 30-year sentence for armed robbery.

"I am a fairly decent 69-year-old long-distance runner and commercial printing salesman from Indiana presently 'retired' here in Florida," Deupree wrote with dark humor.

He proposed to run, not through New York's five boroughs with 37,000 other entrants, but in the razor-wire isolation of the prison yard of the Jackson Correctional Institute. He would circle a dirt track, one that measures about two and a quarter laps to the mile, until he completed the marathon in about 60 laps. He said he had trained 50 miles a week and hoped to complete the race in four hours.

His aim, Deupree said, would be to raise money for cancer research in memory of George Sheehan, the running guru and author who died of prostate cancer in 1993. Sheehan had written encouraging notes and sent him running shoes, Deupree said.

He had run about 200 of these proxy races of various distances over the past 10 years, Deupree wrote in September to Mary Wittenberg, director of the New York City Marathon and chief executive of the New York Road Runners, the club that organizes the race.

The club eagerly granted Deupree a race number, 49997, and asked that he report his finishing time. "Keep on running!" Robert L. Laufer, a lawyer for the Road Runners, wrote.

Florida prison officials have taken a more skeptical view of Deupree's running over the past decade, saying that organizers of distance runs around the country are too credulous in allowing him virtual entry into their races.

Prison officials acknowledged that Deupree did run on the prison track. But they questioned whether he was completing races and seeking to raise money for cancer research or whether he was merely seeking publicity in hopes of receiving a commuted sentence.

Deupree, who has been in and out of prison since the 1970's for crimes he said were related to a dependence on alcohol, is sentenced as a habitual offender in Florida. He is scheduled for release in 2019, at the age of 83.

With 1,300 inmates to supervise at the Jackson Correctional Institute, prison officials said they did not have time to sit with a stopwatch and lap counter to verify the running habits of any one inmate. Any racing would have to be done on the honor system.

"He runs on a regular basis," Jerry Kelly, director of recreation for the prison, said of Deupree. But, he added, "I truly don't know what his capabilities are."

Carl Davis, an assistant warden in charge of security, said he thought Deupree did run races inside the prison yard. But Buddy Kent, an assistant warden in charge of prison programs, said he thought Deupree was "conning people" in an attempt to get them to send him money or running shoes or to provide him with publicity.

Debbie Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, said prison officials had no evidence that Deupree ran marathons.

"The bottom line is, we think he's conning people, these race officials, and he's done it for years," Buchanan said. "We strongly recommend they not send him a race number or register him, because he's not doing it."

If that is true, Deupree's entry in New York would be an embarrassment for Wittenberg, who is in her first year as race director, and would surely irritate some of the tens of thousands of legitimate runners who failed to gain admittance into the marathon through a lottery system.

[On Friday, Wittenberg said she allowed Deupree into the race because she had been told he had committed a robbery at a young age and because she felt that running a marathon could be redemptive.

"It says to me this guy's serious, trying to make the best of his situation, and we should support that," she said in a telephone interview.

Told of the skepticism of Florida prison officials, Wittenberg said, "My jaw is open," adding, "That would be a travesty, taking advantage of a situation if he's in fact not doing what he says he's doing."

Later, she said of Deupree, "If this gives him something to focus on and gets him out running as long as possible, I think there's some value in that."]

There has been some independent verification of Deupree's history as a prison runner. In May 1980, The Runner magazine detailed his trouble in Indiana with alcohol, burglary, bad checks and a stolen company car, and how running allowed Deupree to shed both 50 pounds and, temporarily each day, the confines and tensions of life behind bars.

After training 100 miles a week, Deupree ran 259 miles from the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City upon his release in October 1979 to his home in Shelbyville, Ind., over 12 days. Hal Higdon, author of the article, accompanied Deupree on two of the days, running more than 20 miles each stretch, and writing that "the eight-minute pace he assumed was relaxed and efficient."

The story ended on a despairing note. A month later, Higdon wrote, Deupree began drinking again and was arrested after a car dealership said he had not returned a loaned automobile on time. Deupree said in an interview that the arrest cost him a chance to run the New York City Marathon in 1980.

On the issue of charitable causes, the American Cancer Society said that Deupree had contacted its national headquarters in Atlanta several years ago. But, a spokesman said, there were no records indicating that donations had been made on behalf of Deupree or Sheehan.

Bernard F. Daley, a criminal defense lawyer in Tallahassee, Fla., who has corresponded with Deupree, said the prison system had a history of discouraging such charitable activities.

"I think he's sincere in trying to utilize his time for something good," Daley said of Deupree. "Whether it has resulted in anything, I don't know."

Four months shy of his 70th birthday, at 5 feet 9 inches and 170 pounds, Deupree appears fit with trim gray hair, a ruddy face and bifocals strapped in place by dental floss. His running shoes are falling apart and caked with dust. He lost his only benefactor when his brother died last year, he said, leaving him unable to afford new running shoes for $73.70 at the prison canteen.

If he does complete a marathon in four hours Sunday, it would be a remarkable achievement. Last year, only nine men in his age group, 65 to 69, finished the New York City Marathon in four hours or less.

When he began running in prison 26 years ago, Deupree said, he was a "fat butterball" who weighed 250 pounds. Essentially, he said, he has replaced one addiction with another, favoring exercise now over alcohol, which cost him two marriages and his freedom and left him estranged from two sons.

His latest incarceration, for robbery with a deadly weapon, came for a crime committed on Jan. 12, 1990. He said he walked into a bank in Clearwater, Fla., after a drinking binge and handed a teller a note that said: "I've got a gun. I want $2,000 or I'll hurt you."

"An insane alcoholic thing" is how Deupree refers to his crime.

By contrast, he said, running provides a natural high and "an escape from where I'm at, from the tensions of being in prison." But prison officials were attempting to sabotage his running-for-charity project, Deupree said. The authorities preferred stories about overcrowding and inmate riots so that money for new prisons would be readily available, he said.

"It's the lock-the-door-and-throw-away-the-key principle," he said.

Warden Russell Smith of the Jackson Correctional Institute disputed this. Given the adverse publicity many prisons receive, any positive news would be embraced, he said.

"He's led me to believe he's raised several hundred thousand dollars for the American Cancer Society," Smith said of Deupree. Not so, Deupree said, adding that he knew for certain only $400 in charitable donations had been made on his behalf. If he had more publicity, he could raise more money, he said.

Round and round, prison officials spar with Deupree. By his own count, he has been written up 61 times for rules violations related to running. The latest disciplinary report came when a race number was sent to Deupree from New York, prison officials said. He is not allowed to receive race numbers or money, T-shirts and running shoes donated to him, the authorities said. Anything that would single him out from other inmates is considered contraband.

Earlier this year, the New Balance shoe company agreed to send 80 pairs of running shoes to Deupree and the prison, but delivery was halted because it was a rules violation, said Kent, an assistant warden. New Balance, however, said it declined Deupree's request because it did not meet the company's guidelines for charitable donations.

Les Smith, a lawyer from Portland, Ore., who is event director of the Portland Marathon, said Deupree notified him that he had completed last month's race by proxy in 3 hours 58 minutes 11 seconds. He regularly provides Deupree with a race number, Smith said, noting it was not important to him that Deupree complete the race and raise money for charity. The simple act of running was sufficient, Smith said.

"It's good for mental health," Smith said. "Something to be encouraged."

Here in the rural Florida Panhandle, though, prison officials remain unconvinced about Deupree's intentions to complete a proxy run of the New York City Marathon.

"He has a couple of medical conditions and he's 69 years old," Kent said. "My best guess is, he won't run no 26 miles 385 yards."

Yes, he will, Deupree insisted. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he said, he planned to run for two and a half hours on the prison track Sunday morning, return to his cell for a mandatory inmate count, then return to the track for one and a half hours. Another inmate has agreed to lend him a pair of size 8½ shoes if his own give out, Deupree said. He plans to write his race number on his shirt, near his prison number, or scribble it on his arm.

How far will he run? Most likely, only he will know.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy

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The Forgotten of Africa, Wasting Away in Jails Without Trial

November 6, 2005
By MICHAEL WINES
LILONGWE, Malawi - Since Nov. 10, 1999, Lackson Sikayenera has been incarcerated in Maula Prison, a dozen iron-roofed barracks set on yellow dirt and hemmed by barbed wire just outside Malawi's capital city.

He eats one meal of porridge daily. He spends 14 hours each day in a cell with 160 other men, packed on the concrete floor, unable even to move. The water is dirty; the toilets foul. Disease is rife.

But the worst part may be that in the case of Mr. Sikayenera, who is accused of killing his brother, the charges against him have not yet even reached a court. Almost certainly, they never will. For sometime after November 1999, justice officials lost his case file. His guards know where he is. But for all Malawi's courts know, he does not exist.

"Why is it that my file is missing?" he asked, his voice a mix of rage and desperation. "Who took my file? Why do I suffer like this? Should I keep on staying in prison just because my file is not found? For how long should I stay in prison? For how long?"

This is life in Malawi's high-security prisons, Dickens in the tropics, places of cruel, but hardly unusual punishment. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, justice scandalously uneven.

But by African standards, Malawi is not the worst place to do time. For many of Africa's one million prison inmates, conditions are equally unspeakable - or more so.

The inhumanity of African prisons is a shame that hides in plain sight. Black Beach Prison in Equatorial Guinea is notorious for torture. Food is so scarce in Zambia's jails that gangs wield it as an instrument of power. Congo's prisons have housed children as young as 8. Kenyan prisoners perish from easily curable diseases like gastroenteritis.

When the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights last visited the Central African Republic's prisons in 2000, it heard that officers had deemed 50 prisoners incorrigible. Then, dispensing with trials, they executed them.

Even the African Commission's special representative for inmates has not visited an African prison in 18 months. There is no money, said the representative, Vera Chirwa, a democracy activist who herself spent 12 years in Malawi jails under a dictatorship.

"The conditions are almost the same," Ms. Chirwa said. "In Malawi, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in almost every country I have visited. I've been to France, and I've seen the prisons there. In Africa, they would be hotels."

Most African governments spend little on justice, and what little is spent goes mostly to the police and courts, said Marie-Dominique Parent, the Malawi-based regional director of Penal Reform International, a British advocacy group. Prisons, she said, "are at the bottom of the heap."

With so much misery among law-abiding citizens, the world's poorest nations have little incentive to improve convicts' lives. But, then, not everyone in African prisons is a convict.

Two-thirds of Uganda's 18,000 prison inmates have not been tried. The same is true of three-fourths of Mozambique's prisoners, and four-fifths of Cameroon's. Even in South Africa, Africa's most advanced nation, inmates in Johannesburg Prison have waited seven years to see a judge.

Some of Africa's one million or so prisoners - nobody knows how many - are not lawbreakers, but victims of incompetence or corruption or justice systems that are simply understaffed, underfinanced and overwhelmed. Kenya's former prisons commissioner suggested last year that with proper legal representation, a fifth of his nation's 55,000 prisoners might be declared innocent.

The most immediate and apparent inhumanity is the overcrowding that Africa's broken systems breed, compounded by disease, filth, abuse, and a lack of food, soap, beds, clothes or recreation. A survey of 27 African governments by Penal Reform International found that national prison systems operated, on average, at 141 percent of capacity. Individual prisons were even more jammed: Luzira Prison, Uganda's largest, holds 5,000 in a 1950's facility built for 600.

Babati Prison in Tanzania, built for 50 inmates, housed 589 as of March.

Malawi's 9,800 inmates, living in effectively the same cells that were too crowded when they housed 4,500 a decade ago, are luckier than many. Three years ago, half the prisoners had yet to go before a judge. Under a pioneering program run by Penal Reform International and financed in part by the British government, paralegals have winnowed that to fewer than one in four - among the lowest rates in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet the flood of newly accused still outstrips Malawi's ability to deliver justice.

"This is not a hotel, where we can accommodate no more than our capacity," said Tobias Nowa, Malawi's commissioner of prison operations. "We must accommodate whomever is sent to us."

Prison Population Doubles

Paradoxically, democracy's advent has catalyzed the problems of Africa's prisons. Freedom has permitted lawlessness, newly empowered citizens have demanded order - and governments have delivered.

Malawi's prison population has more than doubled since the dictatorship ended in 1994. But its justice system is so badly broken that it is hard to know where to begin repairs.

Malawi's 12 million citizens have 28 legal aid attorneys and eight prosecutors with law degrees. There are jobs for 32 prosecutors, but salaries are so low that the vacancies go unfilled.

So except in special cases like murder and manslaughter, almost all accused go to trial without lawyers. The police prosecutors who try them have only basic legal training. And the lay magistrates who sit in judgment are largely unschooled in the law.

Justice Andrew Nyirenda, 49, the chief of Malawi's High Court, said the system had been swamped by the growth and rising complexity of crime since Malawi became a democracy in 1994.

"There are conspiracies to commit crimes, drug trafficking, even human trafficking, and instances of lower-level white-collar crimes where people are literally swindling institutions," he said. "These are extremely complicated cases for people who have not been trained sufficiently. We get convictions that aren't supposed to be convictions, and acquittals that aren't supposed to be acquittals."

Pacharo Kayira, one of the eight prosecutors, seconds that. "I've done so many cases where I don't agree with the conviction by the lower court," he said in an interview here. "It's not the best situation, to say the least."

Malawi's police officers can take two years merely to send prosecutors their report on a homicide. Prosecutors need months more to decide whether the case should be taken to a lower court, the start of a legal process that lasts years.

Malawi's High Court, which must pass judgment on all capital crimes, has not heard a single homicide case in the last year. There is no money to assemble lawyers, judges and witnesses for hearings in the locales where the crimes occurred; no money to empanel juries as required since 1995; no money for the written record that the Supreme Court needs for its mandatory review of convictions.

Ishmael Wadi, Malawi's director of public prosecutions, said his eight prosecutors had a backlog of 44 untried fraud and tax-evasion cases, 173 robbery and theft cases, 388 fatal accident cases and 867 homicide cases.

"When the offenses occur, they send the files to this office," he said. "The files keep on coming, so the number keeps increasing. So what do you do? You accumulate the files, keep them nice and put them on the shelves."

And the caseload is rising. Capital crimes - homicide, rape and manslaughter - consume virtually all the time of legal-aid lawyers and prosecutors. While they process about 380 homicides a year, 500 to 600 other homicides are committed.

Shortages of judges, prosecutors and lawyers ensure that justice is both sluggish and mean. Many inmates sit in cells for lack of bail that can total less than $10 or $20.

The interminable wait between arrest and courtroom torments the innocent and lets the guilty escape justice. Evidence in police stations is misplaced or discarded. Witnesses die and move away.

Mr. Kayira, the prosecutor, encounters such cases far too often, after much life has been wasted and long terms already served, by both the innocent and the guilty.

"There have been many times when I have used the discretion granted me as a prosecutor to tell the police to release a person who has been there five, six years," he said. "I look at their file and say to myself, 'There isn't the evidence here to convict this person.' " For prisoners like Lackson Sikayenera, their cases lost in a system that only sporadically works, the only alternative is to hope someone hears their pleas for help - and to make a new life.

The Road to Prison

Built 40 years ago to house 800 inmates, Maula Prison, on a recent visit, held 1,805 inmates, all but 24 of them men. Mr. Sikayenera lives in Maula's Cell 3, one of 160 in a pen the size of a two-car garage.

Once a farmer near Dowa, a dirt-road village 25 miles north of Lilongwe, Mr. Sikayenera was sent here after he killed his elder brother Jonas. Their father, he said, gave him a choice tobacco plot that Jonas claimed was rightfully his. Jonas threatened to kill him if he did not surrender it. Lackson refused, he said, and Jonas attacked.

"To protect myself, I took a hoe handle and hit my brother on the forehead, and he fainted," he said. "Then I went to the police to report that I had harmed my brother." The police jailed him, then moved him to Maula Prison a week later.

That was more than 2,100 days ago.

"I have not seen my family since 1999," he said. "I was the only productive person in my home, and now there is too much poverty for them to afford transport to see me. The only communication I have gotten is from my first wife, who informed me, 'I am tired of staying alone here, and I am going to get married.' "

"Life is very hard here," he said.

He and the other men spend daytime in the prison yard, a field of thick yellow dust with an outdoor privy, a communal shower and one water spigot. At 4 p.m., they are herded into a dozen concrete cells. Fourteen hours later, at 6 a.m., they are let out again.

Their cells have iron-barred windows and thick walls to discourage escape attempts. A sporadically working shower and toilet are crammed in each cell's corner.

One cell wall is painted glossy black - a blackboard where inmates scrawl trivia like the cell's head count, prisoners' faiths and works of chalk art, like drawings of autos and dream homes.

Prisoners sleep on blankets on the floor, too tightly packed to reach the toilet - too packed, in fact, even to turn in their sleep. One inmate awakens the rest each night for mass turnovers. The most privileged inmates sleep on their backs, ringing the walls of the cell. Everyone else sleeps on his side.

"It is so unhygienic here," Mr. Sikayenera said. "Basically, if you need any source of water, you have to get it from the toilet. The showers, most of them are broken. There is a lot of dysentery. A lot of the time, the water isn't running." Maula Prison's commanding officer, an expansive man named Gibson Singo, disputes none of that.

"They were designed for 50 or 60 people in one cell," he said. "But now it's 150, 155. If you talk of human rights, there is no way you can put 150 people in one room."

Maula and four nearby prisons split a monthly state allotment of $12,500, from which Mr. Singo must pay Maula's 124 employees and meet inmates' needs. Maula's share is laughably small. There are no prison uniforms, no blankets, no soap, save what charities provide. The only food is nsima, corn mush leavened with beans or meat from the prison rabbit hutch. The only drink is water.

The mush is boiled in massive tubs outside the prison, where wardens moved the kitchen after hungry inmates began fighting over the food. The old kitchen is now a rudimentary school, its lessons scrawled in chalk on the walls.

These conditions exact a cruel toll. Maula Prison lost an average of 30 prisoners a year in 2003 and 2004 - about one death per 60 inmates. The average for American prisons is one death per 330 inmates.

It could be worse: Zomba Prison, 100 miles south, loses one in 20 inmates annually. But it is bad enough.

How They Survive

"It's just unbearable," said Frances Daka, 32, jailed on an unresolved murder charge since 2002. "We make ourselves live, just to survive."

Survive they do, in ingenious fashion. On each cell's wall, beside the chalk artwork, is a list of rules, laws that are both prosaic and telling: Do not make noise when the lights are off. Do not smoke during prayers.

Prisoners must be clothed, lest a bare body excite sex-starved men. "Sodomy is not allowed in this house," one rule states.

A cell hierarchy maintains order. A minister of health checks daily for sick prisoners and arranges medical care.

If justice outside the prison is slow to come, inside it is swift, lest unrest ensue. Cell policemen "arrest" rule breakers, and cell magistrates hear evidence and pronounce sentences.

"Let's say someone was helping himself while the others are eating," Mr. Sikayenera said. "This person might be given 500 days of cleaning the cell."

After 20 or so, the offender might be taken again to a cell judge, who can grant a reprieve.

"The reason why there is all this hierarchy is to find conflict resolution," Mr. Sikayenera said. "So there is no chaos. And it's effective. In most of the cells, you find there is no fighting. People don't break the rules."

Mr. Sikayenera is the magistrate of Cell 3. For six years, no one in Malawi's justice system has decided whether he should be punished or freed. But in prison, elevated by seniority and fellow inmates' respect, he metes out mercy and retribution with an even hand.

And without delay.

"When a case comes up," he said, utterly without irony, "it is dealt with. Right there."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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CA:San Quentin Death Row Plans Expand in Marin County

San Quentin death row plans move ahead
Marin County officials complain that expansion is too expensive
By Keri Brenner, MARIN INDEPENDENT JOURNAL
Inside Bay Area 11-5-05

SACRAMENTO — State officials Friday ignored warnings that San Quentin State Prisons new death row will cost more than $300,000 per cell and voted unanimously to approve the projects preliminary construction plans.
It was the last public vote necessary before construction can begin.

This is a $1 billion boondoggle and the governor is still asleep, said Assemblyman Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, after the packed meeting of the state Public Works Board. This is a huge disappointment.

The public works boards 3-0 vote came just hours before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Lloyd Connelly denied Marin Countys request for a temporary restraining order to block the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from taking further action on the project.

I dont see that there will be any irreparable harm occurring in the next 15 days, Connelly said. The project isnt due to break ground until June 2006.

Connellys ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Marin County Board of Supervisors. The suit claims the state Department of Finance violated state code when it approved a revised scope for the $233 million, 768-cell maximum security facility.

Connelly set a Nov. 21 hearing date on the countys lawsuit.

The death row, to be built on the bayfront near Larkspur Landing, was approved by the state Legislature in 2003 for 1,024 cells at a cost of $220 million, but in August was shrunk to 768 cells after projected costs rose to $265 million.

At $233 million, the new proposal is a 6 percent increase in cost from the original $220 million. But the county argues that, with the reduced scope, it amounts to an effective 30 to 35 percent increase in the price tag.

Obviously this cant be a good decision, Marin County supervisor Steve Kinsey told the public works board. This is the most expensive land in California — bayfront land in a vibrant urban setting — and the most difficult place to staff a prison and the highest cost of construction.

But former San Quentin Warden Jeanne Woodford, said the the need for more secure death row housing was critical, noting two death row inmates almost escaped due to faulty security.

Weve run out of room, and the public safety risks in our current facility are very clear, said Woodford, now state corrections department undersecretary. We need a modern facility.

Posted by lois at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2005

7 million adults in US Prisons or on probation or parole

Nov. 2, 2005, 7:43PM
Number in prison or on supervision nearly 7 million
30% increase since 1995 results from tougher rules on sentencing By REBECCA CARROLL Associated Press, Houston Chronicle

WASHINGTON - Nearly 7 million adults were in U.S. prisons or on probation or parole at the end of last year, 30 percent more than in 1995, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

That was about one in every 31 adults under correctional supervision at the end of 2004, compared with about 1 in 36 adults in 1995 and about 1 adult in every 88 in 1980, said Allan Beck, who oversaw the preparation of the department's annual report on probation and parole populations.

Beck attributed the overall rise in the number of people under correctional supervision to sentencing reforms of the 1990s. The nation's incarcerated population has been growing for more than 30 years, with a sharp rise in the last decade.

He said crime rates have fallen in recent years, which helps account for slower growth among people on probation - those allowed to live in the community with some restrictions rather than being incarcerated.

The number of people on probation in 2004 grew by 6,343 to about 4.2 million.

Nearly 50 percent of all probationers at the end of last year were convicted of a felony. Twenty-six percent were on probation for a drug law violation, and 15 percent for driving while intoxicated, said the annual Justice Department report.

Whites made up 56 percent of the probation population and only 34 percent of the prison population, according to Wednesday's report and another Justice Department report released last month.

"White people - for whatever reason - seem to have more access to community supervision than African-Americans and Hispanics," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, which promotes alternatives to incarceration. He called probation a cheaper and more effective form of rehabilitation.

Blacks, he noted, made up 30 percent of probationers and 41 percent of prisoners at the end of 2004. Hispanics made up 12 percent of the probation population and 19 percent of the prison population.

The adult parole population grew by 20,230, or 2.7 percent, during the year, more than twice the average annual increase of 1.3 percent since 1995, the report said. The total number of parolees at the end of 2004 was 765,355.

Beck said a late 1990s spike in prison populations is now showing up in the number of parolees, as the number of prisoners released rises.

About 187,000, or 39 percent of discharged parolees, went back to prison or jail in 2005.

The total number of people incarcerated in the United States grew 1.9 percent in 2004 to 2,267,787 people.

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com

Posted by lois at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

CO: Victory for organizers opposing private prisons!

Private prison in Lamar needs voters' approval

By ANTHONY A. MESTAS

THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

LAMAR - Citizens voted Tuesday to change the city charter, which will now require a vote before a privately owned prison can be built or operated in town.

The measure also bars the city from selling water or sewer services to a privately owned prison or from using city funds or staff time to recruit a prison without a vote.

The ballot measure passed 1,007 to 816.

Plans to build a privately owned prison in town surfaced in 2003 and the issue has sparked a long fight.

Concerned Citizens of Lamar, the group battling the prison proposal, have fought with city officials for the past three years and on Wednesday members said they were elated to hear the election results.

"It's been a long and hard struggle - from lawsuits to protests - we are extremely happy that the citizens get to decide if there will be a prison located here," said Verdell Howard, CCL president.

City Administrator Jeff Anderson said Wednesday that the people have spoken and he supports the outcome of the election.

"We needed to hear from the people and the best way to do it is through an election," Anderson said.

Anderson said that the prison issue may be over.

"To move forward and try to recruit a prison, in my opinion, would be going against what the majority of the people have spoken for - that's just my feeling. I can't speak for the whole town," Anderson said.

"I think we need to be very cautious before we ever approach this issue again."

The fight to keep a privately owned prison from being constructed gained momentum last March when District Judge Douglass Tallman ruled against city officials who filed a lawsuit questioning the legality of a petition seeking a vote on the issue.

City officials filed suit in Prowers County District Court in August 2004 questioning if CCL's petition had more than one subject.

Tallman ruled against the city, clearing the way for CCL to proceed with the initiative process that was stalled when the lawsuit was filed.

After months of fighting city hall, the petition was approved by the city clerk in April.

CCL turned in more than 300 signatures to the city clerk this summer. Only 167 signatures were needed to put the issue on the ballot. "We had a rough time, but we are glad to see this outcome - it tells us that people do want to make the decisions in our town," Howard said. Although the measure passed Tuesday, the fight is still not over.

Last week, Howard requested that District Attorney Mike Davidson investigate whether Prowers County Development Inc. has violated a campaign law.

Howard alleges that members of PCDI were lying to the public about the ballot measure in fliers and cards they were circulating. Officials at PCDI said that the measure could have a negative impact on attracting new jobs to Lamar and Prowers County.

Howard and a group of CCL members met with Davidson Wednesday. Davidson is still investigating to see if there was a violation.

Howard said that the CCL will lay low for now, but they will continue to fight for the citizens of Lamar on other issues.

http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1131011552/15

Posted by lois at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

CIA Prisons in Eastern Europe

November 4, 2005
Nations Urged to Answer Prison Allegations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:10 p.m. ET

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Commission said Friday it would encourage governments in Eastern Europe to comment on allegations that the CIA set up secret prisons in the region to interrogate al-Qaida suspects.

Polish authorities denied any knowledge of prisoner transfers, but -- in a piece of information that raises questions as much as it sheds light -- confirmed Friday that a plane carrying Americans touched down at a little-used airport on the very day a human rights group claims flight logs indicate a CIA aircraft landed there.

In Romania, officials gave The Associated Press computerized flight logs in an attempt to disprove claims of suspicious flights landing at an airport near a military base.

The broader allegations, first reported in the Washington Post, have also triggered a flurry of denials from other governments in the former Soviet bloc and prompted European Union officials, the continent's top human rights organization and the international Red Cross to say they would investigate. U.S. officials have refused to confirm or deny the claims.

''It is obvious we'll take the statements of those countries for true,'' said Friso Roscam Abbing, a European Union spokesman. ''Only if we receive evidence which would prove the contrary will we decide what possible next steps to take in terms of contacting authorities.''

Roscam Abbing said the European Commission -- the EU's executive office -- would seek statements from governments that have not denied the existence of secret prisons on their territories to comment on the issue ''if only to get as much clarity and transparency as possible.'' Such prisons, European officials say, would violate the continent's human rights principles.

The commission said it would make an informal inquiry, requesting answers from all 25 member governments as well as EU candidates Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Turkey.

In Poland, an EU member, airport officials and border guards said that on Sept. 22, 2003, a Boeing passenger plane carrying seven people with U.S. passports touched down at midnight at Szczytno-Szymany airport, a former military base in the country's northeastern pine forests. Szczytno-Szymany is not an operating airport, but planes may land if arrangements are made in advance.

Border guards spokesman Maj. Roman Krzeminski said records show the plane took on five other people with U.S. passports who were waiting at the airport and whose documents said they came to Poland on business. He said the plane took off after about an hour on the ground.

Former airport director Mariola Przewloczka said border guards drove out to meet the plane on the runway instead of having the occupants enter the airport terminal. ''After the plane landed, two vans drove out to meet it with border control officials,'' Przewloczka said.

She and other officials said they didn't know where the plane came from or where it went.

Several residents said they had not noticed any unusual flights.

''I didn't see anything, nothing,'' Marek Wyrzykowski, a farm worker who lives in a village next to the airport, told the AP. ''Taliban? There's no Taliban here.''

Human Rights Watch said Thursday it has evidence, based on tail numbers and flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004, that indicate the CIA transported suspects captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania.

Mark Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the New York-based organization, said the group matched the flight patterns with testimony from some of the hundreds of detainees in the war on terrorism who have been freed by the United States.

He said that in September 2003, a Boeing 737 flew from Washington to Kabul, Afghanistan, making stops in the Czech Republic and Uzbekistan. On Sept. 22 -- the same day Polish officials said a Boeing arrived -- he said the plane flew to Szczytno-Szymany Airport, then to Romania, Morocco and finally to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In Romania, aviation officials and the military denied Human Rights Watch allegations that the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base may have been used by the CIA as a detention facility.

The United States used the Kogalniceanu base, near the Black Sea port of Constanta, to move troops and equipment during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. forces left the base in June 2003.

''When the Americans were here there were so many civilians working there, people would have found out about it,'' Dan Buciuman, the base commander, told the AP.

The head of the International Mihail Kogalniceanu airport, where planes carrying detainees are alleged to have landed, gave AP computerized flight logs for all landings from 2003 to 2005. There was no mention of the flights that have been reported in recent days as suspicious.

''It would be practically impossible for them to land here without a record,'' said airport director Cornel Balan. ''These records cannot be erased or altered.''

At the nearby air base, officers reacted with disbelief to the allegations that Kogalniceanu's facilities were used to keep secret CIA prisoners.

''It's incredible what is being said and to remove all doubts we have decided to open our doors, so that anyone can see that we have no detention facilities,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Adrian Vasile, a spokesman for the base.

------

Contributing to this report were Associated Press Writers Ryan Lucas in Szczytno, Poland, Monika Scislowska in Warsaw and Dan Mihaescu at Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, Romania.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

Posted by lois at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)

All of Us or None Working to Bring Down Barriers to Prisoner Re-Entry

November 2, 2005
An October vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors puts the city closer to ending hiring discrimination against people with past convictions. The board voted unanimously in support of a resolution to "ban the box" - a check box on city employment applications that asks, "Have you been convicted by a court?" The resolution was part of a campaign by All of Us or None, an organization of formerly-incarcerated people, prisoners and their families.

This question on the public employment application proves a barrier to people trying to find employment after they leave the penal system, even when their conviction may have nothing to do with the job they applied for, and even in cases where the conviction is many years old. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times cited research by a Princeton sociologist showing that checking a felony box on a job application reduced applicants' chances of getting an interview by at least 50%.

The All of Us or None campaign seeks to end discrimination against former prisoners and people with past criminal histories. In addition to "banning the box," the campaign also calls for limits on background checks of job applicants to ensure that such information is collected at an appropriate point in the application process and only on convictions relevant to the job. The Alliance sent a letter of support on the resolution to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in May 2005.

All of Us or None has pushed San Francisco to focus on the issue of discrimination against people with criminal backgrounds as part of a massive city civil service reform effort. A review revealed that though the city has an existing policy of considering applications on a case-by-case basis, it is not being carried out. Linda Evans, an organizer with All of Us or None, explains, "According to their own policy as it exists now in San Francisco, there should be no disqualifying convictions except those that are legislatively mandated. For example, if you want a job in law enforcement, California law dictates that you cannot have felony convictions. If you want to work in California schools, you cannot have certain types of sex offenses."

In reality, convictions that have nothing to do with the job do have an impact on the city's consideration of job applicants. To address this problem, All of Us or None proposes that criminal background checks be performed only at the final hiring stages, when job candidates have made it through the interview process. Evans says, "What we're asking for is equal opportunity in employment -- an end to discrimination, and that's not happening. And it cannot happen if they are collecting information at the first stage of the application procedure."

Now that the Board of Supervisors has urged banning the box, the next step for All of Us or None is to work with the civil service commission, the city's department of human resources and the city attorney to set and implement policy. The civil service commission will have a hearing on the issue on December 19.

For more information on the campaign or to get involved, please contact Linda Evans with All of Us or None at linda@prisonerswithchildren.org.

http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/110205banthebox.cfm

Posted by lois at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2005

NY: Re-Entry Net New Resource

Hundreds of Reentry Resources now available at www.reentry.net/ny!
Reentry Net is a free information clearinghouse for criminal defense, legal services, social services, and policy advocates on the consequences of criminal proceedings. The online resource center offers:

► Interactive news and calendar tools, and program directories with referral information

► National research and policy materials

► Hundreds of practice materials for advocates and clients, selected by experts, including:
· A manual on the collateral consequences of criminal proceedings in New York
· An Overview of criminal process and criminal law terms for non-lawyers
· Model motions and briefs, sample letters and forms for employment and housing
Visit www.reentry.net/ny to register for your free membership

Posted by lois at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

Should Architects Stop Designing Prisons?

Feature -- Trendspotting , July/Aug 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joining the Parade!
Should Architects Stop Designing Prisons?
By Stephen A. Carter
Correctional News
Just in case the AIA Committee on Architecture for Justice has not yet planned its early November program in San Francisco, one topic of interest might be whether to sign "the pledge." Getting through the crowd of 279 protesting architects at the CAJ hotel site who have signed "the pledge" could be a challenge. Still, this shouldn't take long since none of the recognized architects that I know of who have historically been involved in designing prisons have signed it.

Therefore, stopping to say hello to old placard-carrying friends won't take long.

By now, you may be wondering if I'm spending the summer in the hot sun without head cover. But unless you have been too long at the pool-side bar, you should have heard that Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility (www.adpsr.org/prisons) has asked that all socially responsible architects, designers and planners join together and refuse any commissions that would expand the number of prison beds in the US. ADPSR is a viable organization, founded in 1983 to support a nuclear arms freeze and to become a voice for social issues rising from the hearts and throats of the design community. The organization has been at the leading edge on green building issues and regularly raises the bar on ethics, calling on designers and planners to give more regard to their communities than giving them a thought only when they're passing through them on their drives to work.

Should we sign "the pledge?" My guess is that the readers of this periodical earn a reasonable portion of their pocket change from the prison building industry. And we are talking industry. During the decades of the '80s and '90s, the U.S. added an average of 100 new prison beds a day. It truly requires an industry to meet that level of demand. During the time when a million new beds were constructed, the industry innovated, matured and, well, profited. While the conditions of confinement in America's prisons and jails were being vastly improved, voices of caution were also constantly reminding us that we would never build our way out of a social and political crisis.

A Controversial Topic

In mid-June I moderated a debate on "Privatization" at the American Association of Correctional and Forensic Psychology's (www.aa4cfp.org) National Prison Debate in Alexandria, Va. As you might expect, this topic was the most controversial, the most misunderstood and the one around which the least consensus developed. However, from the "left" and the "right" came at least a murmur that maybe we have enough beds and now is the time to be about doing more at the front-end and back-end, and less in the middle of the continuum.

I won't burden you with facts about the U.S. being the most prolific jailer in the world, with more folks under some form of community control than a city the size of Los Angeles, and spending more money per prisoner each year than it takes to send a kid to college with an excess of beer money. Attend any prison conference and you will be reminded of just how big the industry has become. The question for us is are we following the path of the U.S. automakers, producing Hummers and rubber-tired, highway-eligible tanks even as gas prices are doubling and will continue to increase regardless of more and bigger pipelines?

Regardless of which side of the economic equation you come down on, in the end the future of the auto, health care and prison industries will be less about social than fiscal policy. Prison building in America today is a fraction of its former self. Is it because there is less crime? You bet. Then what's sustaining the astronomically high number of incarcerations? Is it longer sentences? Also a safe bet, especially because those sentence lengths are no longer set by judges who have the advantage of hearing all the facts of a complicated case. Instead, they are being determined by overtired, excessively lobbied legislators who have to make relatively snap decisions on 200 pieces of legislation, and then rush home to raise money for their next campaigns.

This is not about architects unplugging prison producing CADD machines to reduce bed counts; this is about red-eyed legislators setting social policy through the way they allocate public funds against perceived priorities. Now, some of the folks I met at the debate had the impression that our industry has a key to the legislative cloakroom and regularly fills re-election coffers with more than spare change, and that is why we have so much legislation passed that requires a bed in return for a buck. But does anyone also want to discuss how hospitals, college dorms, electrical sub-stations or airports get funded?

The design community can change social policy by getting involved with "the process." But first we have to recognize that making sausage is different from eating it. The journalist-author Michael Kinsley once commented that all of us face a choice of remaining on the curb and watching, or joining the parade even if we aren't familiar with the music. The issues surrounding the incarceration rate in America are as complex as calculus, and to suggest that by asking the design community to stop so we can sort out how many beds we really need has as much validity as asking architects to stop designing Wal-Marts until a better employee health insurance package emerges.

A Warning

But we have to start. The current trickle of state-funded prison projects has first to do with the economy and second, I hope, with an honest re-examination of who really needs to go to prison and for how long. The design community can't do a lot to shift economic priorities, but it can do a great deal more to join in the debate about when is enough enough. One such debate is now under way in Congress in the form of The Second Chance Act of 2005 (H.R. 1704). As the title implies, the act would provide federal assistance to systems that can demonstrate how we can have safe communities and lower crime rates, and better prepare offenders to contribute positively to society.

But I warn you. At the same time Congress is addressing mandatory sentencing policies and re-entry programs, individual states will pass at least 50 acts making incarceration the preferred sanction. On this, I agree with Raphael Sperry, President of ADPSR and author of "the pledge:" We will effect no change if we are content to simply watch the parade. A collective voice must be heard that questions the continued use of incarceration as the first and only answer to crime and its consequences.

So, do we sign "the pledge" (which, by the way, can be found at the ADPSR web site)? Or, do we rationalize that if we don't plan and design better prisons, then we'll be back where we were in the '70s when conditions of confinement in America were pretty miserable? And besides, if those who have invested their careers in making conditions not only better but the best in the world stop designing, then someone else will. And that someone just may not have the necessary skills. People get hurt in prison.

In Act II of Julius Caesar, the man himself reminds Calpurnia that, "Cowards die many times before their death, the valiant never taste of death but once." I have always thought that was a slogan for the euthanasia lobby or the battle cry of a deranged drill sergeant, but as I contemplate the genuine urging of "one of us" to thoughtfully consider if what we are doing is really producing a better and safer society, Caesar's comments are haunting.

The story doesn't end there, however, as Jules goes on to say, "Of all the wonders I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come." I will resist seeing that as a fatalist philosophy suggesting that prisons are what we have and therefore what we have to have. Relative to the movement to stop prison construction, I am going to believe that Caesar was suggesting that we have nothing to fear but the fear of not asking the complete question: Are more prisons the best, and only, answer?

Read the pledge. Enjoy the parade.

Stephen A. Carter, AICP, is principal of Carter Goble Lee LLC in Columbia, S.C.
http://www.correctionalnews.com/index.cfm?do=otm2&otm_id=147

Posted by lois at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

The Second Chance Act of 2005

Congressional Action on the Second Chance Act
The Second Chance Act of 2005 was recently introduced in the U.S. Senate and will receive a hearing today in the House of Representatives. The bill is designed to promote safe and successful prisoner re-entry. Its provisions include, among others:
· Authorization of re-entry demonstration and mentoring grants to states;
· Creation of a federal re-entry taskforce; and
· Establishment of a national re-entry resource center.

Senate Introduction
Senate Leaders introduced the Second Chance Act of 2005 on Friday, October 28. The bill, S. 1934, was introduced by Senate Judiciary Chair Arlen Specter (R-PA), along with Senators Joe Biden (D-DE), Sam Brownback (R-KS), James Talent (R-MO), Mike DeWine (R-OH), Jon Corzine (D-NJ), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Rick Santorum (R-PA), and Barack Obama (D-IL).

www.reentrypolicy.org

Posted by lois at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2005

WA: House Bill 1819--Sealing of Records

HB 1819 - DIGEST
Declares that it is the policy of the state of Washington to encourage and contribute to the rehabilitation of felons and to assist them in the assumption of the responsibilities of citizenship.

Recognizes that the opportunity to secure employment or to pursue, practice, or engage in a meaningful and profitable trade, occupation, vocation, profession, or business is an essential ingredient to rehabilitation and the assumption of the responsibilities of citizenship. To this end, it is important for the offender to be able to respond to employment inquiries according to RCW 9.94A.640(3) without fear of being contradicted by a court file disclosing the vacated conviction.

Provides that, when a court vacates a record of conviction under this act, the court may order the court clerk to seal the court file as provided for under court rules, without requiring the offender to demonstrate compelling circumstances. The order to seal the court file may allow the deletion of the offender's name in the case index and the substitution of the offender's name with his or her initials.
for more information go to: www.access.wa.gov and type in the HB #.

Posted by lois at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)