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December 31, 2005

Editorial: NY Times: VA: A Light on Justice Denied

December 31, 2005

Editorial

A Light on Justice Denied
A harrowing postscript to official justice is taking place in Virginia, where the discovery of a forgotten generation's blood samples in old forensic files has led to modern DNA tests that have already cleared five inmates convicted of rape, with hundreds of other felony cases to be examined.

As cheering as the recognition of their innocence has been for the five, who together lost about 90 years behind bars, a sad truth is emerging about the frequency of wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system. The two latest proofs of innocence emerged from a random sampling of just 29 old rape cases from the 1970's and 80's. Back then, Mary Jane Burton, a meticulous state serologist who died six years ago, bothered to retain evidence scraps that are now proving weighty in the modern era of forensic DNA tests.

The pity is that Ms. Burton's extra step of quiet professionalism is unusual - the procedures still current in much of the nation's justice system would have led to the destruction of such evidence by now.

Faced with the startling trove of resurrected evidence, Gov. Mark Warner has done the only thing he could do in good conscience: he has ordered the state to backtrack through hundreds of past convictions that may overlap with the Burton files and to let the DNA chips fall where they may.

Commendably, Governor Warner has made Virginia the first state to begin such a sweeping review without waiting for court challenges from convicted felons.

The Virginia experience evolved from the prodding of the Innocence Project, the legal appeals group that mounts DNA-based challenges on behalf of the wrongfully convicted. The state's look back is especially relevant as forensic lab methods become a target of increasing doubt and criticism across the nation. To "Burton" a case is already a fresh term of art in Richmond, one that deserves to spread through the criminal justice system.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Crime Numbers Keep Dropping Across the City

December 31, 2005

Crime Numbers Keep Dropping Across the City
By AL BAKER

Crime has fallen across New York City for the 17th consecutive year, with subway crime down by more than 5 percent from last year and the number of recorded murders virtually certain to be the fewest in any single year since 1963, new Police Department statistics show.

As of yesterday, there had been 537 killings in the city, according to the department's latest marking-period reports that are issued weekly. That is down from 566 in the same period last year. And it is down from 649 in all of 2001, when joblessness surged, anxiety from Sept. 11 was present and a budget crisis prompted a reduction in numbers of city police officers. In that year, some citizens and criminal justice experts predicted a bottoming out of the crime downturn as the police force took on new counterterrorism responsibilities.

New York reported its greatest number of murders in 1990, when 2,245 people lost their lives by violence.

In 2005, in addition to murders, numbers for rape, felony assault, burglary and grand larceny all fell, the department said.

Auto theft, which, like murder, is considered a reliable indicator of crime patterns because there is little discretion in how to classify it and little reluctance in reporting it, fell by nearly 12 percent.

"When you get eight million people together, you will have some crime," said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. "But is the city improving? And, is quality of life improving? Most believe that and believe that cops are doing a great job and crime is coming down."

New York's continuing decline is in contrast to some other cities across the nation. After years of falling crime, Boston is now experiencing a surge in homicides. Houston has seen more killings in 2005. In Philadelphia, murders are outpacing last year's rate. Some law enforcement officials have attributed rising murder rates outside of New York to use of the drug methamphetamine.

David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said, "Nobody else, anywhere, has been able to generate either the huge reductions in violent crime or sustain those reductions without reversal for 10 years, which is what New York has now done."

In the view of some critics, the overall numbers seem too good to be true. Officials in the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the main police union, charged last year that precinct commanders felt such pressure to drive down crime that they "cook the books," reducing the severity of crimes on paper to avoid recording them and reporting them to the F.B.I.

But the department has an internal auditing system, said Michael J. Farrell, the deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives. Since that system was put in place in the early 1990's, the error rate has gone to 1.5 percent from 4.4 percent, he said.

"The aspect of it that reassures us are the audits that we do, which are very substantial, in terms of the number," Mr. Farrell said. "Every precinct is audited randomly, twice a year."

Of course, on any given day in the city, the streets can feel dangerous.

Arrests for guns are up, heading into the last week of this year. Two police officers have been killed in the line of duty in recent weeks, and more officers were shot this year, 8, the highest number since 1997, when 10 were shot and one was killed. The 2005 murder tally could still increase by midnight tonight or when some 2005 deaths because of unknown causes are finally determined by the medical examiner.

Shootings, a crime statistic the department has tracked for the last 12 years, were up by 3.2 percent, to 1,508 from 1,461. And the number of victims wounded in those shootings rose to 1,808 from 1,755. The shootings, though, were concentrated in a handful of precincts, and they have now started to fall. This year could well wind up with the second-lowest number of shootings since 1993.

The precinct with the greatest number of incidents of gunfire in 2005 was the 75th Precinct, in East New York, Brooklyn, which recorded 92. The most gun arrests, 225, happened there, too.

The citywide dips in five of the major crime categories was followed by roughly proportional dips in arrests for those crimes. But the number of robberies increased, by 0.8 percent, and, consequently, robbery arrests mushroomed to nearly 11 percent as the police focused on the problem.

Or, as Mr. Farrell put it, to "re-inoculate" a new generation of criminals "who may not have gotten that vaccine."

Put in context, the rise in robberies, to 23,948 from 23,746, comes in a category of crime that is a mere shadow of its former self: their number peaked at 100,280 in 1990, said Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian and executive director of the Citizens Crime Commission, a group that monitors police policies in New York.

In all, the numbers collected, computerized and crunched by the New York Police Department reveal all manner of trends and developments.

In 2005, eight precincts in the city recorded not a single murder - vast parts of the city that included Central Park and the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where there were four murders last year, and in 1990 there were eight.

Five precincts, including one covering the Long Island City section of Queens and another, in the Fordham and Bedford Park sections of the Bronx, recorded some of the highest numbers of violent crimes this year. There were 229 robberies in the 108th Precinct in Queens, for instance. But even with those high numbers, it was those very precincts that recorded the greatest reductions when set against last year. For example, robberies in the 108th were down by 16 percent.

Perception can be as much a measure of crime as reported statistics. In 1963, as today, some sensational cases made headlines for weeks. Then, it was the so-called Career Girl murders, the double homicide of a Newsweek researcher and a teacher on the Upper East Side. There were a total of 548 homicides that year. Now, it is Peter Braunstein, a writer suspected of posing as a firefighter in an Oct. 31 sex assault in Chelsea.

Commissioner Kelly, for his part, said no floor for any crime is acceptable. The department tracks crime in "real time," he said, and maps it down to street corners.

The manpower for Operation Impact, a program started by Mr. Kelly to flood problem areas with Police Academy recruits accompanied by more experienced officers, will be doubled next month to include 1,200 officers. A strategy of splitting the most violent precincts into thirds, Operation Trident, will be put in place in the 44th and 46th Precincts, he said.

Many people, however, including Andrew Karmen, a criminologist who has analyzed the factors affecting the city's crime, have wondered just how long this trend - what Dr. Karmen calls a "crime crash" - can last.

"I think there is room for even further progress because in other large cities around the world, such as London and Tokyo, people get along even better with each other than we do," said Dr. Karmen, who wrote the book, "New York Murder Mystery" (N.Y.U. Press, 2000), about declining crime rates in the 1990's.

Dr. Karmen said that most criminologists attribute New York's falling crime rate to both criminal justice and broader societal factors, including smarter police work, tougher sentencing, improved job opportunities and the perception of an improved economy.

Mr. Kennedy said: "The controversy remains. Is it something that law enforcement did, or isn't it? My thought is, you can't explain it without a very large contribution from law enforcement."

Heading into his second term, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the record bodes well for the future.

"Every year, experts say we can't drive crime down any further, but happily the N.Y.P.D. proves them wrong and breaks another record," Mr. Bloomberg said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/nyregion/31crime.html?hp&ex=1136091600&en=10df13f49ff8773a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Posted by lois at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

NY: Bedford Hills--A Tough Life All About Drugs & Sister Elaine

December 31, 2005
The City Life
Well-Spent Prison Time
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
A two-time loser nicknamed Sexy - so dubbed in her earliest years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women - was dying in the prison ward. Old friends, both inmates and keepers, were stopping by, anguished that radiation treatments had taken Sexy's beautiful head of hair. "What really upset her was she lost her teeth, not her hair, and she would die that way on the inside," recalled her chaplain, Sister Elaine Roulet. The nun smiled, singling out Sexy to make a point about the thousands of women convicts - murderers, drug addicts and courier "mules," prostitutes and thieves - she grew close to in 47 years of service at Bedford Hills, a New York prison.

"A tough life for Sexy - all about drugs," the nun recalled, speaking from her supposed retirement at one of the nine homey shelters she created across the city over 25 years for the women she regards as her larger community of sisters: Bedford Hills prison alumnae who have done their time. "But Sexy was always elegant, and she wanted to die that way."
Vanity behind bars is more than an acceptable vice in the subversive catechism of Sister Elaine, who broke out of parochial school teaching early in her career to become a reading teacher for imprisoned women. From there, things took off: she discovered that maternity, not literacy, was the big problem.
She focused on programs that allowed felons to mother their infants on the inside for the first year, to stay close to their children through creative visitor programs in the years that followed, and eventually to find a year's shelter with their children at one of her Providence House shelters in converted convents and rectories. She is so busy in retirement that she could not resist starting another program, called Our Journey, for quick spiritual retreats in the city where the women encourage one another and watch their children grow.
"Something new - there's nothing worse than old ritual," the nun warned, digging through piles of family prison pictures she keeps in a lockbox she got from a longtime friend, Ruth Brown. " 'Ma' Brown - the last woman to escape the electric chair," Sister Elaine said. "She died inside." Sexy's last rites turned out to be special. "The very kind prison dentist said, 'Look, we can't make her false teeth - she'll be dead soon,' " Sister Elaine said. "But he made a plaster mold on his own, and we ran around to dentists, begging them, and one directed me to this guy, some kind of dental mechanic, who finally laughed and made a set for nothing." Sexy loved her new teeth, smiling as much as possible with them before her death, her chaplain recounted. "And the point of this story is you don't do anything alone, in prison or outside: look at all the people who got Sexy her teeth," the nun said, enumerating the half-dozen who had nudged the search along to the final touch of ritual elegance for Sexy. FRANCIS X. CLINES

Posted by lois at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2005

NY: Jail Unit for Gay Men Set to Close at Rikers Island

December 30, 2005
New York Set to Close Jail Unit for Gays
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
For at least three decades, gay and transgender inmates had their own housing unit inside Rikers Island's sprawling jail complex. To be admitted, all a new inmate had to do was declare homosexuality, or appear to be transgender, and ask to be kept out of Rikers's main jails.

The idea, city correction officials said, was to protect vulnerable inmates who might otherwise become victims of discrimination or sexual abuse in the rough world of the general inmate population. The only other metropolitan jail to separate gay and transgender inmates is Los Angeles County Jail. Gay inmates there, however, are forced to live separately from other inmates.

But at Rikers Island, gay housing, as it is called by New York correction officials, is about to end. On Nov. 28, the Correction Department stopped admitting new inmates to the unit. In a few weeks, the unit, which still holds about 50 people, will be no longer.

Under the new rules, gay or transgender inmates who want protection from general-population inmates must apply for it in a special hearing, correction officials said. If granted, the protective custody requires inmates to be held in individual cells for 23 hours a day, just as inmates punished for disciplinary reasons are held.

Martin F. Horn, the city correction commissioner, said gay housing was ending as part of a larger reorganization of inmate housing to improve security. The change of policy, he said, will increase jail safety among gay and transgender inmates.

Though originally intended to promote safety, gay housing became a dangerous wing at Rikers because it mixed weaker inmates seeking protection with violence-prone inmates seeking to prey on them, Mr. Horn said. Some inmates who were not gay, he added, would request to be placed in the unit as a way to avoid their enemies in the general population, or to take advantage of a group they perceived as weak.

"It was the only area of the department where inmates could choose where they wanted to live," irrespective of the security classification each inmate receives upon entering the jail system, Mr. Horn said in an interview. "What we ended up with was this housing unit where people were predatory and people were vulnerable. The very units that should be the most safe, in fact, had become the least safe."

The elimination of special housing for gay and transgender inmates has outraged some critics, who say that Mr. Horn's new policy essentially punishes pretrial detainees, who have not been convicted of any crime, for their sexual orientation. It also forces these inmates, their advocates say, to choose between the possibility of being abused in the general population or being locked up alone for 23 hours a day.

"This is not a change for the benefit of the prisoners, this is a change for the benefit of the administration," said Carrie Davis, a social worker at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York, whose clients include former Rikers inmates. "What they're saying is, people who by virtue of immutable physical characteristics are going to be put in 23-hour lockdown," she added. "Does that sound fair?"

Other inmate advocates say the new policy contravenes city regulations and at least one state court ruling. In 1982, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court, Second Department, ruled, in Schipski v. Flood, that Nassau County's policy of holding protective-custody jail inmates in lockdown 22 hours a day was unconstitutional. The new policy also violates regulations created by the City Board of Correction, a jail oversight agency, that stipulate which type of inmates can be placed on lockdown, said D. Horowitz, a lawyer with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a Manhattan-based group that represents transgender clients.

Thomas Antenen, a spokesman for the Correction Department, said that department lawyers believed the 1982 case was different because it involved a blanket rule for protective-custody inmates. New York City, he said, assigns protective custody case by case. Hildy J. Simmons, the board's chairwoman, did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.

Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said his organization and about 15 others were seeking a meeting with Mr. Horn to come up with an alternative method of separating vulnerable gay or transgender inmates. "Our hope is that this decision can be modified significantly," Mr. Foreman said.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

NJ: Passaic Jail Ends Housing Immigrant "Detainees"

Passaic Jail ends housing immigrant detainees

Thursday, December 29, 2005

By KAREN KELLER
HERALD NEWS

ThePassaic County Jail will no longer house federal immigration detainees, markingthe end of several years of controversy about the jail's treatment of thosedetainees. It alsowill mark the end of a revenue source that brought millions of federal dollarsinto the county. Thejail's current 110 detainees are leaving the jail at the rate of 10 to 20 aweek, sheriff's spokesman Bill Maer confirmed Wednesday. In an e-mail, Maersaid Sheriff Jerry Speziale's decision to end the program was based mainly onconcern about the amount of effort spent to manage the detainee population. The movecomes as the Department of Homeland Security prepares to release a report inFebruary on conditions and treatment of detainees.

Aspokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees thedetainees, said Wednesday that the Sheriff's Department made the call. "Theydid recently notify us that they want to withdraw from the [Inter-GovernmentalService Agreement], so we stopped sending detainees," said Mike Gilhooley,the ICE spokesman. Spezialewould not comment. Thedetainees, most of whom are being held for violations of civil immigrationlaws, will be shipped to other sites in New Jersey,New York or Pennsylvania, Gilhooley said. The Passaic jail served asone of the major immigration detention facilities in the wake of 9/11, with itspopulation climbing to 386 from 40, according to Ron Fava, the sheriff at thetime. The jail eventually held almost 500 detainees. Alongwith the increase in detainees came protests and hunger strikes about crowding,poor conditions and mistreatment. InDecember 2001, seven detainees staged a hunger strike. In March 2002, AmnestyInternational issued a report saying detainees held in jails, including Passaic, had been abused.The same month, U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine, now the governor-elect, toured the jailand wrote a commentary, condemning the prolonged imprisonment of detainees asviolating the basic right of due process. Asrecently as Dec. 13, immigrant advocates charged that jail guards beat anEgyptian detainee - a charge the Sheriff's Department denied. More than90 detainees signed a petition Dec. 17, asking that Homeland Security end itscontract with Passaicbecause of "very poor and health risk conditions at this jail." Heung WahWong, an immigration detainee who passed through Passaic County Jail but is nolonger there, detailed what life was like there in a memo sent to HomelandSecurity. There was one urinal for 58 men, Wong said, and grease floating ontop of the milk served to the detainees. "Weare humans that made a mistake along one of life's long roads," Wongwrote. "We are seen as the waste of America, but we are not!" Haitian-bornJean Alexander, 37, who spent six months at Passaic County Jail before beingreleased Nov. 23, said conditions were worse for an immigrant. "Theystart trouble with us," Alexander said of the guards. AfterNational Public Radio reported in November 2004 that dogs were being used onimmigration detainees in Passaic County Jail, the federal government forbadethat practice and launched an investigation. But theaudit ran into trouble in July, when Speziale ejected the federal auditors,saying they behaved arrogantly. Theauditors were allowed to finish their work after Speziale met with HomelandSecurity officials in Washington, D.C., in August. Theimmigration detainees brought in hefty federal payments to the Sheriff'sDepartment that ranged from an estimated $12 million in 2003 to an expected$6.9 million this year. To offsetthat loss, the Sheriff's Department jail is accepting prisoners from the stateand the U.S.Marshals Service, Maer said. TheMarshals Service pays $77 a day per prisoner, the same amount as Immigrationand Customs Enforcement, while state prisoners are less lucrative, at $62 a dayper prisoner. Passaic has the highestnumber of Marshals Service prisoners of any county jail in the state, with 375prisoners currently, said Jim Tlousis, the U.S.marshal for New Jersey.
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyJmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2ODQ3MzY5

Posted by lois at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Execution of Stanley Tookie Williams

December 27, 2005
Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Death Penalty
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BERLIN, Dec. 26 - For years the quaint Austrian town of Graz trumpeted its special relationship with its outsize native son, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Born in a village nearby and schooled in Graz, Mr. Schwarzenegger was an honorary citizen and holder of the town's Ring of Honor. Most conspicuously, the local sports stadium was named after him.
But early on Monday, under cover of darkness, his name was removed from the arena in a sort of uncontested divorce between the California governor and the town council, which had been horrified that he rejected pleas to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, former leader of the Crips gang, who was executed by the state of California two weeks ago.

The 15,000-seat stadium had been named after Mr. Schwarzenegger in 1997 as an act of both self-promotion and fealty toward the poor farmer's son and international celebrity, who has always identified Graz as his native place.
But when he declined to commute Mr. Williams's death penalty, the reaction was swift and angry in Graz, which, like most places in Europe, sees the death penalty as a medieval atrocity.
"I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen," Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party, said in a recent interview. "The petition was accepted by a majority on the council."
Before a formal vote was taken on the petition, however, Mr. Schwarzenegger made a kind of pre-emptive strike, writing a letter to Siegfried Nagl, the town's conservative mayor, withdrawing Graz's right to use his name in association with the stadium.
There will be other death penalty decisions ahead, he wrote, and so he decided to spare the responsible politicians of Graz further concern."It was a clever step," Ms. Binder said. "He took the initiative," she continued, and then suggested a bit of the local politics that had entered into the matter. "It was possible for him to do so," she said, "because the mayor didn't have the courage to take a clear position on this point."
Needless to say, Mr. Nagl, a member of the conservative People's Party, who opposed the name-removal initiative, does not agree.

He is against the death penalty, he said in an interview, and on Dec. 1, he wrote a letter to Mr. Schwarzenegger pleading for clemency for Mr. Williams. But he blames the leftist majority on the City Council - consisting of Greens, Social Democrats and two Communists - for trying to score some local political points at Mr. Schwarzenegger's and, he believes, Graz's own expense.
"One stands by a friend and a great citizen of our city and does not drag his name through the mud even when there is a difference of opinion," Mr. Nagl said in a letter he wrote to Mr. Schwarzenegger. "I would like to ask you to keep the Ring of Honor of the City of Graz."
The heated nature of the debate revealed how much a relatively small place like Graz, certainly a place with no military might or diplomatic power to speak of, wants to play a role as a sort of moral beacon, waging the struggle for what it considers the collective good.
Graz, a place of old onion steeples, museums and Art Nouveau architecture, designated itself five years ago, with a unanimous vote of the City Council, to be Europe's first official "city of human rights." While the designation has no juridical meaning, it provides a sort of goal to live up to.
"We are against the death penalty, not only in word, but really against the death penalty," said Wolfgang Benedek, a professor of international law at Graz University.
He said the council's reaction reflected the special circumstances surrounding Mr. Williams: a man who had written a children's book aimed at steering young people away from violence, he had already spent many years in jail, and seemed, to Europeans at least, to have reformed himself.
"Many people around the world pleaded with Mr. Schwarzenegger to show mercy in this case, and when he didn't, the city had somehow to react," Mr. Benedek said.
Mr. Benedek allows that there is an element of elite versus popular opinion on this matter. A poll by the local newspaper found that over 70 percent of the public opposed removing Mr. Schwarzenegger's name from the stadium.
This adds to a practical consideration very much on Mr. Nagl's mind: that Graz will no longer be able to count on using its special relationship with the governor to promote its image.
"We had the great classical culture on the one side," Thomas Rajakovics, the mayor's spokesman, said, referring to other important figures who are associated with Graz, from the astronomer Johannes Kepler to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, to the conductor Karl Böhm. "And on the other, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger and the popular culture. These were the two poles for us, but we're not allowed to use his name any more."
The Schwarzenegger name has, as it were, been erased. The new name is now simply Stadion Graz-Liebenau (a district of Graz), though there were other proposals. One was to name the stadium after the Crips, the gang that Mr. Williams founded, but that idea did not get widespread support. Another was to name it Hakoah, after a Jewish sports club that was banned after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.
But the first "city of human rights" did not seem quite ready for that either. It is not that there was vocal opposition but, as Ms. Binder put it, Austrians do not generally want a daily reminder of the terrible wartime past.
Meanwhile, city officials are holding on to Mr. Schwarzenegger's honorary citizenship ring, which arrived from the governor during the holidays. Mr. Rajakovics said they would keep it for him in the hope that one day he would take it back.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/international/europe/27austria.html

Posted by lois at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)

MI: State Replaces Male Guards at Women's Prisons

State replaces male guards at women's corrections facilities 12/28/2005

The Associated Press

LANSING, Mich. (AP) ‹ Male guards have been replaced by women in the living units at two of Michigan's three corrections facilities for women.

The change has been made at the Robert Scott Correctional Facility in Plymouth and the Huron Valley Complex in Ypsilanti in response to allegations of sexual abuse by male corrections officers. It comes six years after former Corrections Director Bill Martin first proposed removing male guards from such units.
More than 1,500 women are held at the two sites.

Also, male officers on morning and afternoon shifts have been replaced by females at the Camp Brighton boot camp near Pinckney that houses about 400 women. Three men still working the midnight shift will soon be replaced, Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlin told The Detroit News for a Wednesday story.

"They are finally taking steps toward ensuring the safety of women in their care," said Deborah LaBelle, an Ann Arbor lawyer involved in lawsuits against the corrections department. "I hope they will continue to take steps to end the degrading treatment of women in our prisons."

Patricia Caruso, director of the state Department of Corrections, has said staffing changes were required as part of an agreement reached with the U.S. Justice Department in 1999. The agreement came after the state was sued based on a Justice Department investigation into sexual abuse complaints.

The staffing changes at the three facilities involve 50 positions.

Marlin said 120 corrections officers, 75 of them women, will complete a training program in February and are to make up the new personnel.

A pending class-action lawsuit alleging sexual mistreatment was filed against the Corrections Department nine years ago and now includes more than 450 complaints from former and current inmates. Two additional lawsuits were filed this fall.

In 1999, the state paid $3.8 million to 36 women who filed a similar suit.

A group of corrections officers had filed a lawsuit challenging the staffing changes. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their case in October.

___

Information from: The Detroit News, http://www.detnews.com

http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/michigan/index.ssf?/base/news-30/113576784325
0110.xml&storylist=newsmichigan

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

MI: Should Aging Men & Women be Freed?

The Detroit News

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Should aging inmates be freed?
Medical care saps Mich. prisons
Number of inmates older than 60 has jumped 62 percent in six years

Francis X. Donnelly / The Detroit News

Criminologists say many geriatric jailbirds can be released from prison without posing a threat to society. Should aging inmates be freed?

COLDWATER -- The elderly grandfather can't do much with his right arm or leg. Withered by a heart attack and stroke, John Richmond has trouble walking and getting out of bed. Once considered dangerous, he's sometimes overwhelmed by chairs that won't release him from their clutches. Old cons like Richmond, 73, sentenced up to 30 years at Lakeland Correctional Facility, are quickly becoming the face of prisons in Michigan and the United States. The number of inmates older than 60 has jumped 62 percent in six years.

Their medical costs are eating up an already strapped Michigan budget, preventing the state from spending on schools and other needs. Health care for Michigan prisoners has jumped 50 percent in six years, from $120 million to $181 million.

But the financial hemorrhaging is avoidable, say criminologists. They said many geriatric jailbirds can be released from prison without posing a threat to society.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who has worked with elderly prisoners, said study after study has shown that age is the best criteria to determine whether parolees will return to crime. A federal Justice Department report found in 1990 that 2 percent of men paroled after age 55 return to prison. For men ages 18-24, the figure was 22 percent.

"You're facing a serious crisis," Turley said. "Most states will hit a demographic wall, and they're not prepared."

Despite the soaring costs of locking up the elderly, the state has little inclination to release them.

And victims' advocates said convicted felons like Richmond, who sexually assaulted a woman in 1990, don't deserve a single day of freedom.

"If they did something horrendous to my family, I wouldn't want them out," said Gail Beasley, who began a Detroit bereavement group in 1989 after her brother was murdered. "They have to be accountable for their actions."

Richmond, a retired Air Force flight engineer with a white buzz cut, was sentenced to eight to 30 years. He became eligible for parole in 1998 but has been turned down every year.

And so he spends most of his time in his dormitory-like room, sleeping and watching soap operas on his black-and-white TV. He takes a dozen medications and shuffles about with a walker.

"There is nothing I could do to hurt someone," he said.
But few people were listening.

'It's the same as dying'

The geriatric unit at Lakeland Correctional offers a glimpse into the future of Michigan prisons. It looks like an old folks' home surrounded by uniformed guards and concertina wire.

It has rooms instead of cells, beds instead of bunks, ramps instead of steps. The doors have automatic-opening buttons, and the showers have seats. Handrails snake around the florescent-lit hallways.

The H-shaped unit, which has medical facilities in the middle, has 96 male prisoners who were assigned there because of poor health. The most seriously ill are held at a prison hospital in Jackson.

The unit sits inside the larger prison, a former mental health facility surrounded by a barren, frozen landscape evocative of the community's name. It doesn't feel like prison so much as a hospice, said inmate Al Albertson. "It's the same as dying," he said. "It's capital punishment in a non-capital-punishment state."

Albertson, 74, who has been locked up 40 years for killing a bar owner, was whisked by ambulance from the facility in May after a heart attack. As Albertson spoke last week, he stood outside a rec room where a man was playing solitaire and another assembling a thousand-piece puzzle. A stationary bike went unused.

Each week, the unit has bingo, wheelchair aerobics and handicraft classes, where men knit and crochet. Lines for medication form at 8 a.m., noon, and 4-8 p.m. When inmate Eli Rossell looks in the mirror, he sees a stranger who is wrinkled and plain worn out.

Aches and pains make it difficult for the onetime college football player to move about. Visitors stopped coming a long time ago.

"I know my life is over," he said. "My family and friends are either dead or so old they're not the people I used to know."

Rossell, 82, who has served 34 years for killing a woman, found the geriatric unit so gloomy and death-scented that he moved back into the more dangerous larger prison several years ago.

"Most people talked as if they had one foot in the grave," he said.

Tough parole board

The Michigan Parole Board became one of the toughest in the nation during the 1990s, said criminologists.

Then-Gov. John Engler pushed for members who took a dim view of rehabilitation.

In 1992, the board required inmates with life sentences to serve 15 years before becoming eligible for parole and to wait five years for each subsequent review.

In 1998, the state passed a law requiring inmates to serve at least their minimum sentences.

Neither Gov. Jennifer Granholm or Corrections Director Pat Caruso, who appoints the parole board, has shown much interest in softening Engler's stance.

"I expect the parole board to be tough," Caruso said. "That's their job." "They're responsible to a wide range of groups, from taxpayers to the public, the community, the victims, the prisoners they consider for parole, all of us."

Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland have released elderly inmates through a program founded by Turley, the law professor. Law school students cull inmates' records to find the best candidates for release based on age, crime, behavior in prison and other factors.

The students then argue the cases in front of the parole board. They've won the release of 100 inmates, and none has returned to prison.

In Michigan, the state's toughness with inmates comes with a price. The number of Michigan prisoners older than 60 has risen from 960 in 1999 to 1,557 this year. The overall population increased 11 percent during that time.

Inmates over age 50 account for 13 percent of the prison population. At the geriatric unit, the oldest inmate is 85. Some have been in prison since the Korean War.

It's a bald battalion armed with bifocals and hearing aides, propelled by a battery of canes and walkers. So many residents wield wheelchairs that few chairs are necessary in the cafeteria.

Wobbly fingers prevent the buttoning of shirts. Some, baby-like, need to have their food chopped up. They're helped by younger prisoners who work as aides.

"It leaves a lot of stroke victims dealing with shoestrings and buttons," said Doc McBee, 68, who has served 35 years for murder.

Financial costs soar

Inmate Joe Bennett has the face of an aging leprechaun but, unlike the mischievous elves of Irish folklore, his capture didn't net anyone a crock of gold. Instead, it's costing the state one.

He takes 10 medications twice a day for arthritis, a hernia, poor breathing, swollen legs and high blood pressure.

The annual cost of jailing an elderly inmate is three times higher than a younger one, $69,000 vs. $22,000, according to the National Center of Institutions and Alternatives, a Baltimore group that studies alternatives to prison. If the inmates were released, they could be eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, transferring the financial responsibility from the state to the federal government.

Bennett, 79, who is serving up to 40 years for sexually abusing a girl, keeps his legs elevated by sticking books and clothes under his mattress. Until, that is, he has to urinate, half a dozen times a night.

"What good can come of holding an 80-year-old in prison?" he asked. "Most aren't able to tie our own shoes."

It's not just an old con's lament. His ailments aren't the most expensive for the state to treat.

The prison's health roll call would challenge any nursing home's: diabetes, epilepsy, cancer, amputations, HIV, Parkinson's, hepatitis C, Lou Gehrig's disease, kidney and liver failure.

"Our ailments?" said inmate George Hall. "Pick a card."

Hall, 70, once worked at the geriatric unit as an aide. Now he's a resident. Like most of the inmates, he dreams of walking away from prison one day. He imagines living in a simple house in the country, being able to fetch cold milk from his refrigerator in the middle of the night.

But Hall knows the odds are against him. The convicted murderer, who has been in prison for 30 years, was passed over for parole last year. His next chance is 2009.

"Longevity 101 will tell you I can't do many of those," he said on his birthday.

Hall said he no longer poses a threat to anyone, but that's not why he's still in prison, serving a slow death sentence.

"The real reason is punishment," he said. "Only my death will pay the debt. Society wants my life and nothing is going to change that."
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051228/METRO/512280332

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

December 27, 2005

NY Times Editorial: Phantom Voters, Thanks to the Census

Phantom Voters, Thanks to the Census
New York Times Editorial Board, December 27, 2005

The first Constitution took for granted that enslaved people could not vote, but counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. This inflated the voting power of slaveholders and gave them much more influence in legislative matters than their actual numbers warranted. No American would knowingly tolerate such an arrangement today. But a glitch in the census that inflates the populations of some state legislative districts - thus exaggerating their voting power - has led to a contemporary version of that problem. It involves counting prison inmates in the district where they are confined rather than where they actually live. The Census Bureau could fix this problem in a heartbeat, so it needs to get a move on.

The culprit is a provision in the census that counts prison inmates as "residents" of the institutions where they are held, often for relatively short periods of time. Denied the right to vote in all but 2 of the 50 states, the inmates are nonetheless treated as voters when the State Legislatures draw up legislative districts. This practice mattered little 30 years ago, when the prison population was tiny. But with about 1.4 million people in prison today, it can be used to shift political power from one part of the state to another.

A startling analysis by Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative found seven upstate New York Senate districts meeting the population requirements only because inmates were included in the count. The Republican Party in New York relies on its large upstate delegation for its majority in the State Senate - and for its political power statewide. New York is not alone. The Prison Policy Initiative's researchers found 21 counties nationally where at least 21 percent of so-called residents lived behind bars.

By counting these nonvoting inmates as residents, the prison counties offend the principle of one person one vote, while siphoning off political power from the home districts to which the inmates will return as soon as they are released. Since inmates are jobless, their presence also allows prison districts to lower their per capita incomes, unfairly increasing their share of federal funds earmarked for the poor. Congress, which has just caught on to this, recently gave the Census Bureau 90 days to file a report on the feasibility of counting inmates at their homes of record rather than in prison. At the same time, a committee overseen by the National Academy of Sciences has been studying the residency issue and is expected to make its final report this spring. But why does the bureau need another study to decide whether it wants to uphold the one-person-one-vote principle? The bureau should get to work immediately on procedures that would allow it to count inmates where they actually live - and get those procedures locked in place by the 2010 census.

Posted by lois at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2005

If Alito had been on Supreme CT in January, Ronald Rompilla Might Well Be a Dead Man

25, 2005
In Criminal Cases, a Court Nominee Hews to Rules
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
If Samuel A. Alito Jr. had been on the Supreme Court back in January, Ronald Rompilla might well be a dead man.

That month the Supreme Court heard an appeal of a decision, written by Judge Alito for a panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, that upheld Mr. Rompilla's sentence for a murder committed in 1988. The Supreme Court, finding that Mr. Rompilla's lawyers had been ineffective representatives December at trial, later reversed the ruling in a 5-to-4 vote.

Mr. Rompilla's appeal offers a study of how Judge Alito, President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court, has handled criminal cases that have appeared before him.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the judge, a former federal prosecutor, has often - though far from uniformly - ruled against defendants. But it is not clear that he stands out: In appeals of criminal convictions generally, defendants face a steep uphill battle. Nationally, just 5.6 percent of such appeals result in some kind of reversal, according to the federal Office of Court Administration.

Judge Alito's opinions in criminal cases are meticulously written, with careful deference to the findings of trial court judges and juries and scrupulous determination to fit his decisions into the framework built by past cases. He hews to the rules.

"The perception is, he's coming from an extremely conservative point of view," said George Newman, a defense lawyer in Philadelphia who has argued cases before the judge. "He's not a good defense judge."

In his appeal, Mr. Rompilla argued that his trial lawyers had provided inadequate representation, saying they failed to investigate his background thoroughly by interviewing family members carefully and reviewing medical, police, school and prison records. As a result, his new lawyers said, they did not uncover evidence that he had limited mental capacity, was neglected as a child and suffered other problems.

Had evidence of his traumatic life experiences been presented at trial, the lawyers argued, then jurors would not have sentenced him to death.

Judge Alito did not agree with these arguments.

"Trial counsel conducted an extensive investigation for mitigating evidence," he wrote. "According to their testimony, trial counsel got to know Rompilla well during the course of their representation and established a good relationship with him. Rompilla was questioned about his background but provided no useful information or leads."

What is most striking is Judge Alito's close application of rules established by prior cases on what standard of competence a lawyer must meet, without regard to the success of the lawyer's efforts. The focus was on the process they followed, not the result they achieved.

For example, he wrote, "With the benefit of hindsight, we know that these records contain useful information about Rompilla's childhood home environment, his mental problems and his problems with alcohol." But, he said, "trial counsel had grounds for believing that if there was any mitigating evidence of this sort to be found, at least a hint of its availability would be disclosed in the interviews with Rompilla and his family members or in the testing and evaluations performed by the three mental health experts whom they retained."

Judge Dolores K. Sloviter, who dissented from the decision by Judge Alito and Judge Walter K. Stapleton, strongly criticized the majority's reasoning. Judge Sloviter said it did not matter whether the explanation offered by Mr. Rompilla's lawyers for their failure to conduct further investigation was reasonable. What mattered, she said, was whether the failure to investigate was itself reasonable.

It is a distinction that the Supreme Court emphasized as well.

In an opinion concurring with the ruling in favor of Mr. Rompilla, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - whom Judge Alito has been nominated to replace - wrote: "In the particular circumstances of this case, the attorneys' failure to obtain and review the case file from their client's prior conviction did not meet standards of 'reasonable professional judgment.' "

The criminal cases that came before Judge Alito in his 15 years on the appellate court raised a range of issues. Several concerned sentences meted out to convicted criminals. In a 2004 case involving a pastor convicted of participating in a scheme to steal from his church, he wrote that the lower court judge was correct not to reduce the pastor's 51-month sentence because of his charitable work.

It is "only when an individual goes well beyond the call of duty and sacrifices for the community that a downward departure may be appropriate," Judge Alito wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. "The defendant's net charitable and civic contributions - taking into account both the good and bad that he did in his capacity as a member of the clergy - cannot be considered as so extraordinarily positive as to warrant a downward departure."

Other cases involved substantive legal questions about, for example, the legitimacy of a particular wiretap or search. In the case of an International Boxing Federation official convicted of taking bribes, Judge Alito ruled that a video recording of the hotel room in which bribes were paid was properly taken - a view that, a dissenting judge commented, would "gulp down the Fourth Amendment."

The boxing official, Robert W. Lee, argued that the videotaping had violated the Fourth Amendment because it was conducted without a warrant. But Judge Alito wrote that because one of the people in the room had consented to the taping and could have testified to anything said, Mr. Lee had "no legitimate expectation of privacy." The judge added, "Although Lee had an expectation of privacy in the hotel suite so long as he was alone there," once he allowed someone else to enter, that expectation vanished.

Sometimes the judge's meticulously logical approach and exacting standards worked in favor of a defendant. In a case decided in 2003, for example, Judge Alito wrote a unanimous opinion for a three-judge panel that concluded that Ronald A. Williams, a black man convicted of murder, should be given a chance to show that a juror hearing his case had concealed racist views.

Although courts are reluctant to inquire into jury deliberations, Judge Alito wrote, the woman who claimed to have heard a racist comment by a juror was not herself a member of the jury and she heard the comment outside the jury room. Therefore, excluding the woman's testimony "for the purpose of determining whether a juror lied during voir dire cannot be sustained," the judge wrote.

In a 2001 case, the judge also sided with a man challenging a murder conviction, this time after finding that the lower court judge had improperly rejected one of the man's arguments. The lower court had correctly dismissed claims that were not properly made, the judge wrote, but incorrectly lumped with them additional claims that the defendant, Robert E. Wenger Jr., should have been allowed to make.

Again, Judge Alito's reasoning was tight, technical and focused on procedure rather than outcome - as he wrote in the unanimous opinion of a three-judge panel. "Needless to say," he said, "we express no view regarding the merits of the claim."

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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U.S., Citing Abuse in Iraqi Prisons, Holds Detainees

December 25, 2005
U.S., Citing Abuse in Iraqi Prisons, Holds Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 - The commander of American-run prisons in Iraq says the military will not turn over any detainees or detention centers to Iraqi jailers until American officials are satisfied that the Iraqis are meeting United States standards for the care and custody of detainees.

"Bottom line, we will not pass on facilities or detainees until they meet the standards we define and that we are using today," the commander, Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner of the Army, said in a telephone interview this week from Iraq.

The comments by General Gardner come in the aftermath of two recent raids of Iraqi government detention centers that uncovered scores of abused prisoners. They also follow calls by American officials for the Iraqi government to bar militias from dominating the security forces. American military experts have joined Iraqi officials in inspecting Iraqi detention centers.

The general's remarks also come at a time when three of the main American-operated prisons in Iraq remain severely overcrowded despite a $50 million expansion that is nearly finished and when Americans are training Iraqis to take over detention duties.

Pentagon and military officials say that Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, has expressed frustrations over the heavy burden of guarding and caring for a detainee population that is growing far faster than inmates can be processed and turned over to Iraqi authorities.

The number of violent detainees has grown to more than 14,000 from about 8,000 in January. The crowding has been compounded by a growing backlog of prisoners, now about 3,100 people, who are waiting for Iraq's fledgling judicial system to hear their cases.

General Gardner, who took command on Nov. 30, expressed optimism that the inspections of Iraqi detention sites would not unduly delay the American goal of delivering Iraqi detainees to the Iraqi government. Military officials said they had a tentative target of turning over American-run prisons to the Iraqis by the end of 2006, although no exact timetable has been approved. But other senior military officials said turning over all Iraqi prisoners to the Iraqis could stretch into 2007.

One Pentagon official described the Iraqi detainee population as a "millstone" that sapped personnel who otherwise could be assigned to other pressing missions. About 3,700 American personnel are assigned to detention operations, the equivalent of one full brigade out of the 17 American brigades now in Iraq, a figure that is scheduled to drop to 15 early next year.

Pentagon and military officials say the huge number of prisoners under American control is a constant source of tension with ordinary Iraqis two years after the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal came to light.

General Gardner said that he was painfully aware of the legacy of Abu Ghraib, but insisted that conditions at the American-run prisons in Iraq had improved strikingly. "Abu Ghraib was criminal and I was appalled," he said. "We've come a long way since then."

The issue of Iraqi detainees raises complex legal and diplomatic questions. The United States has pledged to conduct itself in keeping with international conventions, including one regarding torture that precludes handing prisoners to any country where they would face the likelihood of torture. Iraq is not a signatory to that treaty, and it is hard for the United States at this point to certify that some of these prisoners would not be tortured if put under the control of Iraqi jailkeepers.

The influx of detainees has swelled the population at the major American-run prisons to 119 percent of their ideal capacity, General Gardner said. As of this week, the military is holding 14,055 detainees in four prisons, a military spokesman, Lt. Aaron J. Henninger, said. In addition, 535 are being held at the brigade or division level around the country.

At Abu Ghraib, where crowding contributed to the worst of the prisoner abuses that occurred in late 2003, there are 4,924 detainees, nearly 40 percent over what the military considers ideal capacity.

At the largest center, Camp Bucca, in the south, the prison has been divided into compounds of about 150 people instead of 600 or more, to allow guards to maintain better control. There are 7,795 detainees there.

Camp Cropper, at the Baghdad airport, holds 140 prisoners, including dozens of so-called high-value detainees. Fort Suse, a 1980's Russian barracks in northern Iraq, was turned into a prison in October and holds 1,196 detainees.

The increase in the number of imprisoned foreign fighters - to 465 from 391 in June - underscores the shifting profile of insurgents taken into custody recently. These fighters come mainly from Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Jordan, the command said. In a survey taken in October, of the more than 3,500 new detainees in American-operated prisons in Iraq since January, about 87 percent were deemed to pose a "high risk" or "extremely high risk" to American personnel, about twice the percentage from late last year, military officials said. American officials this week were reclassifying all detainees as either low, medium or high-risk prisoners.

Many of the new prisoners are considered so dangerous that two review boards, each staffed by six Iraqi and three allied officials, are now ordering them released in only 35 to 40 percent of the cases, General Gardner said, down from 60 percent last year. Each panel reviews about 400 cases a week, he said.

Under rules put in place in June 2004, the United States must release detainees held in American custody after 18 months unless the Iraqi prime minister and General Casey agree to continue to hold them for a specified period, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, another military spokesman. About 130 detainees face hearings under this process in January and a similar number in February, he said in an e-mail message.

The transfer of the American-run detention centers will require training and equipping Iraqis to operate the prisons.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad, said via an e-mail message that the transition plan had four basic steps.

First is instruction on the basics of how to be a prison guard, a course taught by visiting American Justice Department instructors. So far, about 300 guards designated to work side by side with American jailers at internment centers run by American forces have completed the program, Colonel Johnson said. Another 450 guards are currently in the course, and the next session is expected to include approximately 150 Iraqi guards.

The second step involves Iraqi guards actually working alongside guards at detention centers under American control. The 300 guards who completed the classroom instruction in October are now working at the Fort Suse center with American guards, Colonel Johnson said.

Camp Bucca is scheduled to receive 150 Iraqi guards this month, and Fort Suse will receive another 150 Iraqi guards before the New Year, bringing the total to 450. Early next year, Camp Bucca will receive an additional 300 Iraqi guards, also bringing the total there to 450, Colonel Johnson said.

Step three, he said, involves Iraqi guards taking the lead of detention operations under the supervision of the American forces.

"This will allow us to work continually with them to ensure all standards of humane treatment and quality of care are maintained," Colonel Johnson said. "This process mirrors what we are doing for security transition across the country."

In the final stage, he said, "oversight will be reduced until the Iraqis are ready to completely assume control."

No specific timetable for the final transition has been set. "The transition will be based on meeting standards, not on a timeline," he said.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Compan

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December 24, 2005

Comic Books from the Real Cost of Prisons Project

Comic Books from the Real Cost of Prisons Project

These comic books are being created loosely based on each of the Real Cost of Prisons workshops. The stories and statistical information in each comic book are thoroughly researched and the research is cited.

Comic books will be sent free of charge to organizations who submit a one page email or letter explaining how you will use the comic books in your organizing, community education and outreach work.

Your letter should include contact name, mailing address, phone number,email address and brief description of your organization or program. Please specify how many comic books you can use. Organizations/groups can receive up to 300 copies of each comic book depending on your needs. Due to demand, we cannot guarantee you will receive the number you request but we will try to meet your request.

Each comic book is 16 pages with a four color cover and black and white interior pages.

Send your letter to: Real Cost of Prisons Project, 5 Warfield Place,
Northampton, MA 01060

Or email: info@realcostofprisons.org .

For those interested in copies of the Real Cost of Prisons comics for their personal use, they can be purchased through AK Press at akpress.org

Prison Town: Paying the Price by Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore. The comic book tells the story the ways in which the financing and siting of prisons and jails effects the people of rural communities in which prison are built. It also tells the story of the how mass incarceration effects the people of urban communities where the majority of people who are incarcerated come from. Included in the comic book are alternatives to the current system.

As an extension of our comic book series, we have developed a number of the one page handouts that feature pages from the comics. Please feel free to print them out and use them in your work.
From Prison Town: Paying the Price by Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore

How Prisons Are Paid For (and who really pays)
"Map" of the U.S. on prison building and siting
The Cost of a Cage

Prisoners of the War on Drugs by Sabrina Jones, Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens. The comic book includes: the history of the war on drugs, mandatory minimums and how racism creates harsher sentences for people of color; stories on how the war on drugs works against women, three strikes, obstacles to coming home after incarceration; how mass incarceration destabilizes neighborhoods. Alternatives to the present system.

From Prisoners of the War on Drugs by Sabrina Jones, Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens

Consider These Alternatives
Meet the Builders of the Drug Prison Boom
Cycles of Exile
Free at Last (available in spanish Libra Al Fin)
Three Strikes and You Are Out

Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children by Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack, and Lois Ahrens. The comic book includes stories about: women trapped by mandatory sentencing and the War on Drugs, the "costs" of
incarceration for women and their families. A two page story details the trial and sentencing of Regina McKnight. Also included are "Change is Possible" alternatives to the present system, a glossary and footnotes. 20 pages with a four color cover.

From Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children by Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack, and Lois Ahrens .

1 Out of Every 109 Women In America
The Story of Regina McKnight (poster size)
The Story of Regina McKnight (consecutive pages)
Change is Possible
Glossary

Posted by lois at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2005

The Myths of Addiction Are Slowly Crumbling as Arizona Moms Rebuild Their Families

EAST VALLEY TRIBUNE, DEC 22, 2005, AZ
M E T H and motherhood
The myths of addiction are slowly crumbling as Arizona moms rebuild their families
By MARY K. REINHART

The preschooler snuggles close to her mother on the couch, limp like the blanket that covers the two of them. "She’s got a fever," the mother whispers as she strokes her daughter’s hair. Not such an unusual sight, unless you consider that the mother is a recovering methamphetamine addict, she’s pregnant with her second child, and this little family lives with more than 20 other women and their kids in a residential drug treatment program. The Center for Hope in Mesa is the only place in the East Valley that takes drug-addicted pregnant women and their kids, and one of only a few in the state. But that may change in the coming years as growing support for methamphetamine prevention and treatment takes hold.

Though methamphetamine has been on the scene for decades, federal and local policymakers have focused mainly on busting large labs and reducing access to the drugs used in its manufacture. Meanwhile, politicians, police and others have promulgated several meth myths, making the drug sound impossible to kick and demonizing its users, particularly those who have children.

"The myth that needs to be debunked is that treatment doesn’t work. It works," says Rob Evans, director of the governor’s office of substance abuse policy. "But treatment capacity is always an issue. It’s sort of a constant effort to be able to fill those gaps, and the gaps are pretty big."

Gov. Janet Napolitano recently called for coalitions in every county to devise plans to combat meth in anticipation of a two-day conference on the drug in February. The state’s behavioral health system has put out its first contracts for methspecific treatment, and state Child Protective Services is working with treatment experts to find ways to keep families together or at least reunify them sooner.

The Arizona Parents Commission is spending about $1.6 million in state alcohol tax money for the conference and technical support to anti-meth coalitions.

"What we’re trying to do now is educate the population that meth is a serious problem, but you need to look at it differently," says Frank Scarpati, CEO of Community Bridges, a substance-abuse treatment center that opened Center for Hope in January. "People don’t destroy their brain and their body by choice." Scarpati’s agency has one of the first state contracts to develop meth-specific treatment using a model that includes behavioral therapy, time management, drug testing, family involvement and positive reinforcement.

"I think it’s harder to treat a pot smoker than a meth addict, because it’s harder to make them see that it’s hurting them. It’s not hard for a meth addict to see that their life is out of control," says Kimberly Craig, who researched meth treatment under a federally funded program in Montana before opening the Center for Hope in January.

"The truth is, many of these women had very successful lives at one point. They were working, they were part of the community, they came from good families," she says. "This is the devastation of drug addiction."

NEW RESEARCH

Long in the cross hairs of law enforcement and child welfare agencies, methamphetamine addicts had been given up as lost causes. The hype surrounding the drug and the children of meth users has rivaled that of the 1980s crack cocaine problem and "crack babies." Hospitals are testing mothers for drug use, and CPS has put their newborns into foster care.

In a July letter to national newspapers and network TV stations, more than 90 medical doctors, scientists, psychologists and treatment experts implored the media to stop using terms like "meth babies" and not to rely on non-experts for information about treatment or the effects of prenatal drug exposure, and to stop labeling babies as "addicted" to meth since no symptoms of addiction have been found among babies whose mothers used drugs while pregnant.

"We are concerned that policies based on false assumptions will result in punitive civil and child welfare interventions that are harmful to women, children and families rather than in the ongoing research and improvement and provision of treatment services that are so clearly needed," the letter said.

In states such as South Carolina, drug-abusing mothers have been jailed for child abuse. Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas plans to push legislation that would allow his prosecutors to do the same after placing the newborn in state custody.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, would make it a crime for a mother to give birth to a baby who tested positive for illegal drugs or showed an injury within a year of birth that resulted from the mother’s drug use. It also would require
health care workers to notify police when they believe a baby has been exposed to drugs. "A condition would most likely be that they have to undergo courtordered treatment," says Yarbrough. "The goal is to change the behavior, so that the next baby is not going to suffer the same harm that this one did."

Yarbrough says he’s met with Scarpati and is impressed with Center for Hope, but believes the law is necessary to force women into such programs. "We have a shared goal," he says. "We may have a different perspective on how to get there." But critics say such laws prevent women from seeking prenatal care and getting off drugs. At the same time, because few treatment programs accept children or pregnant women, addicted mothers must choose between their children and their addiction.

"There’s no way to protect children without protecting mothers and families," says Lynn Paltrow, a lawyer and director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York City-based nonprofit organization. "We claim to be a country that cares about families, and yet so many of our policies actually split up families," she says. "The notion that people can just go out and get the drug treatment they need is absurd."

To be sure, methamphetamine packs a powerful combination — highly addictive, cheap, long-lasting and easily accessible — and it has taken its toll on children and families. Meth was the most popular drug among parents entering Child Protective Services’ substance-abuse program, the vast majority accused of child neglect, not abuse. About 1,200 parents who participated in the Arizona Families FIRST program had more than 2,000 children placed in foster care, according to the most recent evaluation of Arizona Families FIRST.

"The drug and the type of addiction that comes with it does pose a risk to kids, particularly when there’s not another caretaker in the home," says Steve Sparks, who oversees Arizona Families FIRST for the state Department of Economic Security’s Division of Children, Youth and Families. "That’s particularly true with very young children, infants and toddlers, who require 24-hour attention." But Sparks says that not all parents who use meth are the same, and not all of their children should be taken into foster care. Treatment programs that allow families to stay together have proved effective. "It isn’t just the substance, in and of itself. It’s what is the effect of the drug on the parent’s ability to provide proper care to their children."

Center for Hope’s first graduate made that decision herself, sending her three boys to live with their father in Michigan when she realized her meth addiction had taken over. The center insists that the women and their families not be identified. Articulate and attractive, the newly divorced, working mother of three said she started using meth because "it gave me energy. I thought it made me perform better."

But over the next two years, she would lose her job and her apartment, become pregnant and deliver a girl who tested positive for meth, and become pregnant again, this time landing at the Center for Hope in time to kick the addiction and deliver a drug-free boy in April. She left the Mesa treatment center earlier this month, clean, confident, gainfully employed and devoted to her children.

"Life does go on without drugs," she says. "You can be happy. You can be a better mom. You can work and be part of society again, and feel like you’re important and not just an addict." A total of 24 women, either pregnant or with their new babies, plus up to eight toddlers live and recover together at the center. Roughly three-quarters are addicted to meth. Some are sent by judges, and some are referred from other programs in the community. Their first several days are spent sleeping, eating and getting cleaned up — "we just let her know that she’s safe, that she can take a deep breath," Craig said.

Another of Center for Hope’s residents comes from a close-knit Mormon family in Gilbert and had been using meth for about five years. Her mother brought her to the center in May after she moved back home, pregnant and addicted. The buoyant, artistic 22-year-old brunette is due to deliver a baby boy any day. "The place is a miracle," says the young woman’s mother. "I really believe it is the length of the program . . . and dealing with every aspect of what these girls have been through."

She visits often and has gotten to know many of the women at the center. Like her daughter, they have lived through much in their short lives. Unlike her daughter, though, most don’t have such solid family support. "People need to be forgiving and have much more understanding about how this drug works," says the mother. "None of them just went out and wanted to be bad. "The things that they’ve been through, they really hardly had a chance. And now, they have one."

Posted by lois at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Harshbarger Resigns from the Harshbarger Prison Reform Commission

Harshbarger, Barrios resign from prison reform panel

By Denise Lavoie, AP Legal Affairs Writer | December 8, 2005, Boston Globe
BOSTON --More than two years after the prison killing of defrocked priest John Geoghan, not enough has been done to reform the state's prison system, a report released Thursday concludes.
The slow progress on suggested reforms prompted the resignation of former Attorney General Scott Harshbarger from the committee that reviewed the system, and prompted him to accuse Gov. Mitt Romney of neglecting the issue of prison reform and failing to support the Department of Correction.
A second member of the panel, state Sen. Jarrett Barrios, D-Cambridge, also resigned from the panel in a resignation letter dated Nov. 21, four days after Harshbarger resigned. In his letter, Barrios said it was the right time for him to step down because the council's final report was complete. But later in the letter, he echoes Harshbarger's concern that progress on reforms was not being made quickly enough.

"In my view, the commission and council have made considerable progress in turning around the beleaguered Department of Corrections using the mission and authority it has been given. But we are at a crossroads: we can proceed to implement the much needed changes, or we can blink," Barrios said in the letter.
A spokesman for Barrios said he would not comment on his resignation.
However, at least two members of the panel -- Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz and Essex County Sheriff Frank Cousins Jr. -- say they are satisfied with the progress made so far, noting that prisons are institutions that take time to change.

The advisory committee was formed by Gov. Mitt Romney following the August 2003 death of defrocked priest John Geoghan, who was slain in prison allegedly by a fellow inmate. The slaying raised questions about prison security and the ways inmates were classified that determined where they were placed.

Harshbarger said too little has been done since Geoghan, who was serving time for molesting a 10-year-old boy, was strangled and beaten to death in his maximum-security prison cell. The DOC was criticized after Geoghan's death for housing him with hardened criminals and prompted Harshbarger's group to call for changes in the inmate classification system as well as numerous other prison reforms.

State Correction Commissioner Kathleen M. Dennehy declined to discuss Harshbarger's criticisms. She did say that Romney, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey and Secretary of Public Safety Secretary Edward A. Flynn support the Department of Correction and its reform efforts.
The department has "made demonstrable progress" since Geoghan's death, Dennehy told the AP.

Harshbarger, a Democrat who lost the race for governor in 1998, said he submitted his resignation last month because he felt a "lack of commitment" on both the part of the state Legislature and Romney, who is considering a possible presidential bid.
"For whatever reason, there appears to be a loss of focus and a lack of urgency on the part of the executive and the Legislature, who are major players in the system," he said.

"I believe the governor is ... obviously focused on other things, and when he focuses on other things, other people focus on other things," Harshbarger told The Associated Press Thursday.

Romney has been considering a run for president, but the governor denied Thursday that his political ambitions had led to inactivity on the prison reform effort.

"I think there may be some people who want to read that into what
(Harshbarger) said," the governor told reporters during a Statehouse news conference.
A 15-member panel spent eight months visiting prisons before recommending in June 2004 18 major changes, including better prerelease job training and counseling, changes in prison guard contracts, an independent inspector general, and changes to mandatory minimum sentences for some crimes.

Three months later, after an inmate was strangled by another prisoner at the Bridgewater State Hospital, Romney appointed Harshbarger to head a new panel, with many of the same members, to ensure the recommendations were put in place.

In the report, the advisory council said overclassification can be a barrier to the reduction of recidivism because inmates in maximum-security prisons do not receive the same rehabilitative programs and services as prisoners held in minimum- and maximum-security prisons.

Dennehy said a revamped classification system developed with the help of the National Institute of Corrections is being implemented. It is a massive effort that requires a tremendous amount of staff training and follow up, she said.
"This isn't just something that you just roll out and say you are done," Dennehy said.

Leslie Walker, executive director of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said the re-entry issue is critical if the state hopes to reduce the number of inmates who continue to commit crimes after they are released.

"If you are sent behind the wall to a high-security prison, where you are living in a very tense, violent atmosphere for a number of years, you receive no job training, very little education, no alcohol or drug treatment, and then you are released directly to the street, then you're a public safety hazard. You are a crime waiting to happen," Walker said.

AP Political Writer Glen Johnson contributed to this report.

Posted by lois at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2005

Families Against Mandatory Miniums: End of Year Roundup on Federal Sentencing Legilslation

End of the year roundup on federal sentencing legislation and predictions for 2006

End of the year roundup on federal sentencing legislation and predictions for 2006.

Booker Fix:

2005. The big news of the year in federal sentencing legislation is what did not happen: 2005 did not see the introduction of serious legislation to "fix" the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Booker. Following the court's split opinion that declared the sentencing guidelines unconstitutional and then advisory, rumors flew that the Justice Department and Congress were preparing to quickly introduce legislation to restore mandatory guidelines. Indeed, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chair of the House Judiciary Committee introduced a radical drug sentencing bill (H.R. 1528) that included, besides a host of new mandatory sentences and the elimination of the Safety Valve, a section that would have hardened the guidelines But his proposal was roundly condemned and he decided to forego even bringing it to a vote in his own committee. Opinions were nearly unanimous that everyone should wait to see what the courts would do with their newfound freedom. It appears they are doing much as before. (

The bottom line: H.R. 1528 (link to our reports on it here) lies dormant and we understand it will not be taken up by the House Judiciary Committee or the full House. The Senate does not have a comparable bill.

Prediction: We understand the Department of Justice is finalizing a legislative proposal to reinstate mandatory guidelines. Colloquially known as soft-top guidelines, they would make the tops of the guidelines advisory but not the bottoms. That would make it very difficult for judges to sentence below a guideline range while permitting judges to increase sentences.

The other Booker-fix: mandatory minimums everywhere

While Booker-fix legislation was not considered in 2005, sentencing conservatives in the House of Representatives used the vacuum to introduce a series of bills that included many new mandatory minimums and some new crimes. According to one Republican, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va), who introduced a harsh anti-gang measure, the Supreme Court's decision in Booker made the many and increased mandatory minimums in his bill necessary. If the guidelines are not mandatory, he said, then there must be mandatory minimums to fill the gap.

Here are some of the bills we saw this session:

H.R. 1279, the Gang Prevention and Community Protection Act of 2005, created many new federal crimes, raised existing mandatory minimums, created 24 new ones and rewrote the definitions of "crime of violence" and criminal street gang" in ways designed to radically alter the federal criminal code. Though 21 Republicans joined many Democrats to defeat the bill, it passed the House.

Meanwhile, the Senate was preparing to consider S. 155, The Gang Prevention and Effective Deterrence Act of 2005, which contained fewer but nonetheless serious new mandatory provisions. Before the Senate Judiciary Committee could take it up, the bill was essentially withdrawn by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Ca) who then sought to develop support for a substitute measure.

The bottom line: Congress did not pass new gang legislation this year.

Prediction: We expect to see a new gang bill introduced in the Senate that while not as harsh as the current bill, will contain changes we will oppose.

H.R. 1751, Secure Access to Justice and Court Protection Act, was introduced in response to high profile attacks against judges. It contained new mandatory penalties for a variety of threatening and harmful acts. The House passed the bill after several Republican members were successful in removing some of the mandatory penalties. The Senate's bill, S. 168, the Court Security Improvement Act, contains none of the mandatory sentencing provisions of the House version. It has not been voted on by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bottom line: Congress did not pass a court security bill this year.

Prediction: The Senate may take up a court security bill in the New Year, but it is likely to be very different from the House version.

H.R. 3132, Protecting Children's Safety Act of 2005, included many new mandatory penalties for a variety of crimes against or involving children and included new minimum penalties for other conduct, such as failure to register as a sex offender and internet offenses. The House approved H.R. 3132 and sent it to the Senate.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was considering several similar bills before finally settling on S. 1086, including Title III, the Jetseta Gage Prevention and Deterrence of Crimes Against Children Act of 2005, containing many mandatory minimums for violent crimes and sex offenses against children but fewer than in the House bill. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send the bill to the Senate floor. It has not been voted on.

The bottom line: Congress did not pass new sex crimes legislation this year.

In the meantime, Chairman Sensenbrenner introduced a bill containing leaner versions of the gang, court security and sex crimes bills that the House had already passed. A number of the mandatory minimums called for in the original bills were removed from the omnibus bill, presumably to make it more palatable for the Senate, which does not have the same propensity for mandatory minimums. It was believed by some that the House might take up H.R. 4472, the Child Safety and Violent Crime Reduction Act, before it adjourned for the year. However, the House of Representatives had too much other business to take care of.

The bottom line: The House did not vote on H.R. 4472.

H.R. 3889, the Methamphetamine Epidemic Elimination Act of 2005, rode the wave of methamphetamine hysteria sweeping the country. In its original form, the bill would have changed current penalties so that a mere three grams of methamphetamine would trigger a five-year sentence and five grams a 10-year one. A bi-partisan effort on the House Judiciary Committee, however, produced a much-improved, though not perfect bill. The compromise did not contain any new mandatory minimums. It passed the Judiciary Committee and instead of going to the floor, was "attached" with the Senate Judiciary's concurrence, to the Patriot Act. The new Patriot Act was not passed by Congress this year; instead the current Patriot Act, without the methamphetamine section, was reauthorized for six months.

The bottom line: Congress did not vote on a methamphetamine bill.

H.R. 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, emerged suddenly in the House Judiciary Committee, sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner in the final weeks of the year. The bill was extremely controversial, not due to its mandatory sentencing provisions that would have targeted not only those illegally in the country, but those who helped them, even for the best of reasons. Instead Republicans and Democrats were internally divided over the breadth of the bill, and its failure to address the status of current migrants or provide for a guest worker or status adjustment program. Nonetheless, the House passed the bill (see here) in the final days of the session but the Senate did not take it up. The Senate considered no immigration bill of its own this year.

The bottom line: Congress did not pass immigration reform.

Prediction: The Senate will hold hearings about immigration reform in the spring; however, it will not produce a bill even remotely like the House bill.

Conclusion: 2005 was a remarkable year in Congress as the Supreme Court struck down mandatory guidelines and the House responded with a host of bills laden with mandatory minimums. Some House Republicans played an important role in ameliorating some of the harshest provisions. 2006 is already shaping up to be interesting as we wait to see what the Justice Department plans to do about Booker.

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

Profs, Activists Assail Spying

Profs, activists assail spying - Locals cite earlier actions

BY TOM MARSHALL STAFF WRITER, Daily Hamphsire Gazette, 12-31-05
Northampton, MA

The nation was at war, and the president had backed a massive domestic intelligence-gathering operation to ferret out protesters and civil rights workers who might pose a threat to national security.

The existence of that long running FBI program, code-named COINTELPRO, stunned the nation when it was revealed in 1970 by Christopher Pyle a young graduate student and ex-Army intelligence officer. He later helped craft groundbreaking federal laws designed to restrict the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on American citizens.

This week, it was Pyle's turn to be stunned.

Now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College and a civil liberties expert, Pyle said President Bush's admission he authorized the National Security Agency in 2002 to eavesdrop on the international telephone conversations and emails of U.S. citizens without consulting a special intelligence court was a clear violation of federal law.

'In so doing, the president became the first president in history to admit to a felony,' he said Tuesday. 'It is an extraordinary, breathtaking assertion, (and) not one I think the Supreme Court will accept.'

Across the Valley, academics and activists described the growing scandal - along with recent reports of Pentagon surveillance of domestic anti-war groups - as a potential turning point for a war-weary American public.

'It will help people understand how little we've had in terms of checks and balances in recent years,' said Nancy Talanian, co-director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee of Northampton. 'I think it will enrage and engage all sorts of people.

'Mission creep'

Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, electronic spying may be conducted on U.S. soil only with permission from a secret, 11-member court. That law is the 'sole authority' for such activities, said Pyle, who testified and served as a consultant for the Church Committee, a special Congressional panel that held hearings on intelligence reform in the late 1970s.

The law includes a provision allowing the government to conduct surveillance for up to three days before gaining a warrant from the court. That aspect of the law was a nod to arguments the government must act quickly to gather national security intelligence.

'I testified against the statute, but that was the compromise that was worked out,' he said.

Pyle said he would have preferred a constitutional amendment to authorize such activities. 'The focus was going to be on foreign spies, that was what we were assured,' he said.

But recent revelations show intelligence agencies have gone beyond that mandate in tracking anti-war groups and listening to American telephone conversations without showing a court any evidence of spying, in a classic case of 'mission creep,' Pyle said. 'The question is, can the president override a statute of Congress?'

Bush administration officials this week said another federal law passed in 2001 - the single-sentence authorization 'to use all necessary and appropriate force' against nations, organizations or individuals determined to have been connected to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - included the authority to engage in domestic electronic surveillance.

But the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that officials had also expressed concerns over the legal standard established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

The secret court created by that act requires the government to show 'probable cause' the target is working for a foreign power or involved in terrorism. Officials spoke of the 'inefficiencies' of that approach, and opted in 2002 for a less stringent standard in which National Security Agency officers would decide whether they had a 'reasonable basis' to suspect terrorist links, the paper said.

Area legal experts said the administration took an ill-advised legal shortcut in bypassing the FISA Court.

'These are, to put the best possible spin on it, creative arguments,' said David Mednicoff, an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Massachusetts.

Mednicoff said Congress had neither discussed nor explicitly endorsed expanded domestic surveillance powers when it granted the president the authority to use force in the war on terrorism.

Sheldon Goldman, a professor of political science at UMass, said the framers of the Constitution never envisioned a system in which one branch of the government could be granted autonomy over the other two. He said the news of domestic surveillance without explicit Congressional or court authority shows a fundamental imbalance of powers that could lead to a constitutional crisis.

'Of course, there are enemies, there are terrorists,' Goldman said. 'But (domestic surveillance) is not the battlefield, and even on the battlefield, there are certain rules.'

Dirty tricks

For Ekueme Michael Thelwell of Pelham, a former civil rights worker who served in the 1960s as field coordinator for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this week's news recalled his first experience with government surveillance.

FBI agents went far beyond wiretapping between 1956 and 1971 under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, with agents planting false media stories and documents in an effort to discredit activists and instigate violence with the civil rights movement, Thelwell said, citing COINTELPRO documents.

'I know there's an FBI file (on me,)' said Thelwell, now a UMass professor of Afro-American studies and an editor of Stokely Carmichael's autobiography. 'I have seen documents in which my name was mentioned. And always inaccurately.'

He said he'd seen no evidence of a 'dirty tricks' campaign in the Bush administration's current surveillance program, but said its decision to circumvent the FISA Court - as well as its flawed justification for the war in Iraq - suggested a similar level of carelessness.

'It's less wickedness than it is incompetence,' Thelwell said. 'But to have that kind of incompetence in this government is a terrifying prospect.'

More than 35 years later, the lessons of that 1970 scandal are still relevant, said Thomas Hilbink, assistant professor of legal studies at UMass.

'What was so scandalous about COINTELPRO was that the FBI was ignoring the law,' he said. 'What the Bush Administration is arguing now is that it should never have to go to a judicial authority (for wiretapping warrants.)'

Lois Ahrens of Northampton, an activist who protested U.S. military involvement in Central America in the 1980s, sued the federal government in 1990 in an attempt to see her FBI file after she discovered the agency had apparently infiltrated her group.

But a federal magistrate ruled that national security concerns, or possibly the identity of an FBI agent or source, forbade its release. Ahrens has never learned the contents of the file, or the reasons for her surveillance.

'They were afraid of jeopardizing their sources, who are probably people who are known to us,' she said. The government never accused her of illegal acts. 'At the time, we were standing on the street corner and leafleting, things that were boring, really.'

For Ahrens, this week's news served as a reminder of a turning point in her life, when she learned her government considered her a threat.

'To me, it has never stopped,' she said. 'Since then, I'm aware that this is part of my political history, my personal history.'

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

December 21, 2005

Justice Reinvestment in Louisville

Thursday, December 15, 2005
Louisville to help former prisoners
Social-services plan targets Newburg
By Kay Stewart
The Courier-Journal

http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/ideas_20040106 (link to the OSI Paper on Justice Reinvestment)

Louisville Metro Councilwoman Barbara Shanklin doesn't need a study to tell her that the Newburg neighborhood is shouldering more than its share of Jefferson County's growing population of ex-prisoners.

She says her constituents have provided all the evidence she needs -- calling in recent weeks to complain and voice fears about unsupervised groups of ex-prisoners living together in houses and walking the streets at all hours.
"It's a problem, and there's a need for something to happen," Shanklin said.

A recent study by the city echoes that sentiment and recommends a new plan of attack -- bringing together government, nonprofit and faith-based groups to monitor and provide ex-prisoners in Newburg with services such as drug testing and treatment and job training, starting from the time they are sentenced.

If approved and funded, the Newburg pilot program, proposed in the city's "Justice Reinvestment Project" study, would be the first of its kind in Kentucky, according to local and state officials.

And it would be among only a few similar efforts in the country to address the rapidly increasing numbers of prisoners returning to communities, according to Susan Tucker, director of an after-prison initiative at The Open Society Institute, a New York-based foundation.

Tucker said states are being forced to focus on ways to help ex-prisoners succeed because of their growing numbers, the enormous costs of incarcerating them again and the toll their repeated crimes take on communities. If the pilot program in Newburg could reduce the number of repeat offenders and reduce crime, Louisville officials say it would be expanded to other neighborhoods -- and Tucker said it "could end up being a model" for the nation.

While operational details aren't set and funding must be arranged, city officials said they are optimistic the pilot program can begin, at least in part, next year.

Kim Allen, secretary of the city's Public Protection Cabinet, said the city plans to seek an unspecified amount of funding from The Open Society Institute, which provided $50,000 last year for the study.

Need highlighted

President Bush, in his 2004 inaugural address, highlighted the need to help ex-offenders successfully return to their communities, and a number of faith-based organizations also are focusing on the issue.
Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson said prisoner re-entry is "something talked about at every U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting."

That's due, in large part, to the fact that nationwide, 650,000 prisoners are released each year, a 350 percent increase over 20 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In Kentucky, which leads the nation in the rate of growth of prisoners on probation, 10,308 prisoners were released in 2003, a 67 percent increase in eight years, according to the city's study.

Each year, about 1,850 released state prisoners return to Jefferson County, including 700 who served their entire sentence and are not under state supervision. Based on the most recent figures cited in the report, about 400 Jefferson County residents are released each year from the county jail system after serving 90 days or more for a misdemeanor offense.

The city study, which looked at inmates released to the county from January 2002-December 2004, drew conclusions that mirror national reports showing that the majority of ex-prisoners are under-educated, lack job skills and family support, and have a substance abuse problem.
More than a third of released prisoners in Kentucky also eventually are sent back to prison, according to the study.

Pockets of ex-prisoners

Like other metropolitan areas, ex-prisoners in Louisville also tend to live in concentrated areas, the study found.

In December 2004, nearly half of the parolees lived in six ZIP codes -- 40203, 40211, 40218, 40216, 40210 and 40212 -- that house only 22 percent of the county's population.

Those ZIP codes are primarily in western Louisville, including Russell, Portland, Chickasaw, Parkland, Park DuValle, California and Shelby Park neighbors. Parts of Shively southwest of downtown, and Newburg south of downtown also have relatively large numbers of ex-prisoners, the study said.

In three of those areas -- Newburg, Shelby Park and California -- the study found that ex-prisoners differed in some ways from most of the ex-prisoner population. Shelby Park, for example, had a higher percent of women and white ex-offenders, while California and Newburg had a higher percentage of African-American ex-prisoners. Ex-offenders in Newburg also tended to be younger, with nearly 46 percent under age 30.

The study recommends Newburg for a pilot program because it said ex-inmates there seem to be at a higher risk of repeating a crime, and the area is not near many services. The program would serve Newburg-area inmates who serve time in the state system or who were sentenced to 90 days or more in a county corrections facility.

Lennie Pendleton Marshall, 60, a retired school teacher and neighborhood block watch leader in Newburg, said she is concerned about the large number of ex-offenders there, and she is skeptical about the proposed program.

By returning to Newburg, she said, "it's easier for them to go right back into the same thing."

The Rev. Roosevelt Ligtsy, assistant pastor at Community Missionary Baptist church in Newburg, said it's clear that something needs to be done.

Finding ways to help ex-offenders succeed "is a win-win proposition for us all," he said, adding, "When they don't receive the necessary support, it places all of us in jeopardy."

The city study included interviews with 13 former prisoners, who were not named. The interview reports chronicle a daunting array of needs among families for whom crime is a way of life, often beginning at a young age.

One 26-year-old man from Newburg, for example, was on parole for robbery and wanton endangerment convictions, crimes he committed when he was 18. He reported that he began using drugs and drinking at age 15 and that he had not seen his father for years. He told interviewers that his mother had been jailed several times for drug-related charges and was also on probation. He quit high school his junior year but obtained an equivalency degree in prison. "He has no skill or trade and employment has been sporadic through temporary agencies," a report on his interview said.

John D. Rees, commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Corrections, who participated in the study, said the challenge is getting service providers better organized to address the needs of such people.

A network of organizations that work with ex-offenders -- the Offender Reentry Task Force -- would play a key role in the local effort, and is already developing plans for coordinating services, said the Rev. Suzanne Siebold, executive director of Prodigal Ministries, an ecumenical organization that operates two transitional homes for ex-prisoners.

"There are big needs in Louisville that are not being addressed," said Siebold, a former chaplain at the state's Luther Luckett Correctional complex.

Posted by lois at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Women who were incarcerated faced with hardship, cold society

November 30, 2005
Amsterdam News, NY
"Female ex-prisoners faced with hardship, cold society"
Samantha Obas

It will be a long time before the standard Equal Opportunity Employment disclaimer reads, company X does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, color, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or former incarceration.

But that's what female ex-prisoners - they're not called ex-cons anymore - want in their quest for a new chapter in their lives after spending years locked up behind bars.

When [employers] hear you've been incarcerated, they automatically think you're a cheat, a liar, a thief, a burglar, so they don't want to give you the opportunity said Sharon White, who completed a 13-year sentence at the Bedford Correctional Facility in upstate New York last November. You hear Governor Pataki and them say, "Oh, we're getting rid of the criminals and we're cleaning up these streets." But what about the ones that are coming home? What about the ones that are going to do the right thing and who aren't given a chance?'

White is not alone. She and other women at a recent conference at Long Island University said they face many challenges, particularly blatant discrimination, as they try to reintegrate into society. The most necessary things in life are now obstacles they continually try to overcome: obtaining an education, a job and housing. The question tens of thousands of these women ask is how they can get these things after paying their debt to a society that then bars them from such services as public housing. Most female ex-offenders return to the same neighborhoods that helped them get into trouble in the first place.

Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin, the Women's Prison Association (WPA) program director of reentry services, who 16 years ago completed 21 months of a two-and-a-half-to-five-year sentence for selling $10 worth of crack, recalls that when she was released, she couldn't immediately move in with her mother and son. She had to live with her sister in the same neighborhood in which she'd sold drugs. 'There was no support and no big programs to help,' she said.

What sets the plight of formerly incarcerated women apart from men is they must navigate around the tangles of the legal and foster care system, or relatives, to get their children back, regain their parental rights and get to know their kids all over again " in some cases, as adults. I had to deal with meeting my children on their terms," said Tina Reynolds, an ex-offender, who co-founded WORTH (Women on the Rise Telling Herstory), an association of women who have been affected by the criminal justice system. "It wasn't like me coming back and saying, I'm the mom, listen to me. I had to deal with them not wanting to talk to me, being angry at me and not even wanting to be in the same space with me."

Reynolds lost one of her children due to a law passed in 1997 called the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) that allows states to begin proceedings to terminate parental rights if a child has been in foster care for more than 15 months. The average sentence for a woman who commits a nonviolent crime is 19 months.

Peggy Arroyo, senior director of Alternative to Incarceration and Family Services programs at the Fortune Society, said that a woman imprisoned is more damaging to the family fabric than a man.
When you incarcerate a man, you incarcerate a man, she said. But when you incarcerate a woman, you incarcerate the whole family.
The stigma of being convicted is difficult for women since, traditionally, men dominate the prison rolls.

Women are incarcerated in prisons that were designed for men, Arroyo said. "Our needs are different. Men could deal with isolation, but women - we feel, we communicate. A man - you can lock him up and he can stay by himself," she explained.

And with a huge crop of women being released - 70,000 annually since 2001, according to the WPA - many have to rely on shelters and be legally barred from jobs that come with healthcare.
Female ex-offenders don't qualify for Pell Grants, the primary source of education funding for prison-based education until the passage of the 1993 Crime Bill.

"These women return to our community hurt, angry and full of resentment," Johnson-Peterkin said. "We're the community. We should provide a system to help them integrate into society."

White agrees. Though she received her college degree at Bedford and is now a case manager at Exodus Transitional Community for Formerly Incarcerated Men and Women in East Harlem, she said, "My issue when I got out was straight employment."

Sixty percent of female ex-prisoners are unemployed, according to the WPA. Statistically, for every woman in prison with a college degree, there are 32 without, and of the 78 percent of formerly incarcerated women without a high school diploma, 16 percent will receive a GED while in prison.

However, some organizations are addressing these problems by educating the masses. "A lot of employers have their own biases, and a lot of times don't want to take the risk," said Roberta Meyers-Peeples, co-director of the Washington, DC-based Legal Action Centers National HIRE (Helping Individuals with Criminal Records Reenter Through Employment) Network. "We're responsible for educating employers to get them to understand that people who have criminal records are people, too."

Meyers-Peeples added, "There is no one walking this earth who hasn't made a mistake," She travels across the U.S. educating employers and advocating for former inmates, to get policies changed regarding employment.
Shamicka Frantz can attest to making mistakes. A self-proclaimed former career criminal, the 28-year-old has been working hard to regain a sense of normalcy in her life after growing a rap sheet too long to recount.
"Now I look at my rap sheet, I realize I was young, dumb and thought I would be able to get over, and now I'm struggling to battle my rights over things I did as a kid," she said. "It's so hard."

Meyers-Peeples said indeed it is hard, since it is the law in New York State that a person's criminal record is never sealable. People are stigmatized for the rest of their lives [here], she said. Just getting arrested without conviction can affect a person long-term, Meyers-Peeples pointed out.
Imagine having to explain every time you sit down in front of an employer and they do a background check and receive that information, Meyers-Peeples said.
WPA reported that if women ex-offenders are faced with joblessness and homelessness in their attempts to change their lives, the likelihood is they will turn to illegal activities again.
Often times, women don't see what it is they can attain after incarceration, said Reynolds, who has been out of prison for 12 years and values her activism work helping other women.
"Unless the woman is offered the opportunity to receive the skills [and has] the knowledge that there are services that will help her regain her life, then she will go back."

Posted by lois at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

The War on Drugs and the War on Abortion = War on Women

Dear NAPW Friends and Allies:

We are happy to use this occasional NAPW update to let you know about some recent victories and to provide you with an example of effective public education action. In addition to supporting NAPW, you can help challenge drug war misinformation and help prevent pregnant and parenting women and their families from being punished by disseminating the open letter attached to this e-mail. If you read or hear a news story about “meth babies” or learn that there is new punitive legislation being introduced in response to meth misinformation, please send the attached letter with a note urging the news-breakers or policymakers to base their stories and policies on science not stigma.

Below is a description of some cases, our education action, and links to news stories about this work. Our next e-mail will update you on our work in South Dakota and elsewhere to reframe the abortion debate and protect all women from attacks made in the name of both the war on drugs and the war on abortion.

On November 29th the Supreme Court of Hawaii unanimously overturned Tayshea Aiwohi's conviction for manslaughter. NAPW has been involved in the case from the beginning. When Ms. Tayshea Aiwohi’s newborn son died shortly after he came home from the hospital, she was not supported in her grief; instead, she was arrested based on a scientifically unsupported claim that the methamphetamine problem she was working hard to overcome caused the death of her son. NAPW worked extensively with local and national advocates to oppose this prosecution. In order to avoid a trial, however, Ms. Aiwohi plead guilty to manslaughter but challenged the legitimacy of the charge. NAPW, with the support of the Drug Policy Alliance, and the extraordinarily talented attorney David Goldberg, filed a public health amicus brief on behalf of over 60 public health, child welfare and drug treatment organizations and experts challenging the conviction. We also worked with Ms. Aiwohi’s attorney helping to prepare him for oral argument. Although some of the reasoning of the main opinion leaves something to be desired, this is an important victory adding another state Supreme Court to the list of appellate courts rejecting the idea that continuing a pregnancy to term in spite of a drug problem is a crime.

To read about the decision:
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051130/NEWS20/511300342/1001/NEWS

To read the Hawai‘i Supreme Court ruling: www.courts.state.hi.us/page_server/LegalReferences/73DFB8859867A628EAE7AB3DC5.html

NAPW’s work has also helped to get charges dropped or dismissed in cases in Oregon, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Washington State. Yesterday we received a joyful e-mail from James Rennicke, an attorney in Burnett County, Wisconsin saying in part, “Good Morning, Lynn Drum roll please! Case dismissed!! Due to the brilliant memorandum by James Rennicke, and help from your office, many thanks!!!! case will be dismissed tomorrow.”

Recently, NAPW had the privilege of working with the Maryland Public Justice Center to file an amicus brief on behalf of more than 40 public health, drug treatment and child welfare organizations opposing the prosecution of Kelly Lynn Cruz. Amici are asking for a clear judicial statement that the felony “reckless endangerment of another” cannot be used to punish women for becoming pregnant and giving birth in spite of a drug or other health problem. We just learned that the Maryland Court of Appeals granted cert in the case, meaning that they will review the unjust and unconstitutional prosecution in this case.

NAPW is also proud that we have influenced the media and policy makers across the nation by organizing over 90 medical experts and scientific researchers to speak out against the myth of the “meth baby.” Throughout the 1980’ s and 90’s alarmist claims about so called “crack babies” fueled fetal rights arguments, new punishment of pregnant women and mothers, and ever more punitive drug laws. NAPW recognized that public anxiety regarding a new threat, “meth babies,” could result in a new wave of attacks on pregnant women. As a result, we reached out to experts and helped them to organize a public letter to the media and policy makers warning them not to create a new myth of “meth babies.” This letter was distributed nation wide, in both English and Spanish and has had a significant impact on journalists, child welfare workers and others. The letter has been picked up a referred to in a wide variety of news stories, (see links to stories below) and a commentary by Dr. Barry Lester that we solicited and became the basis for a series of ads in leading political magazines including National Review, the New Republic, the American Prospect, The Nation, Reason Magazine, and the Progressive. (See link to ads below)

ß One hit of meth enough to cause news defects
http://www.jointogether.org/sa/news/features/reader/0,1854,578073,00.html
.
ß Another “Drug Baby Media” Scare? http://www.csdp.org/publicservice/dejavumeth.htm

ß Meth and Myth: Top Doctors, Scientists, and Specialists Warn Mass Media on "Meth Baby" Stories 7/29/05 http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/397/methandmyth.shtml

ß An Inconceivable Solution? Barbara Harris Has an Answer to the Problem of Drug-Addicted Babies—Pay the Mothers to Stop Having Kids, Portland Mercury, by Katie Shimer http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=35535&category=34029

ß The Meth Epidemic: Hype vs. Reality: The facts about how the drug affects child welfare and how agencies have coped http://www.youthtoday.org/youthtoday/oct05/story2_10_05.html

ß Crack Then, Meth Now, What the press didn't learn from the last drug panic http://www.slate.com/id/2124885/

www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org

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

MA: State Opens Non-Prison Detox for Women

http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=117993

State opens non-prison detox for women
By Laura Crimaldi
Wednesday, December 21, 2005

After a decade of sending drug and alcohol-addicted women to a prison hospital for detox, state officials yesterday announced the opening of a new treatment facility for women who have been ordered by a civil court to seek help.
³There are certain things that are not, in fact, done by the criminal justice system and one of those is drug treatment for women who are civilly committed,² Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey said yesterday during a news conference.

From 1995 to the present, the number of women treated annually for alcoholism or substance abuse at the women¹s prison in Framingham grew from nine to 157, Healey said. The women were sent to the prison infirmary for detox after a civil court imposed a Section 35 order under the state civil commitment law. The women do not face criminal charges.

Highpoint, a behavioral health services agency, was awarded a four-year contract for $1.8 million to fund the program at a new 60-bed facility in New Bedford. The facility, which will start welcoming civilly committed female patients in April, will house 25 detox beds and 35 ³step-down² beds.

There are currently four women at MCI-Framingham under the state civil commitment statute. Typically, women spend 14 to 16 days at the prison for medical treatment and do not mix with the prison¹s general population.

The new program is being funded from $20 million in state and federal money set aside for substance abuse services.

³Women who are civilly committed for substance abuse should not be housed in a prison, but in a community-based treatment program like Highpoint,² said state Department of Correction Commissioner Kathleen M. Dennehy.

From the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Policy Coalition----

A growing number of women are finding themselves in custody at MCI Framingham without having been charged with, or convicted of, any crime. They are addicts and alcoholics who have been involuntarily committed for detox and treatment following a civil court determination that they pose a danger to themselves or others because of their addiction and/or alcoholism. The problem is complex and goes beyond current economic concerns, highlighting societal assumptions and prejudices about substance abuse.

Women going to Framingham for detox is nothing new, but the number of women so committed, and the length of time they spend in prison, is increasing. Under Massachusetts General Law chapter 123, section 35, the statute governing civil commitments, men and women can be ordered into treatment, men being committed to MCI Bridgewater, as a matter of course, and women going to MCI Framingham when beds are not available in other detox facilities. The commitment can be for up to 30 days, following a civil procedure that need not involve any criminal charges, although in many cases criminal charges accompany the commitment. The procedure may be initiated by any police officer, physician, spouse, blood relative, guardian, or court official.

The Institute for Health and Recovery (IHR) in Cambridge is the agency charged with placing women once they are committed. IHR Director Norma Finklestein explains that the goal has always been to keep women out of prison, but that in the past, when beds are unavailable elsewhere, women might spend a couple of days there before being placed elsewhere. Within the last six to seven months, however, the number of detox beds available to section 35 commitments has decreased by about 50 percent statewide. This, coupled with other health insurance payer problems, has caused a sharp increase in the number of women going to MCI Framingham under civil commitment.

Nadeene Platt, the section 35 coordinator at IHR, reports that between July 2002 and July 2003 a total of 50 women passed through Framingham before being placed in some other detox facility. As of November 7, 2003, 51 women had been to Framingham following civil commitments since this July. These numbers represent women sent to Framingham on pure civil commitments, with no related criminal charges pending or adjudicated.

Historically, women have not stayed long at the prison following civil commitment, but with the current shortage of detox beds statewide, the stay is increasing. What had been a couple of days, has become week or more. In one recent case, a woman stayed in prison for a full month following a civil commitment, according to Finklestein. And in some cases, staying for more than a day or two will foreclose any chance of getting the woman into another detox, as the private facilities will not take a woman who has already “detoxed.”

The prison is not equipped to handle many of these cases. Women going in on pure civil commitments, without any pending criminal charges, are isolated in the prison’s health care unit, without access to the substance abuse recovery program. The program, “First Step,” is intended for the criminally convicted prison population. Under state law, the prison’s civil and criminal population cannot mix, and the facility is unable to segregate the two populations for purposes of accessing the program. According to Finklestein, some judges understanding this complexity, will revoke bail on small offenses (if available) in order to get the women into Framingham under a “dual status,” and therefore eligible for the First Step program. However, that doesn’t always help, as the First Step program is apparently full, with a waiting list.

In some cases, the public does not understand the shortage of beds and some desperate addicts and alcoholics attempt to use the civil commitment procedure to get around the shortage of available detox beds elsewhere. In a recent case, according to Finklestein, a 68-year old woman, desperate to get into a detox, mistakenly thought that if she subjected herself to civil commitment, she’d be “guaranteed” a bed somewhere by the state. She and her family went through the procedure, and on a Friday, she was taken in handcuffs to the prison, searched, and sat for the week