The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: February 2006 Archives

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February 26, 2006

NY: State Takes Over 9 Substance Abuse Centers

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/nyregion/24crossing.html
New York Times
State Takes Over 9 Substance Abuse Centers
By JULIA C. MEAD
Published: February 24, 2006

RIVERHEAD, N.Y., Feb. 23 ‹ The State of New York took control of nine substance-abuse treatment centers scattered around Long Island on Thursday. The action ended a three-day State Supreme Court hearing in which state officials, who had revoked the centers' operating certificates, were seeking control.

Crossings Recovery Systems, the company that owns the centers, was facing a $6.9 million fine by the state's Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services for what the agency said was a failure to properly manage and staff the centers. The agency had cited Crossings for 174 violations of state regulations, including inadequate medical care and supervision, and inappropriate treatment.

The company disputed the state's allegations, but agreed on Thursday to a voluntary receivership under which the state's substance abuse agency will operate the clinics and supervise the Crossings employees who agree to stay. The clinics served a total of 1,200 to 1,500 patients.

The receivership does not involve about 15 group homes for recovering addicts, known as sober homes, that are operated by Crossings.

An assistant state attorney general, Denis J. McElligott, said the agency would decide whether Frank Buonanotte, the Crossings owner, would have any access to the clinics or their records.

After two days of testimony, lawyers on both sides said Justice Peter H. Mayer had pushed them to reach a settlement. "It's not about benefiting Crossings or Mr. Buonanotte," said Scott J. Fine, the Crossings lawyer. "This is for the sole benefit of the clients. Period."

Crossings recently closed one clinic, in Huntington; several others, which had not paid rent since October or November, were in danger of eviction. And others were temporarily closed this week, Mr. Fine said. As a result, many patients ‹ all recovering addicts, and some of them mentally ill or convicted sex offenders ‹ were left without access to counseling or other treatment services. About $250,000 in emergency state funds was approved late on Thursday to reopen the clinics, and state workers from Manhattan and Long Island offices were called in to assess the caseloads, remaining staff and facilities.

"There's going to be some uncertainty but I think we can work through it together," Henry F. Zwack, the general counsel for the agency, told three dozen Crossings employees who waited in the courtroom most of the afternoon as the lawyers negotiated in the hallway.

Crossings employees said many co-workers had already quit and others were looking for new jobs, but those in court today agreed to report to work on Friday. The state will pay their salaries and patients should once again be receiving treatment or referrals to other programs starting Monday morning, Mr. Zwack said.

On Feb. 14, the agency revoked the operating licenses of all nine clinics and sought a court-ordered receivership, actions the company then challenged in court.

Before the hearing was halted by the settlement talks, Crossings employees testified that it had not met its latest payroll and was nearly $500,000 in debt, and that Medicaid, which represented about half its revenue, had stopped sending payments.

Posted by lois at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

The Myth of L.A.'s Race War

By Maria Luisa Tucker, AlterNet

Posted on February 24, 2006, Printed on February 24, 2006

http://www.alternet.org/story/32674/

J.R. has spent 12 of his 28 years behind bars for attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and discharging a firearm, among other things. His broad back is covered with tattoos of women, marijuana leaves, cars, guns. The images were etched into him with a tattoo gun made from a Walkman motor, a guitar string and a single needle. Like the majority of men behind bars in Los Angeles County, J.R. was a gang member. Which gang, he declines to say.

The calculated intimidation factor of his tattoos and his gangbanging past were necessary for survival during his years on the streets and in prison, and are now necessary for his job. Amidst the brightly colored buildings of Hispanic East L.A., J.R. works as a motivational speaker for Homies Industries, a cornerstone of L.A.'s community of gang intervention organizations. He has been rehabilitated, not by the system but by the combination of parenthood, religion and the realization that gang life almost inevitably leads to prison or death. In the neighborhoods he works, kids are more likely to listen to tattooed ex-cons than cops or teachers, and this ex-con is hoping to steer kids away from gang life and toward education and jobs.

J.R. is not alone in this mission. Over the last couple of decades, a cadre of reformed gangsters has created a community that exists in a netherworld between law enforcement and gang life, working to prevent crime and simultaneously keep the trust and respect of gang members. Along with Homies Industries, there are organizations like Unity One, Unity T.H.R.E.E., Homies Unidos, Amer-I-Can and NO GUNS, which negotiate ceasefires between rival gangs, and provides tattoo removal, job training and life skills classes. The gang intervention workers know what goes on in the streets, jails and prisons better than pretty much anyone else. And recently, they have felt a sense of familiar wariness at the news of the violent, racially charged riots that erupted in L.A. County's jails.

For more than two weeks, headlines have been telling the story of sporadic violence inside the jails that has led to two deaths. The first articles reported that so-called brown-on-black violence began when the Mexican Mafia greenlighted Latino gang members to attack African-American inmates. Later, the sheriff's department said white inmates began the attacks on a black inmate, Wayne Tiznor, the first man to be killed. Though the stories about what sparked the riots have changed, the race war hype stuck.

"When you're on the outside looking in, you are looking for a political answer. And calling it a race riot is the quickest political answer," says J.R., who is Latino. It's both a sensational and digestible way to frame the crisis. "It's like 'Ten o'clock tonight! Mexicans killing blacks! Only on Fox 11 News!' That's what grabs people's attention." But really, he says, "it's about power, money, and dope."

The race-riot narrative simplifies and masks a much more complex tragedy in which racism may be the result of violence, but not its cause. L.A.'s sorely inadequate jails are the setting for a story that has many more antagonists than heroes. And it is a tragedy that begins and ends in the neighborhoods where many of L.A.'s inmates come from -- Compton, Boyle Heights, Inglewood and East L.A. -- where gang intervention workers like J.R. are working to calm the waters and dispel the destructive myth of a new black-Latino race war.

Power and insignificance

Feb. 4: "In rioting triggered by racial tensions, more than 2,000 inmates went on a four-hour rampage Saturday at a maximum-security jail in Castaic, leaving one prisoner dead and nearly 50 others injured." --L.A. Times

"This is more about power, not about whether Latinos hate blacks. It's about who gets to decide what's on television," says Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who founded Homies Industries and is a highly respected leader of gang intervention in L.A. "I think this has very little to do with race." Father Boyle's statement may sound dismissive, but it is true that the flames of large scale violence behind bars are often sparked by seemingly insignificant things.

For example, Shonteze Williams, a gang intervention worker who spent years in Corcoran State Prison remembers a battle in 1998 that began when a Latino inmate cut in front of a black inmate while they were waiting to use the phone. The ensuing melee involved hundreds of men and left Williams with 22 stitches in his arm. Williams says black and Latino inmates automatically divided along racial lines in the fight, because "you have to stick with your own." It's this kind of group mentality that leads to a "never-ending game" behind bars, says Williams.

At an emotional level, incarceration is the act of stripping someone of their self-determination, and in a street culture that values masculine pride, power and dominance, this is acute. Any minor affront is fraught with the possibility of violence.

"It's a little bit like rape. Rape has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with power," says Father Boyle. The violence manifests along a racial divide, but racism is not the cause. Steve Whitmore, Sheriff's Department spokesman, recognizes this as well: "The conflict was divided along race, but the reason it happened was that it is the culture of the jails. What fuels the fights is the tension in the jails."

Violence has erupted frequently in L.A.'s jails, where overcrowding, understaffing and underfunding have historically been part of the system. In the last few months, seven major fights have been reported in L.A.'s jails, and in the Men's Central facility alone, eight inmates were murdered in under three years. The jails saw similar rioting in 2000, 1996, 1985 and 1972.

Since the riots began, the county has been in a tailspin of fingerpointing. "Who should the fall person be? They try to make [Sheriff] Lee Baca the fall guy. Or they try to blame the county," says Bo Taylor, founder of the gang-intervention organization, Unity One. "Well, it should be society. We allowed this to happen."

These problems are not confined to L.A. County jails or California's prisons, but are part of the larger prison industrial complex set up across the nation. Similar stories are told everywhere of corrupt corrections officers, inmate hierarchies, overcrowding, mistreatment, and -- always -- violence. What's unique to California is its historic reliance on segregation as a method of managing inmates.

Riots and segregation

Feb 5: "Violence broke out again late Sunday, this time at the Pitchess Detention Center North 10 inmates were injured in the violence that broke out just before 10:30 p.m. at Pitchess. [Deputy Alba] Yates said the incident involved approximately 170 Latino and 35 black inmates who 'divided on racial lines and fought'." --L.A. Times

Bo Taylor is a clean-cut black man with a bald head, neatly trimmed goatee, and a tattoo on his inner forearm that reads "God's First" in an elaborate script that takes a moment to decipher. "I've had this 14 years," Taylor says. "People look at it and see something negative before they even read what it says. But that's OK. I want people to prejudge us," he says, because people need to realize their initial judgments are often wrong. "They say you can't judge a book by its cover. I say you can't judge a book by its first chapter."

Taylor does not have an office; he conducts meetings in a Mexican diner housed in a bowling alley near mid-city Los Angeles, and is interrupted every four minutes by the ring of his cell phone. When the discussion turns to the jail riots and segregation, Taylor sighs.
Gang intervention workers repeatedly say that segregation is necessary right now simply to save lives. In the same breath, they say cops and the penal system reinforce the racial antagonism.

"Most inmates have a 6th- or 7th-grade education level," Taylor says. "They don't know how to make decisions. They have no tools to figure things out, and once the media gets involved they start saying things that aren't necessarily true and adding fuel to the fire," he says, referring to the racial component of the coverage. "When you look at a jail, you look at groups of whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics and then others. People can't use the same phones, or use the same toilets. Someone has implemented a system based on racism."

For decades, California segregated its prison inmates by race. Last year, a Supreme Court decision outlawed the practice and the state is still in the midst of changing its segregation policies. L.A. County has followed suit, stating that it will only segregate inmates in times of emergency. That time came when the riots began Feb. 4, and since then deputies have segregated some jails by race and ethnicity largely in attempts to protect black inmates, who are outnumbered by Latinos.

"It makes it easier for them to control you, but it promotes hatred. There are boundaries set up by the institutions," says Ralph, a Latino volunteer for Taylor's organization and an ex-con who was released from prison last year. (Like many former gang members, he declined to give his last name.) "It's hard to say if it would be better without segregation. It's been etched into prison life."

Taylor believes that segregation is appropriate now, but still holds that race has been used as the scapegoat. "You have to take into consideration that [if you are incarcerated], you don't have a job, you don't have a house or a car, you might not even have a family when you come out. You are a frustrated person! To say it is a race riot is a blanket statement."

Gangs and communities

Feb. 8: "Nearly 500 inmates fought Wednesday in racially charged melees at Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, marking a fifth day of violence in the Los Angeles County jail system and underscoring officials' inability to stop unrest tied to street conflicts between Latino and black gangs." --L.A. Times

Shonteze Williams Sr. euphemistically calls gangs "communities." His community is the Harlem 30 Crips.

Williams is careful to differentiate between gangbangers -- those who commit crimes and use violence -- and gang members, who are part of the "community" but not necessarily part of the criminal element. "I still have a gangbanger's heart but not a gangbanger's mind," says Williams, who considers himself the voice of reason and peace within the Crips.

Sitting in an office in South Central L.A. that relies entirely on donations and volunteers, Williams talks about the camaraderie of gang life and his belief that gang members can help make positive changes. He believes you don't have to leave the gang to do that: "To be giving back to the community you grew up in, that you used to cause havoc in? Man, that's a beautiful thing."

Williams understands what a lot of law enforcement bureaucrats fail to recognize -- that gang life offers a powerful sense of belonging, the thrill of street life, and a surrogate family to replace absent fathers and strung-out mothers. The group adhesiveness is based partly on a common enemy, and gangs operate much like their own nations by protecting borders, finding symbolism in "flags" or colors, and declaring war on rival gangs. The national values are pride and dominance. Rules are enforced by violence and intimidation.

The rules that apply in jail are established out here, where even during ceasefires men are afraid of looking weak. Williams helped negotiate a ceasefire among 12 gangs that began after the death of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the Crips who was executed in December. Even then, those agreeing to the ceasefire were not agreeing to turn the other cheek, says Williams; only not to be the aggressors. "But either way the result is the same -- peace. And credit needs to be given to the gang members for doing that."

A large part of what gang intervention workers do is control rumors and calm tensions before retaliation takes place. On this particular night, Williams plans to get some information on a recent shooting that left a teenager dead. He hopes to comfort family members and simultaneously quell any plans for vengeance. The community of gang intervention workers across L.A. is hoping to do the same on a larger scale.

Williams is part of an effort to strategize how to keep the peace on the streets when hell breaks loose in the jails. The Unity Collaborative, a gang-intervention network made up of five Los Angeles area agencies, brought together a dozen black and Latino gang-intervention leaders in San Pedro, Calif., just south of William's office.

"It's a war out there," one man says at the meeting. Heads nod in agreement. Discussions roam from the current ceasefire in South Central, the peace-building process that is still underway, and the most recent casualty of the jail riots -- a black inmate who died Feb. 12. By the end of the meeting, a mixture of wariness mingled with dogged hope emerged as the men went around the conference table sharing their woes. One spoke about the need for blacks to be unified, another about the upcoming funeral of a 16-year-old who was shot by the cops the day before. There is clearly no immediate end to violence between gangs in or outside of jail, but it is obvious that preventative measures must continue. The men around the table remind themselves that they can't save every life, but that they must keep going in order to save some.

silence and fear

[Feb. 17: "Skirmishes between black and Latino inmates broke out again Friday night at Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic Six inmates were slightly injured, including four who were taken to a hospital, after more than three dozen prisoners scuffled." --L.A. Times

On Saturday, Feb. 18, the parking lot at the inmate reception center in Pitchess is desolate. As she drives up and catches sight of a piece of paper declaring "No Visits," Elizabeth Schultz feels the wind of hope knocked out of her. Her boyfriend was arrested on drunk driving charges Feb. 6 and since been awaiting trial in the North County Correctional Facility, the same building where the most recent fighting took place. Schultz has been unable to communicate with him because of the lockdown. No mail was allowed in or out until a couple days ago, and inmates are still prohibited to make phone calls or receive visitors. Only the sparsest bit of information is available on the county's inmate information phone line and website, and even that has been more confusing than helpful.

Meanwhile, newspaper headlines continued their story of regular race riots being quashed with tear gas, "sting balls" and rubber pellets. Inmates are punished by having privileges taken away, including showers, and most recently, clothes. According to a Feb. 19 New York Times article, deputies attempted to "calm" inmates by taking away their mattresses and forcing them to strip, leaving only blankets to cover themselves.

Now, in the cold breeze that gusts across the inmate reception center's parking lot, Schultz peers through the gate, even though the actual jail buildings are behind the hills, far from view. The faint, unnerving sound of gunshots echoes through the air. Every few minutes another car ventures in, another family checks to see if visits are allowed today. A father comes and goes, a mother, a neighbor. A guard at the employee entrance road tells Schultz the jail will probably be on lockdown for another couple weeks. He has no other information.

Schultz brushes away tears as she drives away. She is beginning to feel the frustration and outrage at the system gang-intervention workers have been dealing with for decades.

"California's answer to gangs is 25-to-life for teenagers," J.R. says. His voice rises in disgust. "You can rape a woman or molest a kid and be out in a few years. That's messed up."

As for the jail riots, J.R. declares, "I don't see no color lines. I see struggle and pain."

Maria Luisa Tucker is an AlterNet staff writer.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/32674/

Posted by lois at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

CA: State Chief of Prisons Resigns After 2 years on job

State Chief of Prisons Says He's Resigning
By Jenifer Warren
Times Staff Writer

February 26, 2006

SACRAMENTO - Corrections Secretary Roderick Q. Hickman, who embodied Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's vow to turn around California's violent and scandal-plagued prison system, said Saturday night that he was resigning the post he has held for more than two years.

Hickman, reached by telephone, said that he was calling it quits because he lacked political support for his efforts to create a correctional system that was more than a revolving-door warehouse for felons.

Hickman, 49, said the governor would receive an official letter of resignation Monday.

"I think we've built an excellent foundation, but I just don't see the courage and will we need to get it done across the board in the government of California," Hickman said.

While he believes Schwarzenegger remains interested in prison reform, Hickman said "the special interests we're up against are just too powerful to get much done in the current environment."

He said he had grown increasingly frustrated by legislators who attacked the department - often during public hearings - for "small mistakes" that were portrayed as a "massive failure of leadership."

But he also said the influence the powerful prison guards' union wields in Sacramento had nudged him toward the door.

The union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., has battled with Hickman from his first days as secretary - even though he began his career as a prison guard and was a union member for 20 years.

Recently, that battle had intensified as Hickman was approaching a confirmation hearing in the Senate this spring. Though he was confirmed once, legislation that restructured the department last year required he pass a second test.

Hickman, the administration's highest-ranking African American, said he felt confident he could muster the votes to survive, and Schwarzenegger has professed support for the secretary in the past.

But it was unclear whether the governor's advisors were behind Hickman.

The departure will leave the governor with an enormous hole in his Cabinet and the daunting task of filling what experts say is the toughest correctional job in the nation.

Hickman is responsible for a sprawling $8.2-billion penal system that incarcerates more than 171,000 youth and adult convicts and employs 59,000 people throughout the state.

He was brought in as a reformer and, from the start, faced immense problems, including severe overcrowding, an aging inmate population that has driven up healthcare costs and an entrenched gang problem that has defied easy solution.

Because of a series of lawsuits, Hickman also was forced to navigate in an environment where large portions of his domain were under court supervision.

Last week, a federal judge appointed a receiver to manage medical care, declaring that outside intervention was essential to solve a long-brewing crisis in which inmates died because of incompetence or neglect at a rate of one a week.

Hickman and Schwarzenegger had attracted national attention, however, for their pledge to reemphasize rehabilitation as a way to increase the odds that parolees would stay crime-free.

As part of a restructuring of the Department of Corrections last year, the governor elevated inmate rehabilitation to equal standing with other prison operations - a major departure from the past - and even added "rehabilitation" to the agency's name.

Hickman also sent deputies around the country to find the most effective inmate programs to determine which would best fit in California.

Those moves were part of his response to criticism of the system as an operation that, while adept at incarcerating convicts, did little to ensure they would not get in trouble again.

With a recidivism rate that was highest in the nation, California was lambasted by experts time and again for a system that wasted tax dollars and, in effect, provided poor public safety because so many parolees committed new crimes.

To help figure out a new approach, Hickman opened the department's doors to academia, inviting some scholars, such as UC Irvine's Joan Petersilia, to sit in on meetings with him and his top deputies and offer advice.

More recently, Hickman had attracted attention with new thinking on female offenders, who are housed in expensive, high-security prisons even though most are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. He was pushing a proposal to move 40% of the state's female inmates out of prison and into community correctional centers closer to their families.

A physically imposing man with a charismatic style, Hickman has faced criticism from one source more than any other throughout his tenure: the union representing the majority of his employees, the correctional officers. Some say the secretary would have gone further with his reforms had he found a way to work with the union.

Union spokesman Lance Corcoran agreed.

"What is really sad is he had an incredible opportunity to lead this department in a new direction, but he chose to alienate people," Corcoran said. "Our members are tired, they're demoralized, we have an unclear chain of command, and the management team Š is in complete disarray. It all happened under Mr. Hickman's watch."

Once an insignificant player in the Capitol, the union has grown over the last two decades into one of the most powerful forces in state politics. A generous donor supporting both Democratic and Republican candidates, the union spent more than $1 million to defeat a ballot measure seeking to soften the three-strikes initiative and was a key player in defeating Schwarzenegger's special-election measures last year.

Union leaders were initially upset over Hickman's efforts to purge the prisons of the "code of silence," which the secretary and others said deterred guards from reporting misconduct by colleagues. Union executives said Hickman had wrongly portrayed all officers in the same bad light.

Last year, they blamed Hickman for the death of an officer, Manuel Gonzalez, stabbed by an inmate at the state prison in Chino, noting that the prison had failed to distribute 300 stab-proof vests to guards at the lockup. Corcoran said Hickman's "philosophy and his lack of leadership" created the climate for the killing, noting, "I'm sticking all of it on Hickman."

Hickman has declined to comment on the specific attacks but was defiant in one past interview with The Times, saying, "We're heading in a new directionŠ. [The union] can get on the train or get left at the station."

Lawyer Steve Fama, who represents inmates in lawsuits over prison conditions, praised Hickman for "standing up to the union and trying to end the code of silence that too often permeates prisons."

But he said the secretary's brief legacy will be marred by his failure to respond more forcefully to the crisis over medical care that has claimed so many lives.

Earlier this month, Hickman faced criticism anew in the Legislature when Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) blasted the secretary and other officials during a tense hearing called to assess the department's progress.

For the first time, Hickman's patience and enthusiasm seemed to be wearing thin. He left the hearing after testifying, despite Romero's request that he stay.

Former Undersecretary of Corrections Kevin Carruth, who left the department last year, said the hearing and Romero's criticism were telling.

"Rod had the courage to come in at a difficult time and try to provide leadership and go in a new direction," Carruth said. "But the expectations in that place are just unrealistic. They think you can come in, write a memo and turn the place around on a dime. It's impossible."

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hickman26feb26,0,7927526.story?coll=la-h
ome-headlines

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

Prison Economics: Crime and Punishment

Publication: Fortune Magazine http://fortune.com
Date: April 30, 2001
Title: PRISON ECONOMICS Crime and Punishment
Author: Cait Murphy
Print URL: http://www.fortune.com/indext.jhtml?channel=print_article.jhtml&doc_id=20182
0

PRISON ECONOMICS Crime and Punishment
Think that stuffing prisons with lawbreakers makes sense?
You clearly haven't run the numbers.
Here are some better ways to buy safety. FORTUNE
Monday, April 30, 2001
By Cait Murphy

America is an exceptional country. Compared with citizens of other nations, Americans tend to be more religious and more entrepreneurial. We send more people to university, have more millionaires, and enjoy more living space. We are the world leaders in obesity and Nobel Prizes.

And we send people to prison at a rate that is almost unheard of. Right now, almost two million Americans are either in prison (after conviction) or jail (waiting for trial). Of every 100,000 Americans, 481 are in prison. By comparison, the incarceration rate for Britain is 125 per 100,000, for Canada 129, and for Japan 40. Only Russia, at 685, is quicker to lock 'em up.

America was not always so exceptional in this regard. For the 50 years prior to 1975, the U.S. incarceration rate averaged about 110, right around rich-world norms. But then, in the 1970s, the great prison buildup began.

This was a bipartisan movement. Democrats like Jerry Brown of California and Ann Richards of Texas, for example, presided over prison population booms, as did Republican governors like John Ashcroft of Missouri and Michael Castle of Delaware. Bill Clinton worried in public about rising prison populations but signed legislation, much of it Republican sponsored, that kept the figures rising. No surprise, then, that spending on incarceration has ballooned from less than $7 billion in 1980 to about $45 billion today.

Just because the U.S. is different doesn't mean it is wrong. But prison is a serious matter in a way that, say, America's inexplicable affection for tractor pulls is not. Accordingly, a number of people--social scientists, prison professionals, even a few politicians--have begun to examine how and why the U.S. sends people to prison. What they are finding, in broad terms, is that there is a substantial minority of prisoners for whom incarceration is inappropriate--and much too expensive.

Who deserves to be imprisoned is, of course, partly a question of moral values. Prison keeps criminals off the streets; it punishes transgressors and deters people from committing crimes. But it is also a question of economic values. Everyone agrees that caging, say, John Wayne Gacy is worth whatever it costs, but that locking up a granny caught shoplifting makes no sense. The question to consider, then, is not "Does prison work?" but "When does prison work?" Economics can help draw the line.

On one level, it makes sense that America imprisons more people than its peers. The U.S. has historically been more violent than Europe, Japan, or Canada--in particular, our homicide rate is well above world norms--and the public wants violent people punished while freeing society from their presence. "We are a culture that believes change is possible, that human beings can be saved," says Francis Cullen of the University of Cincinnati, who specializes in public attitudes toward crime and rehabilitation. "The dividing line is violence. That's where people start becoming unwilling to take risks."

Fundamentally, America's prison population grew because people got sick of feeling scared and elected politicians who promised to deliver freedom from that fear. Moreover, it could be argued that America had some catching up to do: From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, the violent-crime rate rose sharply while the incarceration rate actually fell. Those trends probably helped spawn the "tough on crime" mentality that has reigned since. In the 1980s lawmakers delivered mandatory minimums--statutory requirements for harsh sentences for certain offenses, mostly gun- and drug-related. In the 1990s came "three-strikes" laws, designed to target repeat felons; truth-in-sentencing legislation; and the abolition of parole in many states. All those policies filled prisons, but not necessarily with the hardened thugs people thought they were putting away. Though there are now 400,000 more violent offenders behind bars than there were in 1980, the proportion of violent offenders in the prison population has actually fallen.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the percentage of violent offenders in state prisons has dropped from almost 60% in 1980 to 48% at the end of 1999; 21% were in prison in 1999 for property crimes, 21% for drug crimes, and the rest for public-order offenses, such as immigration, vice, or weapons violations. In the federal system, home to about 145,000 offenders, 58% are in for drug offenses (compared with 25% in 1980) and only 12% for violent crimes--down from 17% in 1990. Of the six crimes that account for the great majority of prisoners (murder, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, drugs, and sexual assault), drug offenders made up 45% of the growth from 1980 to 1996, figures Allan Beck of the BJS. Every year from 1990 through 1997, more people were sentenced to prison for drug offenses than for violent crimes.

(INCARCERATION RATE TABLE IN ARTICLE)

Because imprisonment went up in the 1990s and crime went down, you might conclude that locking up so many criminals bought us less crime. Up to a point that's true. Steven Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has cleverly provided an empirical foundation to prove the link between incarceration and crime reduction. In 1996 he studied what happened after the courts ordered 12 states to reduce overcrowding in their prison systems. By looking at how the states responded, either by releasing convicts or by building new prisons, he estimated that the effect of imprisoning one additional lawbreaker for a year was to prevent two fewer violent crimes and about a dozen fewer property crimes. The social costs of these crimes Levitt estimated at $53,900 (a figure derived from published estimates commonly used by social scientists). That's well above the $25,000 or so it costs to keep a prisoner behind bars for a year. But that doesn't prove that every prison cell built in America's 25-year construction spree was worth it. There could be ways to deliver just as much public safety for less money.

Take Canada. Like the U.S., Canada saw a sharp decline in violent crime in the 1990s--but while America's prison population almost doubled, Canada's rose only slightly. Or take next-door neighbors New Hampshire and Maine. In the first half of the 1990s, both saw similar declines in crime, but New Hampshire sharply increased the number of people it imprisoned, while Maine did not. Ditto for Kansas and Missouri; the latter built lots more new prisons, but the crime rates in the two states remained similar. In short, building prisons is not the only way to fight crime--and often not a cost-effective way to do so. In economic terms, this is because not every prison cell delivers equal returns, in terms of havoc unwreaked. As more and more people are imprisoned, the nastiness of the inmate population diminishes, so the crime control delivered per convict drops.

Consider the research of John DiIulio, the new director of President Bush's office of faith-based programs; Bert Useem, director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of New Mexico; and Anne Morrison Piehl, a professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 1999 the trio surveyed male inmates in Arizona, New Mexico, and New York about their criminal pasts. Then they multiplied each crime by its social cost, using National Institute of Justice numbers. (The cost of a rape, for example, is estimated at $98,327; of a burglary, $1,271.) They found that the social cost of the crimes committed by the median inmate in New York--that is, one whose crimes rank 50 on a scale of 100 in terms of seriousness--was $31,866; in New Mexico, $26,486; and in Arizona, $25,472. That's slightly more than the $25,000 cost of incarceration. For the 40th percentile, though, that figure dropped to less than $14,000 in all three states, and for the 20th, less than $7,000. At the 80th percentile, the monetary value of crime caused was almost $240,000 for New York and $163,311 for New Mexico--marking the perpetrator as the type of person for whom prison is clearly an appropriate solution.

The major dividing line between cost-effective and non-cost-effective incarceration?
That turns out to be fairly easy to figure. As a general rule, those who were imprisoned for property or violent crimes caused damage to society that cost more than their incarceration; those convicted solely of drug offenses did not. Drug dealing is not harmless, of course. Having an open-air crack market on the corner kills commerce and devastates neighborhoods. But the authors became convinced that the incarceration of so many drug-only offenders--28% in New York and 18% in Arizona--made no economic sense, because one drug seller sent to prison just created a job opening for another seller.

Consider the example of a Milwaukee street corner. In 1996 a Wisconsin task force noted that although the police had made 94 drug-related arrests in three months at the corner of 9th and Concordia, most of them leading to prison sentences, the drug market continued and public safety did not improve. And the price was substantial: It costs about $23 million to jail 94 people for a year.

In short, the authors found that for drug offenders, "the crime averted by incarceration is low," says Piehl. "We need to come up with sanctions that are graduated so that our only options are not nothing, or prison, or probation." What made that conclusion particularly noteworthy was that Piehl and DiIulio had argued for years in favor of more prisons. But by last year DiIulio, who is no one's idea of a bleeding-heart liberal, was writing an article for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal titled "Two Million Prisoners Is Enough." Are there better, less costly alternatives to prison for drug offenders?

Lisa Roberson offers one answer to that question.
She is a resident at the Phoenix Career Academy in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
which offers residents--many of them repeat offenders who
would otherwise be in prison--intensive drug treatment, vocational training, and after-care assistance. Roberson, 31, who started selling drugs at 17 and using them at 21, spent four years at Clinton State in New Jersey for selling drugs to an undercover cop. "All I did there is learn how to jail," she says.

When she was arrested again in 2000, the court gave
her a choice: prison or two years at Phoenix. This is no country club. Residents sleep ten to a room. Just about every minute of their day, starting with a 6 A.M. wake-up call, is plotted for them. If Roberson makes it through the program--and about 60% do--she will be drug-free and will have completed training as a drug counselor. Phoenix will help her find a job, an apartment, and child care for her 4-year-old son. Yes, Roberson may regress--of those who complete the course, about a third eventually go back to drugs--but clearly she has a much better shot at establishing a real life than if she had spent several more years "learning how to jail." The cost of her treatment, funded mostly by state and local governments: $17,000 to $18,000 a year.

Many successful drug-treatment programs are run out of prisons too--such as Amity Righturn, a program in a medium-security facility in San Diego that provides more than a year of assessment and counseling, plus further treatment after the inmates have left prison. A 1999 study found that three years after release, 27% of inmates who completed all three parts of the program had returned to prison; among those who got no treatment, 75% did.

On the subject of drug treatment, cost-benefit analysis has something to
say: It works. Numerous studies have concluded that well-run drug-treatment programs, particularly long-term residential ones with follow-up care, can pay for themselves just by reducing crime. Add in the value of incarceration avoided and taxes paid by the freed, and it adds up. Given this context, it's little short of tragic that drug-treatment programs in prison are not keeping pace with the need for them. In 1991 about a third of the inmates who reported drug use in the month prior to their arrest were getting treatment; by 1999 that was down to less than 15%, according to the Department of Justice, and much of that was of the nonintensive variety that has little long-term effect. Treatment is no panacea: Lots of people will drop out or go back to their bad habits.

The point is simply that treatment works often enough for the benefits to outweigh the costs--the exact opposite of the economics of prison for drug offenders.

What about other prison programs? Social scientists have applied cost-benefit analysis to those too. They have found that busy inmates--those given the chance to learn to read, to finish high school, to learn basic job skills--are significantly less likely than idle ones to return to prison. In Maryland, for example, a follow-up analysis published last October of 1,000 former inmates found a 19% lower recidivism rate for those who had taken education programs in prison than for those who hadn't. Extrapolating that 19% figure for the state as a whole suggests that Maryland could save $23.2 million a year in reduced incarceration--double what it spends on prison education programs.

More evidence that educational programs save money:
In 1999 analysts from the state of Washington surveyed
studies dating back to the mid-1970s on what works and what fails in reducing crime. The researchers concluded that for every dollar spent on basic adult education in prison, there was $1.71 in reduced crime; for every dollar on vocational education, $3.23. If you think such data have prompted more educational programs in prisons, think again. Congress passed "get tough" legislation in the 1990s that eliminated Pell grants to prisoners for college courses; it also reduced the requirements for basic and vocational education for prisoners. Many states have therefore taken the opportunity to cut back. Prisoners have a limited constituency, after all, and nixing programs for them is a politically painless way to cut budgets. Ironically, surveys show that the public strongly supports prisoner-rehabilitation programs. So do many who run the prisons.

Tommy Douberley, warden of Florida's Moore Haven Correctional Facility, is convinced that no-frills prisons are a mistake. "These people are going to be returned to society," he says. "We need to make some provision for them that when they get out they are better than when they went in."

Politicians, however, seem to have interpreted the public's clear desire for greater safety as a mandate for more and harsher prisons. And they are not the same thing at all. There are signs that America is beginning to recognize the limits of prison. Drug offenders are less likely to be sentenced to prison today than they were in 1992 (though still more than three times as likely as in 1980), in part because of the emergence of drug courts in many states, which force defendants into treatment on pain of prison. But past policies continue to exert expansionary pressure. From June 1999 to June 2000, the last 12-month period for which figures are available, the incarcerated population rose 3%. Though the smallest rise in decades, that still meant that 31,000 more Americans were behind bars. To house them means building a prison every ten days or so--an expensive hobby, considering that a medium-security facility for 1,000 inmates can cost $50 million.

Make no mistake: A large proportion of inmates thoroughly deserve to be exactly where they are. Incarceration is an effective way to isolate really awful people. But too many prisons stuffed with nonviolent, idle inmates is simply wasteful, of both people and money. We would do better to learn from several states that have lowered the crime rate without substantially raising prison populations--as New York did at least in part by aggressively funneling drug offenders into treatment, for example. Instead of being exceptional for its willingness to jail its citizens, the goal for America should be to become exceptional in the application of wisdom to its criminal population. At the moment, it is not even close.

Posted by lois at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

WVA: Prison Refomer Hopes for Statewide Success

Charleston Daily Mail, West VA
Prison reformer hopes for statewide success

by Kris Wise
Daily Mail Capitol reporter
Thursday February 23, 2006

WELLSBURG -- Proponents of alternative sentencing programs are looking to overhaul the way the state deals with lawbreakers, and in turn cut down on climbing regional jail costs and prison overcrowding.

Jim Lee, a veteran probation officer in Brooke County, has spent the better part of two decades promoting diversion programs such as community service, day reporting centers and drug rehabilitation for convicted criminals.

Now that the Legislature and counties across the state are struggling to deal with rising regional jail costs and exploding inmate populations, Lee's ideas might be starting to resonate.

"We've been in this madness, locking people up and giving them their just desserts, for 24 years," Lee said.

"I see the same people coming out (of jail) and then going right back in, and then I see their kids doing the same thing. We are never able to break the cycle."

Lee and other law enforcement experts still are trying to come to terms with statistics showing West Virginia has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation while maintaining one of the most rapidly rising incarceration rates.

The state for years incarcerated fewer persons in relation to its population than other states. It has moved up the scale in recent years but still falls significantly below the national average and ranked 40th among states in 2004, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics.

But the growing number of men and women in jail is putting serious strains on state and county resources.

A bill advancing through the Legislature would shift some of the costs of housing inmates in regional jails from the counties to the state. Many counties exhaust their annual jail budgets in the span of a few short months.

The measure would have the state pay 25 percent of those fees, which already have risen by $9 a day this year to $48.50 per inmate each day. If legislation passes, the state's share of regional jail costs will increase another $17 million.

The population at most jails has expanded rapidly in recent years, mostly because of overflow from state prisons that are too small and fall short of beds for more than 1,000 prisoners.

Lee is among those fighting to halt jail expansion and instead change the way people in the state are sentenced.

He's courting legislators, Gov. Joe Manchin and other state executives to buy into his philosophy that only the most violent offenders and sexual predators should be put behind bars.

He said he's seen criminals in his jurisdiction pay a more meaningful debt to society by staying in it.

"What is the crime rate going to look like in a few years if we don't change things?" Lee asked recently from his office outside Wheeling.

"We sentence them to jail, but then when we let them out, we've taken away all their rights. They can't own a gun, they can't get a job and they can't go to college because they don't have any way to make money or get benefits."

Lee hoped to thwart the failing trend in 2001 when he helped open the state's first day reporting center.

Offenders show up there each day for supervised work assignments instead of being incarcerated.

Since then, Lee has started the state's first drug and drunken driving court. He's working to open a new 10-bed residential center for parolees, and he's courting big employers such as Wal-Mart and Lowe's to start a supervised employment program for low-level offenders.

Lee also is pushing for consolidation of the state's 17 day reporting centers, which are modeled after his. At the centers in Kanawha and surrounding counties, offenders show up to do tasks ranging from mowing lawns to painting government buildings.

Lee's plan for the state would have a network of just 12 or so reporting centers that would be more cost efficient and would allow for expansion of alternative sentencing programs like those that have seen success in the Northern Panhandle.

One recent morning, Lee and his team of about a dozen drug counselors and probation officers met to review the cases of 26 offenders recently sentenced through another of those programs, a five-county drug and DUI court.

In Hancock, Brooke, Ohio, Marshall and Wetzel counties, people arrested on drug charges or driving under the influence can be referred to the alternative drug court by a police officer, a judge or even a family member.

The court -- including a judge, a probation officer and counselors -- decides on an approach that will work best to break the person's addiction, get him cleaned up and back functioning in society.

Offenders are sentenced to so much community service each week, supervised work through the day reporting center and a heavy dose of counseling and addiction courses.

Some are sentenced to periods of home confinement, some have to wear ankle bracelets that monitor their alcohol intake and all of them have to submit to frequent urine tests.

Offenders who don't follow the rules - those who show up with drugs or alcohol in their systems, stop attending addiction classes and counseling or become uncooperative -- are sanctioned. They can be fined or demoted in the program, and if things get bad enough they can be locked in jail for up to a week.

Those who don't improve can be expelled from the program and then face the jail sentence they would have in a regular court.

Last week, problems arose with several offenders who were either still experimenting with drugs and alcohol or neglecting their treatment plans.

One young man was fueling his alcohol addiction by drinking four bottles of Robitussin in between sessions each day.

Another offender occasionally would skip treatment when his college-age girlfriend would come home for the weekend.

One participant, who'd been repeatedly sanctioned, was given a final warning and spent five days in jail as punishment. If he continues acting out, he could be expelled from the program and his crime - fourth-offense burglary
-- could qualify him for five to 15 years in jail.

"Sometimes that's all it takes to get an attitude adjustment," probation officer George Winter said. "He didn't like being confined, didn't like the food and just when he found a guy to sit and talk to, he found out that guy was in there for sexually abusing a child. He was mortified at the thought of being locked up with child molesters."

Challenges in the program often reach beyond trying to straighten out lawbreakers who might be hesitant to give up old habits.

Providing transportation for criminals from their homes to day reporting centers sometimes several counties away can pose problems and often becomes an excuse offenders use to explain why they fail at rehab.

Securing housing sometimes trips up even offenders who want to succeed in the program. Often, addicts have overstepped the boundaries of friends and family members who have provided a roof over their heads. Sometimes offenders are living in crime-riddled housing projects or with other addicts, environments that are not conducive to recovery.

Sometimes the most daunting task for drug court and day reporting officials is just dealing with the scope of a person's drug problem.

Last week, Lee and his staff were handed the case of a young woman addicted to heroin, the substance of choice these days for most of the offenders that come through the Wheeling-area alternative sentencing programs. This particular woman was in the worst shape many of them had seen, doing up to 10 bags of heroin a day.

"These are addictions that just don't get better in jail," Lee said. "We lose them so quickly when they have been incarcerated. Unless we give them help, they aren't going to get it."

The goal of the drug court and the day reporting programs is for offenders to finish sober, with a stable job or the skills they need to get one and a secure place to live.

In the past five years, about 650 people have been assigned to day reporting programs for work and rehabilitation.

About 230 of them have been expelled from the program for either repeatedly failing drug tests or breaking program rules. Most of those have wound up back in jail.

The Northern Panhandle's mental health court, which helps rehabilitate offenders with serious mental illness, has 150 participants right now. The drug and drunken driving court oversees about 36 non-violent offenders in the throes of addiction or working on recovery.

The process of graduating from the drug court program is a long one. There are three phases of rehabilitation that take a total of a year and require weekly to bi-monthly court appearances, along with imposed community service and counseling. A person then must submit to continued drug tests and less frequent rehabilitation sessions and stay clean for an additional six months to "graduate" from the program.

"All the issues are based on giving someone the tools to be successful, and then allowing them to be successful," Lee said. "They have more eyes on them than they would being in jail, but the goal is to give them self worth. That's ultimately what will lead to change."

http://www.dailymail.com/news/News/2006022343/

Contact writer Kris Wise at 348-1244.

Posted by lois at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

Aid to Students with Drug Convictions Restored

Aid To Students With Drug Convictions Restored

February 13, 2006

Faces & Voices of Recovery

www.facesandvoicesofrecovery.org

Washington, DC - Thousands of students with drug convictions, many of whom are in recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs, will be eligible for federal financial aid to students. A provision in the budget bill signed into law by President Bush will help people with drug convictions regain eligibility for federal student financial aid, which has been denied since 1998.

"We applaud this important first step in making educational financial aid available to all Americans. It will increase opportunities for thousands of people, many of whom are in recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs," said Merlyn Karst, chair of Faces & Voices of Recovery. "Most Americans supported changing the law and viewed the ban on student aid as discriminatory against people who want a chance to make a positive change in their lives."

Under the new law, people can receive aid unless they are convicted of a drug felony or misdemeanor while in school.

Students convicted while receiving federal aid will remain ineligible - for one year for a first possession offense, two years for a second and indefinitely for a third, with harsher penalties for selling. Repeal of the ban on federal financial aid to students with drug convictions is one element of Faces & Voices of Recovery's Right to Addiction Recovery platform.

Faces & Voices of Recovery is releasing a flyer, "Exercise Your Rights." It will be distributed through recovery community organizations around the country. It informs likely students of their restored right to federal financial aid to attend community college, technical school and college. Faces & Voices of Recovery is working to mobilize, organize and rally the families, friends and allies of the millions of Americans in recovery from addiction in a campaign to: end discrimination; broaden social understanding; and achieve a just response to addiction as

a public health crisis. For more information, please visit: www.facesandvoicesofrecovery.org
.

From the Faces and Voices website:

How the New Law Will Work

The new law goes into effect on July 1, 2006. People will be able to receive aid unless they are convicted of a drug felony or misdemeanor while in school. Students convicted while receiving federal aid will remain ineligible - for one year for a first possession offense, two years for a second and indefinitely for a third, with harsher penalties for sales.

People can participate in treatment programs in order to qualify for their aid to be restored. However accessing treatment services can be extremely difficult. The federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Institute of Medicine have estimated that only 20% of the individuals who need drug and alcohol treatment in any given year receive care.

The US Department of Education, which oversees the new law, will be deciding how it will be implemented over the next few months. In the meantime, if you have a prior drug conviction or know of someone who has one and is thinking about going back to school, talk with a financial aid counselor at the school you would like to attend about filling out the FAFSA financial aid form.

Faces & Voices will continue to work for full repeal. Under the law, students convicted while receiving federal aid will still lose their eligibility - for one year for a first possession offense, two years for a second and indefinitely for a third, with harsher penalties for selling. We will also continue to work to remove the drug conviction question from the financial aid form.

http://www.jointogether.org/news/yourturn/announcements/2006/aid-to-students-with-drug... 2/15/2006

Join Together publishes selected press releases and other announcements relevant to alcohol and drug policy, prevention and treatment.

Posted by lois at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

"Mixed Signals" new counter military recuritment comic book from Sabrina Jones

"Mixed Signals" - a counter-recruitment tool in comicbook form - is now available for use in activism,outreach, counseling, education, startingconversations and saving lives.

For Sample Copies: Please email me your address and
how you'll use them.

16 pages, black & white.
Suggested donation: $2 per copy.
Mailing address: Sabrina Jones
811 Cortelyou Rd #6O, Brooklyn NY 11218

If you are a no-budget group - we can send you some free copies, otherwise, please contribute what you canto keep this thing rolling.
We're hoping to raise funds to print it with color covers (any leads?) but for now, let's get the messageout!
If you have access to a good quality copier, you can
order one copy, remove the staples, and make your own multiples.

Content:
Mixed Signals contains specific information on the
enlistment contract, benefits and obligations. It
proposes alternative sources of college money and job
training, and non-violent forms of community service.
Stories about fictional characters alternate with
illustrated fact-sheets about military life and
non-military opportunities. It questions today's
militaristic climate by raising the issue of
conscientious objection, through a fictional
character, then two recent cases and a brief history.
The comic offers useful, concrete, legal facts, as
well as prompting deeper reflection on the role of
militarism in our lives and society. Mixed Signals
takes vital information from flyers and web sites, and
puts it in an appealing, easy-to-pass-along format, to
catch the eyes of our most vulerable young citizens.

Drop in any time: www.sabrinaland.com
or check me out on these sites:
NEWEST!: http://www.nextleftnotes.net/ www.directoryofillustration.com/SabrinaJones
www.wobblyshow.org/gallery1.php

Posted by lois at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2006

LA Times Editorial: Politicizing Prisons

EDITORIAL
Politicizing prisons
February 23, 2006

SENDING 1,300 INMATES IN L.A. County jails back to state prisons, as the Board of Supervisors proposed Tuesday, is sort of like pitching them from one burning building to another. As bad as the overcrowding, understaffing and inmate violence are in the county jails, the dysfunctional state prison system is hardly an improvement. But the move does at least help focus the political spotlight where it belongs: on a state bureaucracy that is a big contributor to the county's corrections nightmare.

State prisons are already overflowing, with twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold, so the state may fight the county's move. The county has a $27-million contract to hold state prisoners who are either parole violators or felons with less than a year left on their sentences; supervisors voted Tuesday to cancel it as a way of improving supervision of the county's burgeoning inmate population.

There are on average about 21,000 inmates a day in L.A. County jails, and fewer than 3,000 deputies and civilian employees to guard them - a frighteningly unbalanced ratio. Part of the reason for the huge and growing jail population is a series of get-tough-on-crime laws passed since the 1980s. But another is the gross inadequacy of rehabilitation programs at state prisons, including wrongheaded approaches to parole violators, youth offenders and women.

California has the second-highest recidivism rate in the United States. Only 21% of the state's parolees successfully complete their term of supervision, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The returnees have to be processed at county jails, so both systems pay the price.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed many sensible reforms to reduce recidivism and lower the prison population, only to be thwarted at every turn by the politically powerful state prison guards union - which opposes anything that could jeopardize jobs for its members.

In 2004, pressure from the union was a factor in the state's decision to close 300 vocational education programs in the prisons - programs that gave inmates badly needed job skills. Last year, in a move also backed by the guards, the state ended a program that sent nonviolent parole violators to community-based rehabilitation centers or to home detention.

Schwarzenegger hasn't given up trying, partially because he's bound by court orders and settlement agreements to improve prison conditions. He recently released plans to better house and rehabilitate youth offenders, whose experience with the state correctional system too often helps mold them into career criminals, and to move nonviolent female inmates to private community centers. Both proposals are in for a battle as the prison guards' political lackeys in both parties stand up against them.

Enough. Schwarzenegger needs to find the backbone to support these reforms with what political capital he has left. And Californians can help by letting their representatives in Sacramento know that improving conditions in the state's prisons is a priority.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-jails23feb23,0,3968114.stor
y?coll=la-news-comment-editorials

Posted by lois at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)

NY State Takes Over 9 Substance Abuse Centers

New York Times

State Takes Over 9 Substance Abuse Centers

By JULIA C. MEAD
Published: February 24, 2006

The receivership does not involve about 15 group homes for recovering addicts, known as sober homes, that are operated by Crossings.

An assistant state attorney general, Denis J. McElligott, said the agency would decide whether Frank Buonanotte, the Crossings owner, would have any access to the clinics or their records.

On Feb. 14, the agency revoked the operating licenses of all nine clinics and sought a court-ordered receivership, actions the company then challenged in court.

Posted by lois at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2006

Women and Girls in the Criminal Justice System

http://www.ncjrs.org/spotlight/wgcjs/Summary.html
Women and Girls in the Criminal Justice System
Source: National Criminal Justice Reference Service
"Female criminal behavior has been commonly perceived as a less serious problem than male criminal behavior. Historically, women have been more likely to commit minor offenses and have made up only a small proportion of the offender population. Although women remain a relatively small number of all prisoners, these facts have concealed a trend in the rising percentage of female offenders, their participation in violent crime, and have inhibited the development of gender-specific programs to address the issue."

Posted by lois at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

Falling Through the Cracks: Loss of State-Based Financial Aid

Falling Through the Cracks: Loss of State-Based Financial Aid Eligibility for Students Affected by the Federal Higher Education Act Drug Provision
Source: Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform (CHEAR)
"The drug provision of the Higher Education Act expressly denies federal aid to persons convicted of state or federal drug offenses for specified periods of time.4 However, the law offers no prescribed method by which states should determine eligibility for state financial aid. This has led to inconsistency and confusion among state financial aid offices, leaving many qualified applicants without the resources they need to go to college, and many financial aid officers believing, incorrectly, that they must deny aid to students who have been convicted of drug offenses simply because the federal government has done so. This report details the findings of research conducted on how the 50 states and the District of Columbia determine eligibility for state-based financial aid for persons who have reported having drug convictions on Question 31 of the Free Application for Student Financial Aid (FAFSA). The report also makes recommendations for how states can clarify the situation so that students losing federal aid because of drug convictions can still receive state aid."

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

Debt to Society Is Least of Costs for People Who Have Been Incarcerated

February 23, 2006
Debt to Society Is Least of Costs for Ex-Convicts
By ADAM LIPTAK, NY Times. Page 1
It is increasingly expensive to be a criminal.

Beverly Dubois, a 49-year-old former park ranger in Washington State, spent nine months in jail for growing and selling marijuana. She still owes the state almost $1,900 for court costs and various fees. Until she pays up, the state has taken away her right to vote.

Wilbert Rideau, 64, a convicted killer, spent 44 years in Louisiana prisons. Not long after he was released last year, he filed for bankruptcy in an effort to avoid the state's attempts to collect $127,000 in court costs.

Almost every encounter with the criminal justice system these days can give rise to a fee. There are application fees and co-payments for public defenders. Sentences include court costs, restitution and contributions to various funds. In Washington State, people convicted of certain crimes are also charged $100 so their DNA can be put in a database.

Private probation companies charge $30 to $40 a month for supervision. Halfway houses charge for staying in them. People sentenced to community service are required to buy $15 insurance policies for every week they work. Criminals on probation and parole wear global positioning devices that monitor their whereabouts — for a charge of as much as $16 a day.

The sums raised by these ever-mounting fees are intended to help offset some of the enormous costs of operating the criminal justice system. But even relatively small fees — $40 per session, say, for a court-ordered anger management class or $15 for a drug test — can have devastating consequences for people who emerge from prison with no money, credit or prospects, and who live in fear of being sent back for failing to pay.

"The difference between 30 years ago and today," said George H. Kendall, a lawyer with Holland & Knight in New York who represents Mr. Rideau, "is that people who everyone agrees are poor are leaving the courthouse significantly poorer."

Prosecutors and political leaders often say it is only fair that criminals rather than taxpayers pay for what it costs to protect the public.

But Judge James R. Thurman of the Magistrate Court in Lee County, Ga., said his state's many fees, known there as add-ons, were a backdoor way to make poor people pay for the free lawyers guaranteed to them by the United States Supreme Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963.

"You're asking the people who can't afford to hire an attorney to pay anyway by making them pay through add-on fees," Judge Thurman said.

Indeed, according to the American Bar Association, at least 15 states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, charge application fees to people seeking court-appointed lawyers. Washington has one of the longest lists of fees assessed to criminals, and it is diligent in trying to collect them. Ms. Dubois, disabled after a car accident, makes payments of $10 a month toward what was once a $1,610 debt — $1,000 for a county "drug enforcement fund," a $500 "victim assessment fee" and $110 in court costs.

"I still don't know who the victim was," she said.

Her efforts notwithstanding, her debt is growing because of the 12 percent interest assessed annually by the State of Washington. As of September, it stood at $1,895.69.

"I will never have it paid off in my lifetime," Ms. Dubois said.

Washington also uses an unusual tool: it denies people who have not paid such debts the right to vote.

"You have to complete all the terms of your sentence" to regain the right to vote, explained Jeffrey T. Even, a lawyer for the state. "If the monthly payment is low enough and if the debt is high enough, you can actually be going backwards."

Aaron H. Caplan, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ms. Dubois challenging her disenfranchisement, said that tens of thousands of people were affected and that their number would grow. "Over the last 20 to 25 years, the Legislature has been making it more and more expensive to purchase back the right to vote," Mr. Caplan said.

National figures concerning fees assessed to criminals are not available, but Washington is something of a case study. The state sends out some 79,000 bills every month, and it collected about $25 million last year. But these collection efforts are barely making a dent in the $1.2 billion owed by former offenders, much of it for the cost of prison room and board, which can reach $50 a day. The budget of the State Department of Corrections for the two-year period ending in 2007 is more than $1.4 billion.

Fees for room and board are levied in many states, and they can quickly mount to levels that are essentially uncollectible, with states not bothering, except in special cases. Even other types of fees can be unwieldy.

Mr. Rideau, for instance, has been billed $127,000 for the cost of his fourth and final trial last year.

Louisiana wants him to pay for the costs of housing, feeding and transporting his jury from across the state. The prosecution has submitted bills from more than two dozen establishments, including the Seafood Palace ($435.68), Ruby Tuesday ($312.66) and Best Suites ($16,874.33).

His trial was expensive partly because Mr. Rideau was so famous in Lake Charles, La., where he killed a bank teller in 1961. He was convicted of murder three times, in 1961, 1964 and 1970, but appeals courts threw out the verdicts, citing misconduct by the government.

A fourth jury last year rejected the murder charge and found Mr. Rideau guilty of manslaughter, which had a maximum sentence of 21 years, meaning his sentence was complete. Mr. Rideau, who was also a prison journalist during his four decades behind bars, was freed that same day.

But Louisiana was not done with Mr. Rideau. David A. Ritchie, the judge in the case, ruled that Mr. Rideau was responsible for all of the charges billed by the prosecution.

"Mr. Rideau is the one that committed this crime that led to this trial, then led to all these costs," Judge Ritchie said at a hearing in August. "That's why people are charged court costs, because it's their actions."

Mr. Rideau has filed for bankruptcy, even though it is not clear that bankruptcy can erase debts of this kind. He has also appealed the decision, saying he is puzzled by the state's efforts.

"Society's interest is in an ex-con becoming solvent and in becoming a contributing member of society," Mr. Rideau said. "They created this court-costs sham to sabotage my efforts to create a life."

John F. Derosier, the district attorney in the case, defended the charges in court papers opposing Mr. Rideau's appeal last month. "He owes a debt to society which must be paid," Mr. Derosier wrote.

The assessment of court costs is common in civil cases. Many state laws allow or require the costs to be imposed in criminal cases, too, though rarely for an amount even approaching that sought from Mr. Rideau. Vanita Gupta, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which also represents Mr. Rideau, said his case might have unintended consequences.

"The prospect of having to pay for court costs is going to dissuade some defendants from going to trial," Ms. Gupta said. Even an innocent defendant, she said, may prefer a guilty plea to a trial if the downside includes not only a longer sentence but also a crushing debt.

Georgia is also aggressive in collecting fees, and it has enlisted private probation companies to help. The companies charge a monthly fee of $30 or $40 for their services. That fee can rival the fine.

"You're basically charging an interest fee that would make a finance company blush," said Stephen B. Bright, the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

In 2003, for instance, Sabrina Byrd, a 27-year-old single mother, was ordered to pay $852 for failing to leash and vaccinate her dog in College Park, Ga. Too poor to pay, she was placed on probation while she made 10 monthly installments, along with a monthly fee to a probation company of $39 — about half of the fine. When she fell behind and failed to contact the company, a judge revoked her probation and sentenced her to 25 days in jail.

Though the Supreme Court has said that defendants may not be jailed for failing to pay a fine when they have no money, they can be jailed for failing to report to their probation officer. Many poor people do not appreciate that distinction and fail to report when they have no money.

Judge Thurman, who was not involved in Ms. Byrd's case, said he took pains to tell people to report no matter what. Otherwise, "I have no alternative but to issue a warrant for your arrest," he tells defendants.

But some probation companies, according to court records, effectively use the threat of arrest as a collection tool.

John Cole Vodicka, the director of Georgia's Prison and Jail Project, questioned the current system.

"A $500 fine going into probation translates into $1,500 coming out of probation," he said. "No one's really benefiting, except maybe private companies."

New technologies can also add fees. Isecuretrac, an Omaha company that sells global positioning monitors to local governments to track sex offenders and others, promotes a system that encourages offenders to pay, often on a sliding scale based on financial resources. Thomas E. Wharton Jr., the company's chief executive, said about 70 percent of county agencies that use electronic monitoring charge the offenders for them.

"I don't think the intent really is to gouge offenders," Mr. Wharton said, "because they have a difficult enough time to get back into their communities and to support themselves."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/national/23fees.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

February 21, 2006

CT: Teen Crimes, Adult Prisons

Teen Crimes, Adult Prisons
Parents, Advocates Seek Change For Offenders Under 18

By COLIN POITRAS
Courant Staff Writer

February 21 2006

Johnna Paradis fought hard to hold it together the day she picked up her 16-year-old son from the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire.

He was so pale and gaunt, "he looked like someone from a POW camp," Paradis said. "It was horrible."

Paradis said her son, Christopher Wasicki, who suffers from depression and bipolar disorder, didn't get critical medication and thought about killing himself often during his four weeks of hard time at Manson, a high-security adult prison where he was confined to a cell for more than 21 hours a day for the first two weeks.

Teen
Paradis is one of a team of parents, advocates and state legislators making a push this session to keep Connecticut's teenagers under the age of 18 out of the adult criminal justice system. Connecticut is one of only three states - New York and North Carolina are the others - that automatically try and incarcerate teenagers 16 and older as adults, no matter how minor the offense. The majority of the country considers 18 the age of adulthood, although children under 18 can be sentenced to adult prison for certain crimes.

Members of "Raise the Age CT" are staging a press conference, rally and information session this morning in the Legislative Office Building to get attention for their cause. Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, has already introduced legislation this session calling for a change.

"Troubled children need treatment, not jail, to turn their lives around," said Paradis, a single mother from Stamford. "My son needed help and instead he was sent to jail with no programs to help him. It is time to change this law and give our children a second chance."

Talk of changing the age has been circulating in the legislature for more than a decade. The primary obstacle has been the measure's overwhelming cost. Judicial officials last year estimated bringing 16- and 17-year-olds under the auspices of the juvenile court system would create a 50 percent increase in caseloads and cost the state up to $90 million to expand staff, facilities and services appropriately.

Walker and other advocates believe the cost was grossly overestimated, failing to take into account long-range savings that would come with reduced recidivism and the possibility that existing staff in the adult system could be transferred to help ease the burden on juvenile courts. Walker's bill calls for increasing the age gradually over two years to help develop more community diversion programs for older youths and decrease the immediate impact on the state budget.

In what many considered a first-step victory last year, the legislature approved an expansion of the state's youthful offender statutes so 16- and 17-year-olds are automatically considered youthful offenders when they appear in adult court. The move, which is expected to affect about 900 teens a year, limits the maximum incarceration for such defendants to four years, provides for their court hearings to be closed to the public and increases their chances for special probation, counseling and other alternatives to incarceration.

This year, supporters are hoping to gain broader support for their bill in light of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that prohibits the execution of people for crimes they committed before the age of 18. The court's opinion relied in part on recent medical research that appears to show that adolescent brains aren't mature enough to fully understand the consequences of their actions until at least the age of 18.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, noted "a lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility are found in youths more often than in adults and are more understandable among the young. ... These differences render suspect any conclusion that a juvenile falls among the worst offenders. ... The age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood."

The suicide of 17-year-old David Burgos in Manson in July also has brought attention to the issue. Burgos, sent to Manson for violating his probation after allegedly being caught stealing, had a history of mental illness and struggled with bipolar and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, his family said.

Burgos had been at Manson for about four months when he hanged himself with a bed sheet.

"Connecticut's policy of locking up children with adults has failed our youth and our communities," said Abby Anderson, a senior policy associate for the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance in Bridgeport. "It is a waste of money, does not reduce crime and destroys lives."

More than 80 percent of the children and youths tried as adults in Connecticut are arrested for nonviolent property offenses such as larceny or minor crimes such as drug possession, fighting and disorderly conduct, according to Alliance statistics. Christopher Wasicki was sent to Manson in May 2004 as a result of an alleged fistfight with another youth in his neighborhood. His family raised money to cover his $10,000 bail and freed him after four weeks. He remains on probation for that charge.

Each year in Connecticut, approximately 10,000 youths age 16 and 17 are automatically tried as adults, according to the Alliance. Connecticut continues to prosecute them as adults despite research showing that youths held in adult jails and prisons are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted and eight times more likely to commit suicide than youths held in juvenile facilities.

Studies show that between 50 and 60 percent of children admitted to detention in Connecticut have some form of mental illness or disability in need of treatment. At the time Burgos was incarcerated, 18 of the 644 youths at Manson were victims of abuse and neglect committed to the Department of Children and Families and considered wards of the state. An additional 112 boys came from families with active abuse and neglect cases, DCF spokesman Gary Kleeblatt said.

While state correction officials have improved schooling and other services for younger inmates at Manson in the past year, advocates say that when incarcerated with older adults, youths under 18 still do not receive the quality of support, counseling and other services tailored for them in the juvenile court system.

The Manson Youth Institution is the only high-security state prison for serious criminal offenders age 14 to 21. Most youths under the age of 16 are processed in the Superior Courts for Juvenile Matters when they get arrested and many are sent to the Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown or other programs if a judge decides their case warrants confinement. But some youths as young as 14 or 15 have wound up in the adult criminal system due to a 1995 law which automatically transfers serious juvenile felony cases such as murder, armed robbery or rape to adult court. The proposed legislation to raise the juvenile court age to 18 would not change that provision, supporters say.

From 1935 to 1971, Connecticut treated children younger than 18 as juveniles. But like many states, Connecticut responded to a surge in youth and gang violence in the mid-1990s by adopting stronger laws that promoted "adult time for adult crime."

------------------------------------------
Children In Adult Prisons
An effort is underway to persuade lawmakers to raise the juvenile age in Connecticut from 16 to 18 to reduce the number of children under 18 in adult prisons. Children as young as 14 may be sentenced to adult prison for some crimes. This is a look at the prison population for those under age 18. Boys age 14-21 are housed at the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire, and girls as young as 16 are housed at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic. These figures represent a one-day snapshot from Oct. 1, 2005:

• • •
Unsentenced boys 14-15: 17
Sentenced boys 14-15: 6
(All were 15)
• • •
Unsentenced boys 16-17: 198
Sentenced boys 16-17: 129

• • •

Unsentenced girls 16-17: 13
Sentenced girls 16-17: 6
\
• • •

Source: The Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, a Bridgeport-based, nonprofit advocacy group.

Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-juvage0221.artfeb21,0,2929623.story?coll=hc-headlines-local

Posted by lois at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2006

Hawaiian Women Incarcerated in KY--double punishment

The Louisville Courier-Journal
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Doing time a long way from home
For Hawaiians in Kentucky, it's 'double punishment'
By Andrew Wolfson, awolfson@courier-journal.com
WHEELWRIGHT, Ky. -- It harkens back to centuries past, when felons were banished to penal colonies on distant continents.
One hundred and nineteen Hawaiians -- all women -- are locked behind razor-wire fences at an isolated private prison in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, 4,500 miles from their homes and families.

Most will never get a visitor, no matter how long they're incarcerated.
Emerald Nakamura, 26, of Honolulu, who is serving five years for forging checks, sees her 20-month old son Ikaika once a month -- on a video screen. She said he doesn't recognize her.
"It is very sad," she said. "I think about him all the time."
The Hawaiians are housed at the Otter Creek Correctional Center because of severe prison crowding in their native state, and because incarcerating inmates on the mainland saves Hawaii money.
Even with the price of flying inmates across the Pacific and back, it's still cheaper to house them in the continental United States. It costs $56 per day to house each inmate off the islands, compared with $110 in heavily unionized Hawaii, where a gallon of milk is $6.
Ten years after Hawaii started exporting prisoners, nearly half its 3,858 inmates are lodged in the continental United States -- in rural Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky, all in prisons owned by Corrections Corporation of America.
The Nashville-based company says it has saved the state $158 million since 1998.
But prisoner-rights advocates in Hawaii say it is a false economy.
"The cost per bed may be cheaper, but not when you include the cost of broken families," said Kat Brady, coordinator for the Community Alliance on Prisons in Honolulu. "It is hard for a woman to come home after three or five or 10 years and say, 'I'm your mom,' when her child has never been able to visit her."
The Hawaii Department of Public Safety doesn't dispute that sending inmates out of state is hard on them, said Shari Kimoto, who runs its mainland branch. But she said the agency has no choice because the people of Hawaii don't want prisons built in their back yards, and the remaining open areas that can still be developed are prized for resorts.
Kimoto acknowledges that separation is particularly hard on women, who traditionally have been the primary caregivers in their families. But that is where her sympathy ends.
"I don't think they had their children or families on their mind when they did their crimes or did their drugs," she said.
The Hawaiians have been held at Otter Creek since September, when CCA reopened it as a women's prison; 399 Kentucky women also are held in the facility, which once housed about 600 men from Indiana and also was the scene of a nine-hour riot in July 2001.
But the Hawaiians went unnoticed outside of Wheelwright, a former coal camp, until Sarah Ah Mau, 43, died mysteriously Dec. 31 after complaining for a month of a stomachache. The cause of her death is still under investigation.
Hawaiian news organizations reported that she'd told family members before her death that her pleas for medical attention went ignored. CCA said in a statement that her care was appropriate.
A Courier-Journal reporter was allowed to interview 10 of the Hawaiians but barred from asking any questions about Ah Mau's death; Warden Joyce Arnold also insisted that the prison's security director monitor the interviews.
Adjusting to Kentucky
About half the women are serving time for using and selling crystal methamphetamine -- known as ice -- which swept through the islands in the 1990s.
The women interviewed said they deserved to be punished but questioned the fairness of being sent so far from home.
"It is like a double punishment," said Deenie Tanele, 33, who has been locked up since 1999 for smoking and selling ice and will serve out her term until 2009.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled in a case from Hawaii in 1983 that an inmate has no "justifiable expectation that he will be incarcerated in any particular state."
Most states, including Kentucky, ship only a few inmates to other states, usually for security reasons. (Kentucky has 19 housed elsewhere; Indiana has none, according to corrections departments in both states.)
Wisconsin, which six years ago had more than 5,000 prisoners out of state, leading the nation in that category, brought the last of them home last year, said John Dipko, a spokesman for the state corrections department.
The state acted in part so its prisoners would have more family support and be less likely to commit more crimes, Dipko said.
Otter Creek is the fourth stop for many of the Hawaiian women. They were removed from prisons in Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado after other private companies allegedly violated contracts by refusing to provide promised vocational training and drug treatment.
In Colorado, two of the inmates allegedly were sexually assaulted, and inmates had to teach their own vocational classes.
The women say their hardest adjustment in Kentucky has been to the weather. The average February temperature in Wheelwright is 35 degrees, compared with 73 in Honolulu.
"The cold is unbelievable," said Iwalani Carroll-Vierra, 27, who is also serving time for selling ice and noted that she must sleep fully dressed because she is allergic to her blankets.
The Hawaiians also have had to allow for subtle but significant cultural differences, said Catherine Samuel, 65, who is serving 20 years to life for murder.
For example, guards have confused a hand symbol that signifies good luck in Hawaii with a gang sign, she said. Hawaiians also are more likely to touch one another and hold hands, which Samuel said has been confused with prohibited lesbian advances.
Arnold, the warden, said officials are aware of the differences, which she said came into play earlier this month when an inmate innocently put her hand on an officer's shoulder. Arnold said the inmate nonetheless was placed in segregation under the prison's zero-tolerance policy for touching employees. Kimoto said Hawaiian prisons have the same policy.
As a concession to the Hawaiian diet, prisoners are served rice at least once a day and fresh fruit at least once a week. They also may practice hula and other native dances for one hour twice a week, and they will be allowed to celebrate King Kamehameha Day each June 11, to honor the monarch who unified the Hawaiian Islands.
But Arnold acknowledged that it is hard for the Hawaiians to watch as Kentucky inmates get visited weekly by their families and friends, while nobody comes to see them.
A few have received visits from friends from the mainland, Arnold said, but most say traveling from the islands is so expensive that they're not expecting any visits from home.
Even collect phone calls, at $9.75 for 15 minutes, are expensive enough that some have had to stop calling their families.
Norma Tanele, mother of Deenie, said in a phone interview from Waipahu, near Honolulu, that her phone has been blocked from receiving calls from the prison for two years because she's been unable to pay her bill.
Tanele, 62, said that she scraped together money to visit her daughter once, when she was imprisoned in Colorado, but that she can't afford to fly to Kentucky.
Although Hawaiian churches pay for video teleconferences, Deenie Tanele said they became too emotional for her daughter, Mahini, 9, who is being raised by her grandparents. "If I cry, then she cries, and that's no good," Deenie Tanele said.
Inmates such as Patsy Kahaunaele, 36, who is serving 10 years for selling and using ice, said she worries most that her family members will die and she won't be able to bury them.
The state of Hawaii won't pay to fly inmates home for funerals. They are allowed to listen on the phone, and the state will send them a videotape, Kimoto said.
'Life has been taken away'
Several prisoners praised an intensive drug-treatment program offered at Otter Creek, and said they have more freedom there than at Hawaii's single, crowded women's prison on the island of Oahu.

But Samuel said the private prison has been slow to provide them with prescription medicines they got for years at other facilities.
Lorraine Robinson, the director of a Honolulu-based program that helps female inmates re-enter civilian life -- Ka Hale Ho'ala Hou No Na Wahine (Home of Reawakening for Women) -- said that being so far from home makes it hard for the women at Otter Creek to hold out hope.
"They are on shaky ground to begin with," she said of the many who are addicted to drugs, depressed and lacking resiliency, "and this makes it worse."
Deborah Mainnaaupo, 54, who is serving 20 years for attempted assault, said the Hawaiian women feel like "we are all on death row. Life has been taken away from us. It is too cold. They should leave us in Hawaii, where we belong."
Looking out the barred windows of the visiting room to the barbed wire, cliffs and mountains outside, Kahaunaele laughed at the security that keeps the Hawaiians locked inside.
"I don't think it would be possible for us to escape," she said. "But even if we could, where would we go?"

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060219/NEWS01/602190430/-1/rss

Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 582-7189.

Posted by lois at 03:44 PM | Comments (0)

Forget D.C. The Battle is in the States

IN THESE TIMES

This article is permanently archived at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2509/

Forget D.C. the Battle is in the States
By Nathan Newman and David Sirota February 20, 2006

Speaking to a packed room of 2,000 state legislators and business lobbyists gathered in Grapevine, Texas, last fall, George W. Bush thanked the crowd for its work on behalf of the conservative agenda. He wasn't talking about work they'd done on Capitol Hill, but about their collaboration to push the corporate agenda forward in statehouses across the country. The meeting was the 32nd annual gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership association for conservative lawmakers. As its chairman, Georgia State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, said of the president's speech: "It was like the governor of a state talking to his legislative leaders."

This is the critical point: The highest echelons of the conservative movement and corporate America treat state legislators not as members of 50 different institutions, but as a single set of leaders who can be mobilized on a national basis.

Recognizing this reality, the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) was formed in fall 2005 to create a counterforce to the right in statehouses across the country. Supported by groups like MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, along with unions like SEIU, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO and the Steelworkers, PLAN is working with state legislators across the country to move both a united agenda and strategic plan to take on ALEC and its allies throughout the country.

The conservative march through the states
The need to challenge the right-wing movement in the states is clear. ALEC claims more than 2,400 state lawmakers as members--roughly one-third of all state legislators--and has become one of the critical fulcrums of conservative power in the United States. Backed by many of the largest corporations in the country--including Exxon Mobil, Coors Brewing, Pfizer and Phillip Morris--ALEC is networked into conservative think tanks and allied political operations such as the Heartland Institute and the corporate-backed American Tort Reform Association. At the center of this network, ALEC helps draft and promote legislation that has crippled social service budgets, deregulated industries, slashed medical care for the poor, and undermined consumer and worker protections in state after state.

In 2004 alone, 1,108 ALEC model bills were introduced and 178 were enacted into law, a legislative assault that ALEC and its conservative allies have been repeating year after year. Given the prominence of its legislative supporters--34 state speakers of the house, 25 state senate presidents, 31 state senate leaders and 33 state house leaders are ALEC members--this success is hardly surprising.

Sadly, in the face of this daunting right-wing machine, many progressive leaders and activists remain fixated on Capitol Hill and the White House, leaving state legislators, local political organizations and unions to battle ALEC all alone. The problem is compounded by a national media that barely covers these state struggles. Even the most sophisticated national political commentators typically see fights for control of state legislatures as important only insofar as they impact redistricting of federal congressional races. Except for the occasional media spasm around a particularly virulent state legislative proposal that hands out pork to a corporation or restricts civil rights, the overall march of conservative legislation in the statehouses gets relatively little attention from progressive activists fixated on "serious" politics at the federal level.

Yet the battle for our states is incredibly serious. The conservative strategy is to use the state political arena to leverage control of national policy, and unless progressives get focused and view the battle for the states as crucial to America's political future, no amount of change at the federal level will allow us to take our country back.

Why state policy matters
Most progressives fail to realize that state governments collectively have as much--and in some cases, more--power over the issues they care about as the federal government. State and local revenues are about equal to federal tax revenue, and in an era of "flexibility" and "waivers," federal money is increasingly handed over to the states with few strings attached. In explaining conservatives' focus on state legislation, ALEC's Medicaid specialist James Frogue observed, "Innovations and reforms in Medicaid will come from the states. They will not come from D.C."

Most federal civil rights, consumer and employment laws only modify the baseline of rights established by state governments. In fact, only a tiny minority of legal struggles are pursued under federal statutes. Instead, state courts handle roughly 17 million civil cases every year, including contract, tort and real property disputes, the outcome of which turn overwhelmingly on state, not federal, law. Through state law and liability rules, the states regulate trillions of dollars of commerce.

Similarly, while there were 170,535 federal prisoners in 2004, that number is dwarfed by the 1.9 million prisoners in state and local prisons and jails. The criminal sentencing decisions that have decimated a generation of young people in minority communities were made in statehouses, not on Capitol Hill. And one of the least-understood areas of increasing state power is that wielded by public pension funds, which now control $2.7 trillion in financial assets and can shape financial markets with their investment decisions--a fact that the right is all too aware of as they launch campaigns to privatize those pensions.

With all this power in the hands of the states, conservatives recognize that with a coordinated strategy, a movement can govern the nation from the statehouses. States have been vulnerable to this right-wing takeover because most state legislatures are made up of poorly paid, part-time lawmakers with few--if any--staff to research or evaluate the laws they are asked to approve. The lack of resources means there are few staffers in legislatures who can challenge the expertise presented by ALEC and other conservative operatives, or uncover the hidden payoffs for corporate interests contained in legislation. Thus ALEC provides a stealthy, tax-exempt front for corporate interests to sell their ideas directly to statehouse leaders across the country.

At the most obvious level, ALEC gives a "public interest" sheen to the raw special pleading of Big Money before state legislatures. Here are just a few of these recent corporate campaigns:

Backed by the oil industry, ALEC has lined up legislators to lower taxes on gasoline and to undermine regulations aimed at curbing the carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming.
Backed by the drug companies, ALEC has mounted a full-scale campaign to defeat initiatives by cities and states to promote importing lower-priced select medicines from Canada.
Backed by low-wage employers, ALEC has promoted legislation to block local governments from raising local minimum wages or even requiring government contractors to pay a fair wage to their employees.
Backed by the telephone companies, ALEC has worked to bar or hamstring cities that have sought to build cheaper or even free Internet services for their residents.
Backed by the insurance companies, ALEC has been promoting a campaign to stop state insurance commissioners from requiring insurance companies to meet the same accountability and auditing rules that were imposed on publicly-traded corporations in the wake of the Enron debacle.
And ALEC has been advocating cracking down on seniors who shelter income in a home while using Medicaid to finance long term care, a campaign that would force seniors to buy "reverse annuity mortgages," a new financial instrument promoted by ALEC's financial services industry funders.
The right's strategic agenda
Still, if the right-wing movement in the states only amounted to a series of individual profit-driven campaigns, the threat posed by ALEC would merely be one of a slick, well-funded public relations operation, albeit a nasty and effective one.

But the real danger from ALEC and its associated organizations comes from conservatives' aim to structurally undermine the very capacities of government that restrain corporate power and to fuel campaigns that fracture progressive alliances and political power.

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably the premiere right-wing strategist, has famously described the conservative goal as cutting government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Key to that objective is cutting tax revenues and using constitutional limits on state taxing powers to make it politically impossible to fund social needs through government action. This strategy serves not just to limit progressive policy but, by creating a limited pool of funds, pits progressive groups against each other in a fight for resources.

Conservatives also aim to shut down the enforcement of business regulations across the states. The very success of state attorneys general in bringing tobacco and financial firms to heel has led to a backlash to limit the power of attorneys general. And where citizens have the ability to enforce regulations in the courts, the right has been gutting those citizens' legal powers. For example, one of the first acts of Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration was forcing through restrictions on the state labor code's Private Attorney General Act, which had given advocates greater power to enforce the state's labor laws.

In the last few years, no issue has consumed corporate America more than shutting the courtroom door to plaintiffs injured by corporate malfeasance under the campaign of "tort reform." Damage awards have been limited and judges have increasingly been granted the right to exclude evidence of corporate wrongdoing by limiting plaintiff witnesses. This is done through the banning of so-called "junk science," with an often-politically connected judge (rather than the jury) getting to decide which witnesses are credible. The end result of this campaign is to make it nearly impossible for poor plaintiffs to get a day in court or to prevent a judge from overturning any judgment in their favor.

Another key strategy for the corporate right is privatization, a strategy that both undermines labor standards for government services and opens the labor market to corporate profiteering. The conservative-induced budget crises in many states have served to help this process along. In 2002, ALEC co-wrote a report with the Manhattan Institute that made privatization a key solution for balancing state budgets. They proposed that Medicaid be replaced with private Medical Savings Accounts and public schools be funded with vouchers. Similarly, prison management would be privatized. Name an area of government and conservatives are seeking to hand its operations over to corporate allies who, in turn, can eliminate labor unions and use the profits to fund more campaign contributions to their political machine.

A special case of privatization has been the recent assault on state employee pension funds. In 2005, Alaska passed legislation ending guaranteed pensions for all newly hired state employees in favor of individual accounts, and legislators in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Virginia are heading in the same direction.

The most obvious goal is to cut benefits for union workers by ending guaranteed benefits--using exactly the same rhetoric of "choice" that President Bush employed to sell his Social Security privatization scheme at the federal level. But what really enrages conservatives are decisions by trustees of these pension funds to use their shareholder voting power to challenge corporate abuses, such as the pension funds in Ohio, New York and California that voted to divest in firms involved in privatization. And of course, there is the direct payoff to the financial services firms who will end up administering the millions of private accounts in a privatized state pension system and collecting the billions of dollars in fees.

Defunding the left
The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right's campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations--and a few religious conservative allies--as the only forces with significant resources in politics.

Take the 2003 legislation passed in Texas that reserved family planning dollars, including those from the federal government, exclusively for healthcare providers that do not offer abortion services or referrals. This kind of proposal, coupled with "gag rules" and "abstinence only" legislation, not only shifts abortion policy, but strips resources from the broader pro-choice community. Similarly, the push for "faith based initiatives" shifts resources from nonprofits embedded in social justice networks to conservative organizations engaged in active conservative politics.

State-based "Right to Work" campaigns were conservatives' original weapons to cut off union dues, one of the primary sources of funding for political campaigns that oppose conservatives day-in and day-out. The present round of attacks is labeled "paycheck protection"--a nice-sounding term for crippling union workers' ability to donate political contributions through workplace deductions.

The whole right-wing attack on the civil justice system also has the effect of cutting the fees for employment and other trial lawyers, who have been strong sources of political funding for progressive causes. Passing tort reforms nationally, Grover Norquist argued back in 1999, takes "a $5-10 billion a year bite out of trial lawyer fees" and shuts down the progressive "get-out-the-vote effort, funded with money from trial lawyers."

By operating at the state level, Norquist et al have successfully avoided the glare of media attention and the full political focus of progressives. It's as if the right is tunneling under the foundation of progressives; by the time the ground--and financial resources--give way, it'll be too late to save the house.

How progressives fight back
So how should progressives respond to this coordinated assault on every level of progressive policy?

The key is to fight back, coordinate our own battles, think as strategically as ALEC and its allies and win back power at the state level. As People for the American Way said in a 2003 report about ALEC: "Progressives need a collaborative and equally coordinated effort to successfully counter ALEC's influence, expose its corporate and right-wing ties, and defeat dangerous proposals launched by this 'common enemy.'"

While many grassroots efforts have continued across the country since that report, progressives have not established the coordinated response that is needed to beat back the right. To do so, we must take three steps.

First, we need to develop a deep national network of progressive legislators supported by grassroots organizations. We have to establish partnerships between national organizations, grassroots activists and state legislators in each state to find state-specific ideas that represent home-grown progressivism. Not only will these networks help bring progressive-minded people together, but they also will serve as a hotbed of information exchange so progressive legislators can equip themselves with all of the information they need to promote progressive bills.
Second, we need to promote a set of popular issues that define the progressive state agenda in the minds of voters. This could include raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, promoting family issues like paid family leave and pre-K education for all children, protecting free speech in the workplace as well as the political realm, and developing an energy independence policy that creates jobs in each state.
Third, we must develop a set of policies that beat back the right-wing attack and turn the tables on conservatives. We should use legislation strategically to highlight the hypocrisy of groups like ALEC and put conservative legislators in the uncomfortable public position of voting either the interests of their corporate patrons or the desires of their constituents.
For instance, recent legislative initiatives in states ranging from Virginia to Michigan to preserve public lands and stop sprawl divide sprawl developers from a broader population that wants both livable communities and green areas for recreation. Similarly, targeting taxpayer subsidies specifically to entrepreneurial businesses that provide a living wage, as progressives have done in a number of cities, challenges conservatives to justify their fealty to low-wage companies. Supporting paid family leave and expanded child care for working parents forces legislators to confront empty "families values" rhetoric.

Ultimately, each strategic issue will reinforce the others, undercutting opposition coalitions while adding new allies to the progressive side, exposing the hypocrisy of the conservative agenda while clarifying the progressive program, and, step-by-step, entrenching progressive power in ways that the right wing will find harder and harder to dislodge.

Progressives need to use every tool of grassroots mobilization to build unity among our side's state legislators and deploy both strong policies and innovative strategies to beat the conservatives at their own game. Our overarching strategy: find the best public policies and champion them with effective and cohesive messaging. That is what the new Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) is all about. It's time to finally end conservatives' dominance of state policy. It is time for progressives to govern from the states.

This article is being published by In These Times in conjunction with the release of PLAN's report, "Governing the Nation from the Statehouses."

Nathan Newman is the policy director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN).

David Sirota is the co-chair of PLAN, and a senior editor at In These Times.

Posted by lois at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)

Prisons Ask for Alternatives to Jailing Deadbeat Parents

Akron Beacon Journal
http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/13913625.htm
Prisons ask for alternatives to jailing deadbeat parents
Associated Press-
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Prisons officials are asking lawmakers to consider alternatives to putting deadbeat parents behind bars, where they don't earn much money and continue failing to support their children.

The 601 men and 24 women sent to prison in 2004 for not paying child support made $12 to $18 a month working prison jobs, while taxpayers paid about $63 a day for each prisoner's shelter, food, clothing and medical care.

"We strongly think each child should receive the support they are due," said Andrea Dean, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. "But we also understand there are going to be some deadbeat dads or parents for whom, if they had an opportunity, an alternative sanction other than prison would be a good option."

About 2.5 percent of inmates admitted to prisons in 2004 were felony child support cases.

Prisons officials want lawmakers to consider work release or other programs that would allow nonviolent child support violators to work under supervision. They say those options could help alleviate crowding and save taxpayers the $23,000 each prisoner costs annually.

Some officials in charge of collecting child support payments say they go through many options before cases are even prosecuted.

The Franklin County Child Support Enforcement Agency tries punishments such as suspending drivers' licenses, withholding money from paychecks and seizing bank accounts before filing charges, agency head Anthony Bond said.

"We've exhausted every possible administrative and judicial remedy before we do this," he said.

Kim Newsom Bridges, director of the Ohio Child Support Directors Association, which represents all 88 counties, said members would be willing to consider any new option that encourages parents to pay up.

"In most circumstances, the county agency and the court have already been through many steps with the obligor and they have failed to comply," she said. "We are not throwing people in prison on the first try."

In Franklin County, there were 51,000 cases with child support court orders, Bond said. Of those, 706 were sent to the prosecutor and 46 were prosecuted.

Failure to pay child support is a fifth-degree felony, punishable by six to 12 months in prison. Repeat offenses rise to fourth-degree felonies, which carry sentences of up to 18 months.

About two-thirds of the child-support prisoners from 1991 to 2004 were white - compared to half of the overall prison population - and about 60 percent had a high school diploma or the equivalent, according to prisons statistics. The average violator was a 37-year-old man.

Prisoners say they didn't pay child support because they were unemployed or working part-time, had a job that paid minimum wage or had a second family and couldn't afford both, according to state documents. Nearly half had full-time jobs before going to prison, statistics show.

About $2 billion in child support was collected in Ohio during the fiscal year that ended June 30, with another $600 million that went uncollected. The state has about 1 million child support cases, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Doug Missman, chief probation officer for Delaware County Common Pleas Court, said his county has work release and other programs, although not all counties can offer them because such programs are costly.

"It seems silly to be spending money to lock up people so the state pays for them and they can't pay the people they owe," Missman said.

Posted by lois at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2006

Report: Alabama's habitual offender laws filling state prisons

Sun, Feb. 19, 2006

SAMIRA JAFARI
Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Nearly a third of the inmates serving time in Alabama's overcrowded prisons were sentenced under the state's habitual offender law, deemed one of the harshest in the nation by sentencing experts.

Unlike most states, Alabama's repeat offender law - often known as the three-strikes-and-you're-out law - does not figure in the length of time between convictions or the severity of prior offenses.

More than half of the nearly 8,600 habitual offenders were given tougher or "enhanced" sentences after their latest conviction was for property or drug crimes, according to the Alabama Sentencing Commission's preliminary 2006 report. That doesn't mean they didn't commit a violent crime in the past; but in most cases the law doesn't give any weight to the prior offense.

"Alabama does have one of the most stringent habitual felony offender acts," said Lynda Flynt, executive director of the Alabama Sentencing Commission.

Tomislav Kovandzic, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said this has created a problem in corrections.

The habitual offender laws in general don't cut down on crime but do result in prison systems that are "busting at the seams" and increasingly demand larger chunks of state budgets, he said.

The majority of states that have such laws introduced them in the 1980s and 1990s, when the nation adopted a "tough on crime" motto, he said.

"These laws don't do anything in reducing crime," said Kovandzic, who has researched three-strikes laws. "They're keeping people in prison and they're seeing the repercussions in an aging prison system that's costing them a fortune."

Habitual offenders are inherently one of the most expensive populations in Alabama's prison system due to the population aging over lengthy or lifelong sentences. They cost the prison system $112 million dollars a year - or 36 percent of the fiscal 2006 budget. That takes a toll on the underfunded, understaffed, date