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April 29, 2006
OR: Walla Walla a tourist spot despite prison
Published: April 25. 2006 6:00AM PST
WALLA WALLA, Wash. — Swirling a splash of shimmering plum-colored shiraz around their glasses, Philip and Heather Marlatt inhaled deeply before downing their first sample at the Ft. Walla Walla Cellars downtown tasting room. The Marlatts, with 9-month-old son Keegan in tow, were enjoying their first trip to Walla Walla.
“I just heard it was a nice little town,” said Philip Marlatt, who brought his family down from Pullman. The couple, self-described wine novices, decided to make the drive after the owner of his local wine shop recommended the trip. He had no idea the 35,000-person city was also home to the state penitentiary.
“It doesn’t bother me,” he said of the prison.
That’s the sentiment all over Walla Walla, a rural town once known best for onions. Now it’s enjoying a renaissance as home to more than 75 wineries, most of which were founded in the last decade.
Residents and tourism officials there agreed that Walla Walla’s formula can’t be copied, but they also offered some advice on how Madras can make the most of what it has.
Surprise, surprise
Local lore has it that more than 100 years ago, Walla Walla had the choice of hosting Washington State University or the Washington State Penitentiary. Residents chose the prison, Waterbrook Winery founder Eric Rindal said, because they thought it would be a more reliable employer than the startup university.
Today, Walla Walla is unique among prison towns in Oregon and Washington. For one, it is the only one that also draws accolades from the likes of Sunset magazine. The lifestyle publication named Walla Walla’s downtown “Best in the West” in 2002 and dubbed the city “Wine Destination of the Year” in 2005.
On summer weekends, packs of tourists wander between the 11 downtown tasting rooms or shuttle to farther-flung destinations on dedicated wine buses.
Washington’s most southeastern town is gaining a lot of attention now for top-shelf wine, but 15 years ago the sleepy city wasn’t on many lists of must-see attractions, said Timothy Bishop, executive director of the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation.
“It used to be on Sunday, you could literally hear the pigeons crossing the street,” Bishop said.
That was true in 1983, when Rindal founded Waterbrook Winery, the city’s fourth.
“You’d come down here at 5 p.m. and the only thing you’d have to miss to find a parking spot was the tumbleweeds,” Rindal said.
He got into the wine business as a hobby, helping Martin and Megan Clubb with their fledgling L’Ecole No. 41 winery. The region’s climate is ideal for growing premium grapes, they found, and eventually the hobby turned into a full-time job.
As word of the area’s unique climate spread, more and more winemakers migrated to Walla Walla, turning the small circle of winemaking friends into a full-fledged community, Rindal said.
By the late 1990s, more than 30 wineries had sprung up in Walla Walla. Now, a new wave of developments — higher-end restaurants and a proposed destination resort-style private community — are coming to “the town so nice they named it twice.”
“These things all came up and jumbled together to make a great town,” Rindal said. “I don’t think it was something anyone created.”
Walla Walla’s new economy centers around the burgeoning wine trade — which generates more than $100 million annually, according to the Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance. But Walla Walla has more going for it than just wine.
Historically, the town’s economy revolved around agriculture, two private colleges and health care, Davidson said.
Whitman and Walla Walla colleges each draw thousands of middle- and upper-class students to the town and enrich the city’s cultural diversity, Davidson said. Whitman, founded as a seminary in 1859, predates Washington’s statehood and is now a top-tier liberal arts college. Walla Walla College is a 1,900-student school affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, founded in 1892.
The city hosts three hospitals: the Catholic-affiliated St. Mary’s Medical Center, Adventist-affiliated Walla Walla General Hospital and the federal Jonathan M. Wainwright Memorial Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
The farming sector includes wheat, potatoes, peas and Walla Walla sweet onions. Those industries, along with the prison, have given the town a stable employment base.
Madras, which is still seeking employers to complement the 1,100-employee Bright Wood mill, has farther to go than Walla Walla did. Wine changed Walla Walla. For Madras, the continuing flood of newcomers to Central Oregon could be an even more powerful trend, if Redmond and Bend are any measure.
Less than two years before regional growth and the new prison converge on Madras, Walla Walla tourism officials shared their tips for making Madras a more tourist-friendly destination: Make improvements with residents, not tourists in mind. Play to the city’s strengths. And if everyone ignores the prison, it’ll mostly go away.
Not for the tourists
As Rindal, the Waterbrook Winery founder, said, no government agency decided it was time to make the city nicer for tourists. Instead, private citizens worked with city officials to spruce up their own downtown.
“I don’t think downtown revitalization happened because someone said we need to do something for the tourists,” said Dave Warkentin, executive director of the Walla Walla Valley Chamber of Commerce. “I think we did it for ourselves.”
The revitalization included restoring original facades to downtown buildings, adding sculptures and installing retro-styled street lamps, said Bishop, executive director of the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation.
Improving Walla Walla’s appearance didn’t change the way the town worked, but it did make the city more “livable,” he said. And as cities become more crowded and commutes get longer, that lure of livability will only be greater, Bishop said.
Doing it naturally is preferable to trying to be something you’re not, said Michael Davidson, director of Tourism Walla Walla, the city’s year-old promotional arm.
“Ultimately you are what you are, and if that’s something people would like to be part of, that’s great,” Davidson said. “Manufactured destinations, to me, they’re horrible.”
Davidson and other Walla Walla residents frequently commented on the town’s authenticity, the fact that locals, not just tourists, shop downtown, too.
“You can go downtown and buy a pair of socks,” Davidson said.
Playing to Madras’ strengths
For Madras, according to the Downtown Foundation’s Bishop, it’s all about location and size. The city is less than an hour north of Bend and smaller than Bend and Redmond.
It’s a tactic that Madras leaders have already seized upon.
“I think Madras particularly has the advantage of being part of the whole Bend regional drive,” Bishop said. “I think that’s a very realistic opportunity.”
To be successful, though, leaders from all parts of the community need to share a vision, said Davidson, of Tourism Walla Walla.
“There was an understanding by the local business community and the city that there was something here and how can we take advantage of it,” Davidson said.
In the late 1990s, once tourists began to discover the city, Walla Walla nudged the process along by adopting a lodging tax to fund tourism promotion, said City Manager Duane Cole.
“I think we’ve kind of developed a brand and become a destination through that investment,” Cole said.
Now the region targets its relatively limited promotions budget to wealthy wine drinkers in Seattle and Portland.
What prison?
Maybe the most important lesson Madras can learn from Walla Walla is that if your city is someplace people want to go, they won’t care if there’s a prison there or not. It just happens that most towns with prisons aren’t the sort of places people usually visit.
“I can’t think of any time I didn’t go someplace because there was a pen there,” said Elizabeth Martin-Calder, executive director of Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance.
The prison doesn’t seem to be keeping tourists away from Walla Walla. From north-facing rooms at the Holiday Inn Express here, guests enjoy an unobstructed view of the Washington State Penitentiary, home to the state’s most dangerous criminals. At night, especially, the blaring lights can’t be missed.
But few tourists who stay at the hotel ever guess that they’re looking at the high brick walls of a 119-year-old prison, said General Manager Liz Pierce.
“They think it’s a stadium,” Pierce said.
That’s proof that torrents of good press have swamped old ideas of Walla Walla as a prison town, Davidson said.
“Walla Walla gets so much positive attention these days,” Davidson said, “the prison doesn’t even register for most people.”
“We’ve knocked it down to number three now,” in people’s minds, Davidson said. “We figure it’s wine, onions and then penitentiary.”
Not everyone in the tourism business ignores the prison, though. Jim and Kathy Ruzicka’s Gotta Go Embroidery T-shirt shop makes good money selling the penitentiary to tourists.
“We use it a lot for humor,” Ruzicka said.
There’s an entire rack of prison humor T-shirts in the store, displaying slogans like “What’s your cell number?” “Hard Time served” and, in homage to the prison’s floodlights: “Walla Walla, we’ll leave the lights on.”
Keith Chu can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com
Posted by lois at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)
Prison fears are not reality
By Keith Chu / The Bend Bulletin
Published: April 24. 2006 6:00AM PST
Department of Corrections administrators deny it. No government agency tracks it. Yet, while the scale is unknown, families of inmates do follow their husbands, wives and fathers to the towns where they’re imprisoned.
The Bulletin spoke to four such families in trips to the prison towns of Ontario and Walla Walla, Wash. Family members in those towns, and one academic study, say perhaps 5 percent of inmates — about 100 or more families in each city — have relatives who have moved to the area.
It’s these families, along with the threat of inmate breakouts, that Madras residents have cited as the drawbacks of the Deer Ridge Correctional Institution.
What’s surprising, according to law enforcement officials in those towns, is that inmate relatives and friends don’t commit more crimes than anyone else. Just as prison backers in other rural towns learned that the penitentiaries’ economic impact was less than they hoped, so, too, opponents learned the social cost of prisons has been less than they feared.
A worrywart
Measures in place to prevent escapes
On Feb. 28, 2001, Lee John Knoch, a 23-year-old convicted murderer, became the only person to successfully escape from Snake River Correctional Institution. The feat took several hours, as Knoch cut through fences, eluded guards, stole a pickup and fled the state.
No one has escaped an Oregon prison since the incident, according to Department of Corrections spokeswoman Perrin Damon, although 39 inmates have walked away from work crews.
Knoch’s escape fulfilled the fears of many in Ontario who opposed the Snake River prison, but confirmed a popular belief of prison supporters: If someone breaks out, they’re not going to hang around town.
Knoch cut holes through four fences and made his way five miles to Ontario without being spotted by guards.
Police apprehended Knoch the next day on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, 300 miles away in southeastern Idaho.
In Madras, the Deer Ridge prison will rely on a variety of measures to prevent inmates from breaking out:
• A 12-foot-high, no-climb fence will surround the medium- and minimum-security portions.
• A second 12-foot fence will encircle the medium-security prison.
• Rolls of razor wire will line the fences and the space between the double fence layer.
• Electronic surveillance devices, which DOC officials declined to identify, will monitor the perimeter.
• An armed guard will patrol the site in a truck or jeep.
Longtime Madras resident Margaret King, 84, was afraid when she first heard plans for a prison in her town.
“I’m always afraid of escapes,” King said. “It’s not too close to the middle school, but it’s there (on the same road).”
“I think it’s going to bring a lot of undesirable people,” King continued. “I assume not many of them have much, so it’s just going to be where we’re supporting them on welfare, and we’ve got enough of those here already.”
“I’m just a worrywart I guess,” said King, a widow who moved to Madras 56 years ago.
King is not the only worrywart. Deschutes County Sheriff Les Stiles, among others, has expressed concerns that criminally inclined friends and families of inmates will bring their problems south from Madras to Redmond and Bend.
Yet, crime rates in Umatilla and Ontario are down since prisons opened, and most residents say their communities haven’t changed much.
In those cities, the social cost of the prisons fell most heavily on two groups of people — the officers who work in prisons and the families of inmates who relocate to be near loved ones.
Misplaced fears
Fears of escaped convicts, overloaded social services and an influx of welfare families were common reactions from opponents of new prisons in Ontario and Umatilla.
In a survey of 800 Ontario residents taken just before Ontario’s Snake River Correctional Institution opened in 1991, 45 percent of people said they thought inmate friends and family members would move to Ontario, and that it would be a “bad thing.” More than 70 percent said people who moved would “share the inmates’ lifestyles.”
More than 10 years later, though, the crime rate in Malheur County, where Ontario is located, is down slightly from 1994, the year the prison expanded from 500 to 3,000 inmates.
All of the 15 social service providers The Bulletin interviewed said they haven’t noticed a large impact, although they don’t track how many clients are associated with the prison. The worst fears — of escaped cons and inmate families clustering together in “felony flats” — never materialized.
“We were real concerned with people following their loved ones to be closer to their inmates and that hasn’t happened, except in a few cases that I know of,” said Ontario Police Chief Mike Kee. “It’s been nothing but positive as far as we were concerned.”
Harlan Hartman, a retired factory worker who lives less than a mile from Snake River Correctional Institution, said the prison’s impact has been small.
“Wal-Mart changed Ontario more than the prison,” Hartman said.
A prison family
In Walla Walla, the site of the Washington State Penitentiary, Helen Schaub agreed that the prison doesn’t have much effect on their lives.
For the past 55 years, Schaub has lived in a cozy white house a block from the penitentiary, home of the state’s most dangerous prisoners. Schaub, 78, raised four children there with her late husband, George Schaub, and never feared for their safety, she said.
“I’ve lived here 50 years and never had any trouble,” Schaub said.
In that time, she said she never met any former inmates or even any family members of inmates.
“Usually those guys, they have somebody pick them up out on the highway or something,” Schaub said. “They don’t come around the neighborhood.”
Last month, it was an invasion of roosters, from the neighbors next door, perhaps, that most concerned Schaub.
Yet, there’s at least one of those prison families in Schaub’s neighborhood. Just a few houses down the street in an old white trailer, Junior Gonzales, 25, lives with his 5-year-old daughter Leticia and a couple of friends.
It’s crowded, said Gonzales, who works at a nearby car wash, but better than he had it as a kid, when his mom raised him and his six brothers and sisters while working minimum-wage jobs.
His dad, Rogaciano Gonzales (he was convicted under the name Rogaciano Mendoza, according to a prison spokeswoman), was never around, at least not after he was sent to prison 23 years ago for murdering two people in the Tri-Cities.
To be close to him, Junior’s mom moved the family to Walla Walla, Gonzales said. Gonzales was 2 years old; his youngest brother, he said, was conceived in a conjugal visit trailer.
No agency in Oregon or Washington tracks where inmate families live, according to officials at several state departments, but activists and researchers in Walla Walla and Ontario say there are plenty of people like Gonzales, who move hundreds of miles to be near incarcerated parents or spouses.
A study in the early 1990s by Whitman College professors Keith Farrington and Pete Parcells found that at least 93 families in Walla Walla — a total of 286 people — had transplanted to the town to be near inmates.
Oregon law enforcement officials, including Ontario Police Chief Kee and other community leaders, said that doesn’t happen here because the state Department of Corrections can transfer inmates from one prison to another with little or no notice.
Snake River Correctional Institution Superintendent Jean Hill, who reviews visitor logs regularly, said only a handful of inmates have family in the Ontario area.
“We know of two or three, half a dozen at the most,” Hill said.
Wendy Hill, Department of Human Services child welfare manager for Grant, Harney and Malheur counties, said she hasn’t noticed much impact from prison families either.
“We thought there would be this big influx of people moving to Ontario and overloading our systems, but that didn’t happen at all,” Wendy Hill said.
Charles Logan-Belford, head of the Umatilla County Juvenile Justice Department, a county that includes Pendleton’s Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution and the Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, said his department doesn’t know the impact of the two prisons, but plans to start tracking whether youths have connections to them.
“We often get told ‘my Dad’s in prison,’ but what we don’t ask is which prison,” Logan-Belford said. “It’s actually a question we’re going to start asking.”
Todd Siex, who currently oversees the DHS offices in Grant, Harney, Malheur, Baker, Union and Wallowa counties, put it even more succinctly:
“We’re pretty remote,” Siex said. “Families just don’t do that.”
Under the radar
But families do move. By knocking on doors in an Ontario neighborhood for just half an hour, The Bulletin spoke with two families that moved there to be near incarcerated loved ones.
Becky Smith, founder of Freedom SPIRIT, an advocacy group for families of inmates in Ontario, said she’s spoken with 75 families in the past year who relocated to be near loved ones at the 3,000-inmate Snake River Correctional Institution. The real number of relocated families is probably double that, or about 5 percent of inmate families, Smith estimated.
That ratio is similar to what Farrington and Parcells discovered in Walla Walla, where 93 families at the then-1,700-inmate penitentiary — 5.5 percent — relocated.
If that trend continues for Deer Ridge, Central Oregon could expect 94 families of inmates to make the move. But there’s reason to believe even more will move to this side of the mountains, Smith said.
“You’ll probably have more people relocate there because there’s more that that area of the state has to offer,” particularly recreation and a large number of low-wage jobs, Smith said.
Madras is closer to Portland than Umatilla or Ontario, which could also make the move easier, but far enough away to make visiting difficult, she said.
Families move because it just isn’t feasible for wives and family members of inmates to make regular visits to Ontario, situated on Oregon’s far eastern border, Smith said. That’s especially true for those from the Willamette Valley, where most inmates are convicted.
“It’s an extreme burden: a time burden, emotional burden, financial burden, for people to make that commute,” Smith said.
Smith, 50, knows that firsthand, since both her husband and her brother are currently housed at Snake River Correctional Institution.
Her 60-year-old husband, Robert, has been in prison almost two years after being convicted of assault in Newberg, about 20 miles southwest of Portland, a Snake River Correctional Institution spokeswoman said. Smith declined to discuss the details of his case.
Smith said she doesn’t worry her husband will be moved without warning, as some law enforcement officers have claimed. Unless inmates cause trouble, they’re seldom moved and usually given notice before that happens, Smith said.
Inmates are assigned to prisons based on a variety of factors, said Bobbi Burton, community corrections manager for the department of corrections.
First, they’re assigned to a minimum, medium or maximum security level, based on the length of their sentence, gang affiliations, mental health and other risk factors. Then the department sends the inmate to a specific prison, Burton said, taking care to keep accomplices or enemies from the same facility.
Initially, Robert Smith bounced between Snake River Correctional Institution and a prison in Salem while undergoing treatment for a heart attack, but when he recovered, they both settled in Ontario, Smith said. She said she had been recently laid off, which made relocating easier.
They’ve been there for a year now, but it wasn’t easy at first, Smith said.
“When he first was brought out here, I was devastated,” she said.
Smith learned the system: what to wear when visiting her husband (no jeans, blue denim or revealing clothes), how to send him mail and other things she never even thought about.
And once she got to the visiting room, Smith began meeting other women who had moved to Ontario because of the prison.
Smith offered her home as a place to stay for women who were visiting prisoners over the weekend. Over the past year, those connections grew into a full-time job. Now, through Freedom SPIRIT, Smith is hosting a Saturday night support group and working to get discounts at hotels and child care centers.
“The one thing people fail to realize about families of incarcerated people is they are frequently alienated from their other family members, from their friends,” Smith said. “They become isolated. They’re trying to pay for the appeal and put money on his (commissary) books and pay for their usual expenses.”
She has a passion for the work. Smith got angry when asked about the stereotype of welfare-dependent inmate families committing crime and burdening local governments.
“That’s a bunch of (lies),” Smith said. “Anybody who will move umpteen hundred miles to be near an inmate is more concerned about the love of the inmate and supporting their family than attacking Madras, Oregon.”
But is that true? Do people who move to be near relatives who’ve been locked up for stealing, dealing drugs and hurting people really break the law just as often as the rest of us?
According to a study of inmate families in Walla Walla, the answer is yes. The study, by Whitman professors Farrington and Parcells found they committed crimes at almost exactly the same rate as the rest of the community. Inmate visitors to Walla Walla made up .7 percent of the county’s adult population, and were also .7 percent of people arrested over an 18-month period in 1990 and 1991.
State statistics show the crime rate in both Umatilla and Malheur counties followed national trends by decreasing in the years after their prisons opened. For the rate of crimes against people, both counties ranked below the state average in 2003, the most recent data available.
The cool kid
Families of inmates may not commit more crimes than average, but they do have their own problems, said Kim Haus, a teacher at Walla Walla’s Green Park Elementary School. Two years ago, Haus pioneered a program to work with children whose parents are incarcerated.
“Most of the time, these kids aren’t academically successful,” said Haus, who identified 23 children of inmates at her school this year. “They don’t have healthy outlets for their time.”
Almost 70 percent of children of incarcerated parents will eventually have some involvement with the justice system, a 2000 U.S. Senate report concluded. Those children are six times more likely to be incarcerated than other children.
The reason, according to Haus, is twofold: Kids lack positive role models and they’re traumatized by the effective loss of one or more parents.
“That other person is supposed to be there in the child’s mind,” Haus said. “These kids need somebody to fill that void.”
Schools and social service providers don’t ask if students’ parents are incarcerated, Haus said, which makes it hard to help those kids. Most parents are reluctant to volunteer that information and some don’t tell their children, she said. It took Haus a year of making discreet inquiries and befriending children before she compiled her current caseload, she said.
Junior Gonzales, the 25-year-old Walla Walla resident, said kids knew his dad was a murderer, but it didn’t cause any trouble.
“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Gonzales said. “I was the cool kid because of it.”
Still, the superintendents of the Jefferson County and Culver school districts said they don’t think Deer Ridge Correctional Institution will create any unique problems.
“I don’t have any worry about that,” said Guy Fisher, of the Jefferson County School District. “If we have students who come here for any reason, they’ll just be kids in school here.”
Higher-quality people
Inmate relatives, of course, aren’t the only people who relocate because of the prison. In Central Oregon, current and former DOC employees predict that hundreds of correctional officers will move here to work at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution.
Residents of Umatilla and Ontario described corrections officers at Two Rivers and Snake River correctional institutions glowingly.
“Their employees are what I would consider a higher-quality-type citizen,” said Bill Killion, president of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and owner of the local Sizzler restaurant.
A large portion of prison employees also seems to take the time to volunteer for nonprofits, said Estela Gomez, former director of the Malheur County Commission on Children and Families.
“They really have people involved in the community,” Gomez said. Snake River employees sit on nearby chambers of commerce, Rotary clubs and domestic violence prevention groups, among others.
The Department of Corrections makes a point of hiring employees with a record of community involvement, said Snake River Correctional Institution Superintendent Hill.
“It’s just incredibly important,” Hill said. “There are things other than payroll that are important to us.”
Officer M. Willis was jobless, coming off five years as a waiter in Portland, before he joined the Department of Corrections seven years ago. Willis (who declined to share his first name, citing security concerns and prison policy) heard the department was hiring for jobs at Snake River Correctional Institution and thought he’d give it a try.
“I’d never had benefits before,” said the 34-year-old Willis, who transferred to the Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla a few years ago.
Benefits include paid vacation, full medical and dental coverage and particpation in a state retirement plan, said Bobbi Burton of the DOC. The starting salary for an Oregon corrections officer is about $30,000 ranging to $42,000, according to Department of Corrections Spokeswoman Perrin Damon. That’s well above Jefferson County’s $20,670 per-capita income.
According to the Department of Corrections Web site, qualified applicants:
• Must be at least 21 years old.
• Possess good hearing, vision and “overall good physical health.”
• Have a high school diploma or GED certificate.
• Be a U.S. citizen.
• Possess a driver’s license and “acceptable driving record.” Applicants who’ve had their license suspended or a DUII will have their records “analyzed on an individual basis.”
• Have a history of law-abiding conduct, with no felony convictions.
Fellow Two Rivers officer C. Stensrud, 43, said she signed up at the prison after losing her job at a food dehydration plant near Hermiston.
“I never thought I’d be in corrections,” Stensrud said. “This just came along and I thought I’d give it a try.”
Both officers said they like the work, but when Willis started, he said, he tended to take problems home with him.
“There were some days I was kind of stressed out,” Willis said. “You realize you’re doing it and stop doing it.”
Willis rarely had a problem with inmates in his seven-year career, he said, but he’s had a few run-ins. The worst was a 26-inmate fight in the chow hall at Snake River, but he got out of it OK.
“I negotiated it,” Willis said.
Umatilla County Juvenile Justice Administrator Logan-Belford said that stress might contribute to a high rate of domestic violence among prison employees. When Two Rivers Correctional Institution opened in Umatilla, that was the one impact he noticed.
“We saw a dramatic increase in the domestic violence,” said Logan-Belford.
Terri Cribs, supervisor of the nearby nonprofit group, Domestic Violence Services in Hermiston, agreed with Logan-Belford. Neither cited any statistics or studies.
Burton of the corrections department disagreed and said her agency takes those crimes seriously.
“That’s not acceptable behavior and employees can be disciplined on the job for that kind of behavior,” Burton said.
Both Willis and Stensrud said their most important challenge is the balance between keeping discipline and maintaining a good relationship with inmates.
“Treat others as you like to be treated has gotten me a long way,” Willis said.
Stensrud said she likes her job, particularly a policy that lets officers rotate jobs within the prison every six months, but she said she’s changed, too, since she became an officer.
“It’s just going to the grocery store and being able to spot things that maybe aren’t right,” Stensrud said. “Taking in the whole restaurant, not sitting with your back to the door,” where she could be surprised.
Steve Johnson, a 50-year-old first-year corrections officer, said it wasn’t an enormous adjustment from his old job at a food processing plant. He’s shifted his sleeping schedule to stay awake for the night shift. And every once in a while, at work, he realizes he’s locked in a prison, weaponless, with hundreds of inmates.
“It’s not stressful, unless you think about it,” Johnson said.
Constantly being in charge of other people in a place where there’s always a potential for violence also prompted Willis to undergo some soul searching, Willis said.
“It makes you examine yourself,” Willis said. “The environment necessitates examining yourself and choosing who you want to be.”
Keith Chu can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at kchu@bendbulleti
Posted by lois at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)
OR: Reactions from Madras
A new state prison, Deer Ridge Correctional Institution, is scheduled to open outside Madras in late 2007.
The penitentiary will hold 1,884 minimum- and medium-security inmates. Madras residents are excited by the promise of 400 to 500 jobs to energize the city's economy.
Others fear the prison. Prisoners could escape. Inmate families could move to Madras, bringing poverty and crime. The pitfalls may outweigh the benefits.
For this series, The Bulletin visited three other rural Northwest prison towns - Umatilla, Ontario and Walla Walla, Wash. - to see if a prison's promise is ever fulfilled.
Reactions from Madras
With just a year and a half until Deer Ridge Correctional Institution opens, it's too late for Madras to turn back now.
That hasn't stopped Madras residents from debating the prison's impact. Skeptics, like 84-year-old widow Margaret King and hairdresser Karen Madrigal, still doubt Deer Ridge will deliver the promised turnaround. They fear crime will accompany its 1,884 inmates.
Former Mayor Rick Allen and other backers see the prison as a key employer in a fast-approaching Madras renaissance. For them, Deer Ridge is part of a 10-year-long effort to release Madras from its status as the seat of Central Oregon's poorest county. It is a chance to raise the standard of living for residents. The prison, they argue, will help Madras profit from its natural advantages and finally find a path to success.
Hopes and fears
Six ladies at the Jefferson County Senior Center represented both sides of the issue during an impromptu debate last month, while waiting to be called to the lunch line.
"I think (the prison) will probably change our town quite a bit," said Marguerite Olson, 88, who came to Madras from the Boise Valley in 1950. "We've got a little town now and I think in time we'll be a bit more cosmopolitan."
Another woman chimed in, wondering if the prison employees would live in Madras.
"In the 1950s, we had three women's clothing stores and a men's clothing store," she said. "Now we don't have any of that. Why would anybody come here if we don't have anything?"
"They say there's going to be some (new) shops," said 88-year-old Esther Stevenson, a Madras resident since 1961. "Progress."
"Progress? I call it regress," said King. "I just liked this town the way it was when we came down here."
The debate ended unsettled, as the center’s host asked diners to give their attention to the pre-lunch entertainment: a four-minute play written and performed by seniors about a sorority reunion party.
Of course, the women of the Methodist Table weren’t the first Madras residents to wonder about what a prison would do to the town. When the Department of Corrections proposed putting a prison in Madras in the early 1990s, community leaders asked the same questions.
Jefferson County was desperate for new jobs at the time to reverse a prolonged economic slump — per capita income lagged more than $5,000 behind the state average. But local leaders wanted to know how other prison towns viewed their penitentiaries.
To find the answers, a group of seven local politicians and city officials and one hairdresser, who was an outspoken prison opponent, chartered a plane and went to see some prison towns for themselves.
“We wanted to make sure we weren’t getting into something that was going to cause us more negatives than positives,” said Allen, the former mayor, Jefferson County commissioner and primary mover behind most of the happenings there for the past 15 years.
They traveled to Baker City, Ontario and Pendleton, the three Eastern Oregon communities that hosted prisons at the time, and came away with the feeling that most people in those communities thought the prisons had been a good thing, said Janet Brown, a trip participant and then-county commissioner.
“They didn’t feel threatened, they weren’t afraid of the facilities,” Brown said. “A lot of (people) were opposed to the citing of the facility before, but after (prisons) were in operation they felt they had helped the community.”
Madrigal, a hairdresser, was invited to go along because she was one of the early opponents of the prison.
“My biggest concern was the people following the inmates,” said Madrigal, now 40 and living in Bend with her 16-year-old daughter. “That’s the idea in my head, that they’re low-income people, and I thought we had enough low-income people in Madras.”
The trip initially changed her mind, Madrigal said, but today she’s still ambivalent about the prison.
How will it help Madras, Madrigal said a few weeks ago, if most employees decide to live in Redmond or Culver or even Terrebonne? After all, Madrigal, a lifelong Madras resident, moved to Bend so her daughter could go to better schools, she said.
“I don’t think it’s going to be as economically good for us, because people are not going to live there,” Madrigal said. “And it makes me feel sad to say that about the town I grew up in.”
Big stakes
City officials from Ontario and Umatilla both said their biggest mistake was failing to persuade more prison employees to choose their communities.
In Ontario, they blamed the Idaho border and restrictive land use laws that prevented developers from putting up new houses to accommodate the workers.
“The bad part was, we didn’t have a lot of subdivisions ready to go,” when Snake River Correctional Institution opened, said Larry Wilson with Coldwell Banker Malheur Realty. “I think 50 to 60 percent (of employees) went out across the river (to Idaho) because we didn’t have the housing.”
Now, 58 percent of employees at Snake River Correctional Institution live in Idaho, according to prison Superintendent Jean Hill.
In Umatilla, locals said, it was the lack of amenities like restaurants and stores that kept many workers from choosing their town.
Housing, at least, won’t be a problem in Madras, where about 541 homes are scheduled to come online before the prison opens, according to city planners. That’s nearly enough houses to accommodate the expected demand of 557 new homes the Department of Corrections predicted a need for in its economic impact study for Deer Ridge.
That number doesn’t include houses in Madras Land Development Co.’s 1,300-unit East Hills development, scheduled to have a first phase ready by late 2007.
The prison helped persuade uncertain developers that Madras was worth investing in, said Bill Bellamy, a Madras real estate agent and Jefferson County commissioner.
“It’s the one thing that pushed people over the edge,” Bellamy said. “The minute they said the prison’s a go and stuck the shovels in the ground, that’s when all the developers jumped in.”
Madras homes are the right price for corrections officers, said Allen. The median price of a single-family home in the first three months of 2006 was $154,900, according to the Central Oregon Association of Realtors, while corrections officers earn $30,000 to $42,000 annually. Redmond’s median home price was $238,000.
The next round of developments in Madras will start in the low $200,000 range, said Mike Ahern, a Madras real estate agent. Jefferson County’s economy is “wildly healthy,” said Ahern, a former county commissioner and current commission candidate, but he thinks the prison can still help the region.
“You’re not going to catch me saying, ‘Oh no, I wish we didn’t have a prison,’” Ahern said. “I just think it adds a strength to the economic base.”
Allen agreed the prison will help Madras. But he also said if he knew then that Madras’ economy would take off as it has, his strategy for wooing the prison would’ve been different.
“I would say probably not with the same zeal,” Allen said. “I would say when we originally went that route, certainly we wouldn’t have guessed that we would have this kind of growth.”
Postponed promises
The city’s future could’ve looked much different if Deer Ridge had opened when originally planned, Allen said. The Department of Corrections moved the groundbreaking date back at least three separate times, first to 2000, then 2002 before construction finally began in late 2005.
“Emotionally, this was tough for the community,” Allen said. “A lot of people said it was never going to come.”
It was tough financially, too. Local governments made big infrastructure investments, hoping more people would add to the tax base and defray the costs, said school and city officials.
To prepare for the 2001 prison opening, voters passed a $15.8 million bond that paid to expand Madras High School and remodel the buildings that are now Buff Elementary School.
When the Department of Corrections pushed back the prison’s opening — delaying the arrival of prison employees and their families — the Jefferson County School District found itself paying for space it didn’t need, said former Jefferson County School District Superintendent Keith Johnson.
“This community cared enough about schools to prepare for growth,” said Johnson last year. “The state pulled this little trick on us and left us holding the bag.”
While governments built up housing and infrastructure to prepare for growth, social service agencies haven’t kept pace, according to Jefferson County and nonprofit officials. Limited funding simply doesn’t allow agencies to stay ahead of growth, said Diane Seyl, Director of the county Health and Human Services Department.
“One of the issues with a tax base is that the taxes are collected after the people move in,” Seyl said. “You’re never really ahead, you’re always playing catch up.”
The city of Madras thought it was avoiding that problem when it built an $8 million wastewater treatment plant in 2001, timed to coincide with the prison’s opening. As of late last year, it was operating at 10 percent of capacity, said City Manager Mike Morgan.
Those investments may have caused some short-term pain, but former mayor Allen believes the city is better prepared for the prison now than it was in 2001. During the delay, local voters passed a levy for a new aquatic center and the city strengthened building codes and updated water and sewer buy-in charges.
“The best thing that ever happened to us was that three-year delay,” Allen said. “We wouldn’t have Madras Land Development Company, wouldn’t have a new swimming pool, wouldn’t have the (high school) built.”
Even Madrigal said she thinks the improvements will help Madras’ prospects for the future.
“I think that what will save Madras is the fact that they’ve been doing some beautification projects. They’ve been building some nicer homes and they’re closer to Portland.”
Simple math
As Madrigal and other Madras residents see it, the prison’s success is a sort of mathematical formula. It’s how many prison workers move to Madras, minus the number of inmate families.
In other words, will the economic boost outweigh the social cost? Will the workers really live there? And will Madras turn out differently than Ontario and Umatilla and other rural towns that welcomed prisons as economic saviors only to find that things never really changed?
As Madrigal put it: “I can’t re-ally see where the coming of a prison cleaned up Umatilla any.”
Rick Allen thinks Madras will be the exception. A decade or more into the future, Allen sees a town that will look quite a bit different from the northern outpost of Central Oregon that for years has held the region’s highest poverty rate.
Allen sees a host of new subdivisions ringing the 5,500-person city’s downtown, filled with middle-class workers who can’t afford to live in Bend or Redmond or early retirees from Portland looking to grab a piece of Central Oregon lifestyle for a fraction of the cost. Lake Billy Chinook will attract newcomers who prefer water sports over exclusive destination resorts. And skiers who value variety over proximity will appreciate the 68- mile drive to either Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort or Hoodoo Ski Area.
The growth won’t be driven by the prison, either, according to Allen and Roger Lee, director of Economic Development for Central Oregon.
Although Madras leaders have predicted the town’s resurgence since the mid-1990s, only to see growth rates hover around 2 percent, Lee said that’s about to change.
“I’m going to say it’s a year to two years behind in Madras,” Lee said. “If you look at the private sector investment community, they really believe it’s so.”
In Allen’s vision, the new people will double the town’s population and attract new stores — from downtown restaurants and boutiques to big-box chains — that make the city even more livable than its neighbors to the south.
“Those looking for a smaller town with less traffic, less congestion and a small environment” will choose Madras, Allen said.
It’s a vision endorsed by Central Oregon’s biggest developers, including Brooks Resources and Eagle Crest, who are jointly developing the 800-acre East Hills subdivision.
“Madras is a logical alternative for folks who are not finding the (homes) they’re looking for in Redmond, or Bend or Prineville for that matter,” said Stuart Woolley, executive vice president of Eagle Crest. “You’re likely to see a similar mix of year-round residents, vacation home purchasers and pre-retirement purchasers.”
The group’s Portland-based planner, Madras native Doug Macy, agreed.
“It’ll definitely distinguish Madras as a sort of more middle class, more affordable for retirees community,” Macy said. “It’s always going to be a little more modest of a place. It’s not going to attract as many people or as much money.”
Amid all that, thousands of new houses, an 18-hole golf course and a revitalized downtown, the 1,800-inmate Deer Ridge Correctional Institution will be almost an afterthought. “It’s just out there,” Allen said. “What you will have is the workers and the employees out there in the community.”
Keith Chu can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com
Posted by lois at 09:04 PM | Comments (0)
OR: Promises of prison-inspired economic turnarounds seldom pan out
Prisons Fail Economic Hopes
April 24, 2006
By Keith Chu / The Bend Bulletin
The series
A new state prison, Deer Ridge Correctional Institution, is scheduled to open outside Madras in late 2007.
The penitentiary will hold 1,884 minimum- and medium-security inmates. Madras residents are excited by the promise of 400 to 500 jobs to energize the city’s economy.
Others fear the prison. Prisoners could escape. Inmate families could move to Madras, bringing poverty and crime. The pitfalls may outweigh the benefits.
For this series, The Bulletin visited three other rural Northwest prison towns ‘ Umatilla, Ontario and Walla Walla, Wash. ‘ to see if a prison’s promise is ever fulfilled.
In 2000, the Oregon Department of Corrections predicted that a prison in tiny Madras would set off a minor economic miracle. The Deer Ridge Correctional Institution would employ 500 people on its $22 million payroll.
Nearly 70 percent of employees would be hired locally. The spillover effects would create an additional 1,666 jobs, according to a DOC-commissioned study.
While the prison could turn out to be Madras’ ticket to economic prosperity, no Oregon correctional institution has lifted the town where it was located out of economic hardship in the past 20 years.
After three months of research, including visits to three prisons and more than 60 interviews with residents and city officials of current prison towns, professors, current and former corrections employees, The Bulletin identified a handful of reasons prisons don’t deliver on their economic promise:
‘ Prisons hire far fewer local employees than the DOC predicts.
‘ They don’t pay taxes to local governments or buy supplies locally.
‘ Corrections officers and other employees often don’t live in the towns where prisons are located.
‘ Unpaid inmate work crews compete with locals for low-wage jobs.
‘An optimistic view’
In the early 1990s, like today, Malheur County was one of the poorest in the state. Unemployment was more than two points above the state average, while per capita income was thousands less. Even for a place whose French name translates to ‘unfortunate’ county, times were tough.
Residents embraced the idea of 1,000 jobs when the state announced it planned to expand a 500-bed prison into a 3,000-inmate correctional institution.
‘When they built it in our area, what it immediately did was give a sense of optimism economically,’ said Malheur County Sheriff Andy Bentz. ‘Folks who were holding off on building a new house went out and built one. People just got an optimistic view.’
A similar sense of optimism is growing in Madras today. In less than two years, the Deer Ridge Correctional Institution is scheduled to open, with up to 500 new jobs and 1,884 inmates.
For years, Madras leaders have hyped the prison as a way to add jobs and boost wages in Central Oregon’s poorest county. But other rural Oregon prison towns, such as Umatilla and Ontario, found that the prison wasn’t the windfall they expected.
There’s no local backlash against those prisons. After all, they’re one of the biggest employers in each county, with wages and benefits that outstrip most, even after the majority of prison employees decided to live elsewhere. But the continued struggles of rural prison towns suggest that betting heavily on corrections institutions for economic development doesn’t always pay off.
A big payroll
In Ontario, 10 years after the prison opened, locals say the prison’s few naysayers have been proved wrong. Here, in Malheur County’s largest city, with 12,000 people, there are no ‘felony flats’ ‘ apartment complexes filled with families of inmates. The crime rate has dropped from 165 crimes per thousand to 156. And home prices exceeded $100,000 for the first time in the years following the prison’s construction, according to longtime real estate agent Barbara Lee.
Still, some locals say the prison hasn’t been the panacea some made it out to be. Ontario’s Snake River Correctional Institution employs 1,000 people, yet the county’s unemployment rate, 7 percent in 1994, was up to 9 percent last year. Per-capita income has dropped from more than $20,000 that year to less than $19,000 in 2002, the latest data available.
Worse, the problems that have always plagued the region ‘ poverty, drug addiction and a stagnant economy ‘ haven’t improved.
And Ontario’s sense of optimism’
‘I’d say it’s leveled out,’ Bentz said.
Bobbi Burton, community development director for the Department of Corrections, said the department hasn’t studied the economic impacts of its prisons. It conducted impact studies before building the Umatilla and Ontario prisons, but destroyed the studies as part of regular records-cleansing procedures, Burton said.
But with yearly payrolls that range into eight digits ‘ in Madras it’s projected to be $22 million ‘ prisons must be good for local economies, she said.
‘We would view the economic impact as very positive,’ Burton said.
Scent of onions
The smell of raw sweet onions starts a few miles outside of Ontario. They grow in fields all around the city. Their smell grows stronger closer to the city limits, where it mixes with the scent of french fries made at the Ore-Ida plant near downtown.
Entering city limits, gas stations, fast-food establishments and mini-strip malls give way to neighborhoods of single-story homes in varying states of repair and then to the few blocks of slightly dingy two-story storefronts that make up downtown.
The highlights include the remodeled train depot, local watering hole Spuds n’ Suds and the Jolts & Juice coffee chain.
Snake River Correctional Institution, the largest prison in the state, hides a few miles outside of town, safely out of sight of travelers driving U.S. Highway 20 cross-country.
For years, the working-class community relied on agriculture and food-processing plants to sustain the local economy.
Over the past 20 years, however, foreign competition and new farming techniques have drained jobs from the county and forced many young people to leave the area to find employment, said the Rev. Jim Mosier, an Episcopal archdeacon and Ontario city councilman.
Total employment in Malheur County has dropped from 13,531 jobs in 1994 to 11,729 jobs in 2005, according to Jason Yohannan, a regional economist for Oregon Employment Department in La Grande. Farming jobs were hardest hit, Yohannan said.
‘It’s just been challenging to work in agriculture over the past few years,’ he said.
For those who do stay in Ontario, the penitentiary is one of the few places that offers benefits and above-average wages, said Harlan Hartman, a 60-year-old Ontario resident.
Hartman retired from the Ore-Ida plant after working there for decades. His son, Geral Hartman, got a job at the penitentiary.
‘The (inmates) he works with, he doesn’t like,’ Hartman said. ‘But around here it’s hard to find jobs.’
Mosier loves his city, but over coffee at Jolts & Juice, he wasted no time listing its problems.
‘We have a high rate of poverty in this community, hunger is a problem, the city has some real budget issues,’ Mosier said. ‘We don’t have nearly the hand labor (jobs) we used to.’
More than 18 percent of the county lives in poverty, according to state figures ‘ the worst in Oregon. The state economic development department rated the county as ‘extremely distressed’ last year.
These problems are not new, or because of the prison, said Estela Gomez, the former head of the Malheur County Commission on Children and Families.
‘For 30 years, children have lived in poverty in Malheur County,’ Gomez said. ‘We have generational poverty. We don’t seem to have good family-wage jobs. We have a high poverty rate.’
Every student in the Nyssa School District, 12 miles south of Ontario, qualifies for free or reduced lunches, Gomez said.
Back in the early 1990s, when the community was deciding whether or not to welcome the Snake River Correctional Institution, the debate polarized Ontario, Mosier said.
Opponents feared the institution would lead to the spread of diseases transmitted by inmates and families. They also worried about prison escapes, and declining property values, Mosier said. Proponents saw an opportunity for more jobs, a chance to sell services to the correctional institution and community growth. The proponents won out.
Now, 11 years later, prognosticators on both sides of the fence have turned out to be wrong.
‘The things we were afraid were going to happen didn’t and the things we hoped would happen didn’t,’ Mosier said.
‘A very large hotel’
Since 2000, three studies, two by professors at Washington State University and Iowa State University, and a third by the nonprofit group The Sentencing Project, found that small rural towns with prisons have less job growth than comparable communities without prisons.
‘What you’ve got with a prison is arguably a very large Super 8 hotel that nobody wants to live in but people are forced to,’ said Washington State University Professor Greg Hooks, who co-authored the most comprehensive of those studies in 2001 with fellow WSU Professor Clayton Mosher.
Hooks and Mosher acknowledged that prisons provide economic benefits for rural towns, including nearly recession-proof jobs and increased funding for local services. Still, Hooks and Mosher said, there’s no doubt that the facilities have a much smaller economic impact than, say, a similarly sized factory or lumber mill.
When the Snake River Sugar Co. factory in Nyssa closed last year, it wasn’t just the factory’s 700 workers who felt the impact, said Mosier, the Ontario city councilor. Farmers, truckers and suppliers supported by the factory all lost a major client. Local governments lost tax revenue. Economists call the phenomenon the ‘multiplier effect.’
‘With a prison, though, there’s less connection to the community, fewer links in the economic chain,’ Hooks said. ‘I don’t think there’s very many multipliers to use.’
That fact goes against the common assumption that any place employing 500 or 1,000 people has to be good for the economy.
After studying employment data from every U.S. county over a 30-year period, Hooks and Mosher concluded there’s slower job growth, lower total earnings and less income per capita in rural communities with prisons compared to rural counties without prisons.
‘Instead of helping counties in greatest need, (prison) expansion has the least beneficial outcomes for depressed rural areas,’ their study found. Meanwhile, in bigger and wealthier cities that already have diverse econo-mies and don’t need prison jobs, the prisons don’t have much impact at all, they found.
The direct benefits ‘ 500 jobs ‘ are easy to identify. But beyond that, there’s a lot less than there appears.
Hooks and Mosher didn’t prove the prisons caused the poverty in prison towns, but they did cite several aspects of prisons that tend to hurt local economies: The prisons don’t hire locally; don’t pay taxes; unpaid inmate work crews compete for low-wage jobs; and small towns invest too many resources to achieve limited results.
In Madras, backers originally pushed the prison as a way to boost the region’s economy and diversify the job market.
Jefferson County’s economy lags behind Deschutes and Crook counties, but not because the area lacks jobs, said Roger Lee, executive director of Economic Development for Central Oregon. The problem is the jobs, particularly agricultural jobs, don’t pay enough.
According to the state Employment Department, Jefferson County businesses and government agencies employed 6,390 workers in nonfarm jobs last year. Most of the jobs are located in Madras’ robust manufacturing sector, which employs 5,500 people, including Bright Wood’s 1,100-employee factory and 150 jobs at Keith Manufacturing. In Culver, Seaswirl Boats employs about 250 people.
‘What’s unusual about Madras is how many people are actually employed in Madras,’ Lee said.
But the county’s per-capita income is last in Central Oregon, at $20,670, compared to $27,880 in Deschutes County. Jefferson County’s median family income of $46,000 trails the state average by more than $12,000, according to statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Pie in the sky
By now, it’s become conventional wisdom among Madras residents and DOC employees that current employees will flock to the Deer Ridge Correctional Institution because of its location in rapidly growing Central Oregon.
More transferred employees means fewer jobs that go to locals, said Brad Halverson, former administrator of drug investigations for the Oregon corrections department who now lives in Madras.
‘I know a couple of people (in the DOC) who are just waiting for the prison to open,’ Halverson said. Other current DOC employees in Ontario and Umatilla echoed Halverson’s sentiments.
Under the department’s procedures, current employees have priority over new hires when it comes to filling the slots, corrections officials said. The high number of expected transfers has caused corrections administrators to backpedal from a prediction in 2000 by then-DOC Director Dave Cook that 70 percent of employees would be hired from Central Oregon.
A year ago, DOC Community Development Manager Burton predicted fewer than 60 percent of employees would be hired locally.
‘I can’t see us having 70 percent local hires, I just can’t,’ Burton said at a meeting in December 2004.
Earlier this month, Burton revised her prediction again ‘ to 50 percent local hires.
‘I think it’s very difficult to try to predict what that number’s going to be,’ Burton said. ‘I would guess probably closer to 50-50, but that’s really what we’re doing is, we’re just guessing.’
At a Deer Ridge prison advisory committee meeting on March 21, DOC head of labor relations Gary Kilmer told the audience that kind of overestimation is normal for the department.
‘We kind of always start with a pie-in-the-sky number of 70 percent local hires, 30 percent transfers,’ said Kilmer, who also avoided predicting the ratio in Madras. ‘We’ve never quite gotten there.’
The highest percentage of local hires occurred in Ontario, Kilmer said, where the state hired more than 60 percent of employees at Snake River Correctional Institution locally.
A less-publicized economic drag are the cheap or free inmate work crews that sometimes compete with locals for low-wage jobs.
In Ontario, work crews sort onions at the Heinz Ore-Ida frozen foods plant and do maintenance work at nearby parks, according to Snake River spokeswoman Amber Campbell. If it weren’t for the prison, Hooks said, employers would have to pay at least minimum wage for that work.
In Jefferson County, for instance, the Culver Seaswirl plant wouldn’t lay off current employees to use prison workers, but the company would consider using the work crews for some jobs, said General Manager Curt Olson.
Another common pitfall, according to Hooks, is small cities devote so many resources ‘ both of time and money ‘ to secure new
prisons, they end up neglecting other development opportunities.
‘We think that the city or the county ends up overinvesting in this large employer and they don’t have the resources to go after other options,’ Hooks said.
The investments can be even slower to pay off than some towns expect, because states don’t buy supplies from local communities. For the majority of goods, Oregon puts out bids for the entire prison system, said DOC spokeswoman Perrin Damon.
‘Most items would come from centralized suppliers,’ Damon said.
So, unlike the sugar beet factory, supporting industries don’t see a boost from the prison.
Madras hopes to avoid overinvesting in the prison by going after a potpourri of other economic development opportunities, from its new industrial park to efforts to attract more tourists to Lake Billy Chinook, former Madras Mayor Rick Allen said.
Hooks and Mosher also noted that prisons pay no property or income taxes to local governments, meaning locals sometimes pick up the tab for the state’s wear and tear on city infrastructure.
In Madras, as in Ontario and Umatilla, the state has agreed to pay for the road to Deer Ridge and fund almost half of a new sewer treatment plant, which is more compensation than most states provide, Hooks said.
While Madras officials have worked hard to minimize the prison’s potential drawbacks, the reality is that, like other communities that house prisons, it has just one way to capture prison-generated wealth: by persuading corrections employees to live there.
Home near the big house’
Umatilla resident Carla McLane agreed that the prison hasn’t caused any problems, but said she wished more prison employees would settle in Umatilla. Instead, they live 10 miles away in Hermiston or across the Washington border in the Tri-Cities.
‘I know quite a few people who work at the prison and none of them live in Umatilla,’ said McLane, standing in the lobby of the cozy Umatilla Museum, before a Umatilla Historical Society meeting. ‘The commuting rate between here and the Tri-Cities (in Washington) is huge.’
Out of 400 employees at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, about 60 now live in or near the town, estimated City Manager Larry Clucas and Mayor David Trott.
That’s similar to Ontario, where only 42 percent of the 900-some Snake River Correctional Institution employees live in Oregon, according to Superintendent Jean Hill. The rest make their home across the Idaho border in towns like Nampa, Caldwell and even 60 miles away in Boise.
A few blocks from the museum at City Hall, an artist’s rendering of Sixth Street in Umatilla sits on a shelf, covered with a thin layer of dust.
Painted in bright colors, the image is strikingly different from the road just out the door. Empty lots and dilapidated, abandoned gas stations are filled in with new storefronts.
In the foreground, there’s a bright building adorned with a two-story clock tower, a possible replacement for the existing City Hall and police station, currently based in modular buildings.
The drawing is a few years old, according to Mayor Trott.
‘The downtown revitalization part of it is a big bite we have to take,’ Trott said. ‘We don’t really have the money to be able to pull that off.’
A soft-spoken man with steel-gray hair and a neat mustache, Trott, like each of the four mayors and city managers of prison towns interviewed for this series (in Lakeview, Ontario, Umatilla and Walla Walla), said he thinks his city is better for having a prison.
‘It’s been a community friend,’ Trott said.
Trott, head of emergency preparedness at the nearby Umatilla Chemical Depot, notes that since Two Rivers Correctional Institution arrived in 1999, the city has built a new soccer field near the banks of the Columbia River and has launched a neighborhood watch initiative designed to cut crime. They’re not directly connected to the prison, but they show progress.
‘The successes we’ve had around here are due because people see possibilities,’ he said. ‘Change is possible if they’re willing to put some sweat-equity into it.’
In a driving tour of Umatilla, City Manager Clucas points out the purple box-planters built by inmates that now decorate the sidewalks and the gazebo in a small, green park that replaced a mobile home site.
Frank Harkenrider, the former mayor of neighboring Hermiston, said the prison there has been great for his city, but for some reason just didn’t help Umatilla.
‘I go through Umatilla, it’s kind of sad,’ Harkenrider said. ‘They used to be the city down here. They just don’t have it.’
Clucas and Trott said their town is growing at the right pace, about 1.5 percent a year, according to the latest Portland State University population survey. Still, Trott said, he wishes new businesses would come to Umatilla along with the new people.
‘We’ve got to get some businesses in,’ Trott said. ‘If we don’t, all we’re going to be is a neighborhood.’
There’s brisk traffic through Umatilla during the day from commuters heading for Highway 82, the main arterial north to Washington and east to Pendleton, the county seat. The traffic attracted 12 gas stations, which lined the highway, in the 1960s and ‘70s, Clucas said.
Now all but two have been abandoned or converted to other businesses. At night, the town is quiet and dark.
The one exception is The Riverside Sports Bar and Lounge, a restaurant by day and the only strip club in Umatilla County from 6 p.m. until closing.
It’s been open for 12 years now, according to owner Paulette Dufloth, who’s married to a corrections officer at Two Rivers Correctional Institution. Along with the prison, it’s the only thing in Umatilla that regularly attracts folks from out of town.
The Riverside’s owners are good people, Trott said, and as far as he’s concerned, it’s just another business in a town that desperately needs them.
‘I don’t want Umatilla to be known as the adult entertainment capital of northeast Oregon,’ Trott said. ‘But if it’s bringing people into the area that wouldn’t otherwise take a look at the area, that would probably be viewed as positive.’
Keith Chu can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com
Posted by lois at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)
NY: Early Parole for Deportation and the Right to a Lawyer
By Stanley Mailman
New York Law Journal (p. 3, col. 1)
October 23, 1995
WHETHER THEY LIKE it or not, prison inmates can be released for deportation before they serve their minimum sentence, if they meet the terms of a New York statute enacted on June 10, 1995.*1 The new law was inaugurated on Aug. 28, when 86 Colombians were flown out of Kennedy International Airport under escort of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).*2 Is the new law a boon for all concerned, or, as some critics complain, does it seriously prejudice the rights of foreign inmates, a convenient target in an anti-alien environment.*3
At a joint news conference held before the Avianca flight, Doris M. Meissner, Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, hailed the law as ``landmark event''; Governor Pataki said that it will ``take [these aliens] out of our state and off the backs of [our] taxpayers.''*4 Over five years, the early-parole law could yield savings to New York's prison system of at least $7 million, according to state officials who believe that there are some 8,000 non-citizen prisoners among the 68,000 inmates, only some of whom are subject to deportation.*5 For the federal government the dollar saving is significantly smaller, but the program encourages speedier deportation. Whether it yields that result -- a goal that the INS has historically found hard to achieve -- may be another matter.
Inmates who face certain deportation may well embrace an early deportation order if it means abbreviating a prison sentence. But to admit deportability and forgo appeals, they should know whether expulsion is inevitable or can be avoided. They badly need trained lawyers to give them informed advice and to provide effective representation at their deportation hearings. Such representation, however, is unavailable to many inmates, a serious flaw in the process that existed even when inmates could only be deported after they served their minimum sentence.
Aspects of the State Law
To understand the issues it is helpful to know how the state law works, how it meshes with the immigration laws, and what it means to non-citizen inmates. As a way of facilitating the transfer of such inmates to federal custody, New York enacted a law in 1985 to permit ``Conditional Parole for Deportation Only'' of those inmates who completed their minimum sentences.*6 The 1995 statute dispenses with the need to serve even the minimum term.*7 Now, the parole board may consider deportation as a factor warranting early parole as soon as the inmate begins to do time. Consideration will ordinarily await a final order of deportation that the INS assures it will carry out, and the board must specifically condition the parole on prompt deportation.
If the inmate has already served the minimum period of the sentence, the parole board can technically grant parole without a final deportation order, provided the INS commits to starting deportation proceedings promptly on the inmate's release from state custody. But the board, at least in the near run, is unlikely to use this alternative. Deportation proceedings can drag out. As the point of this program is to tie the parole to immediate deportation, INS and parole authorities are concentrating on inmates whose cases have gone to a final administrative order while they are still in state custody. For the same reason, the processing of a parole/deportation is unlikely while judicial review is pending or still available. Other conditions of this parole are a warrant for retaking custody of the parolee who is not deported and an assurance that the INS will cooperate in the transfer. Time spent in INS custody is credited against the term of the sentence. So, too, is the period of parole in the event of deportation.
What if the parolee is later imprisoned by New York for a felony committed after release under this parole program? Eligibility for parole under the new sentence would then be extended by any period the inmate needed to serve to complete the minimum sentence under the earlier conviction. What if the parolee illegally returns to the United States, but commits no New York felony? Return within a given period without permission of the Attorney General is itself a federal crime*8 but would seem to have no consequences under state law.
Can any inmate qualify under the new program? No; those convicted of a violent felony are ineligible for early release.*9 Nor does this provision relate to U.S. citizens, as they are not subject to deportation.
Who Is a Citizen?
Whether or not an inmate is a citizen is not always obvious. Persons born in this country are clearly U.S. citizens, unless they were born here to certain accredited foreign diplomats, or gave up their citizenship. Those born abroad are U.S. citizens at birth if one of their parents was then a citizen, a matter of fact or law or both that not even a wise child may know. And of course natives of other countries may have become naturalized in the United States. Hence, screening for foreign birth, the practice at state intake facilities, may not yield precise information on the alien population behind state bars. Although correction officials cannot be sure whether someone is an alien, the rough selection gives the INS an opportunity to investigate and to start deportation proceedings if appropriate. Understandably, lawyers who represent immigrants worry about New York's early-release program because it would seem to precipitate or hasten deportation.
As to the timing, the immigration laws bar the actual expulsion of persons sentenced to imprisonment until they are released from confinement.*10 But nothing restrains the INS from starting deportation proceedings at any time it has reason to believe that an individual in the United States is deportable. Indeed, in ``the case of an alien who is convicted of an offense which makes the alien subject to deportation,'' the immigration law has long required the INS to begin proceedings ``as expeditiously as possible after the date of conviction.''*11
In the past the INS may not have pursued that initiative with the vigor that some critics would want, including the State of New York, which unsuccessfully sued the Attorney General in 1992 to hasten enforcement.*12
In 1990, Congress required the Attorney General to report to Congress on INS efforts to identify, apprehend, detain and remove aliens convicted of crimes in the United States.*13 The Attorney General must arrange for deportation proceedings against aliens convicted of aggravated felonies, to be completed if possible before they are released from criminal detention.*14 So, making inmates available for deportation not only saves the state money, but supports an important congressional policy.
In cooperation with the INS, the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) started the Institutional Hearing Program (IHP) in 1986, well before the early-parole provisions. The purpose of the program is ``to complete deportation hearings before an inmate is released from DOCS custody.''*15 To do this, DOCS provided physical facilities on site for the regular assignment of Justice Department personnel. But, even then, the pace of proceedings dragged.
Three Facilities
In 1994, after suing unsuccessfully to make the federal government bring deportation proceedings while inmates are still in state custody,*16 representatives of New York and the Justice Department arranged to streamline the process by centralizing the deportation operation within three facilities. Now, INS investigators are regularly stationed at Ulster and Downstate, the intake facilities for male inmates, and at Bedford Hills, the corresponding facility for females.
There, they interview foreign-born inmates to check for their deportability; INS trial attorneys prepare and prosecute the resulting deportation cases; and immigration judges, assigned by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, hear and decide those cases. The program has permitted the INS to pursue deportation hearings well before inmates complete their sentences. Indeed, IHP has every mark of a successfully run lawenforcement program, except for an essential ingredient of fairness -- availability of legal representation.
As discussed below, the arrangements made between the federal and New York authorities have made it virtually impossible to secure lawyers for the inmates placed in deportation proceedings. Given the stakes involved, the lack is critical, particularly in New York. In California, many of the aliens behind bars crossed the border illegally, or overstayed their visitor's permits, rendering them deportable apart from the conviction of any crime. More often in New York, alien prisoners are not ``illegal immigrants''; they are typically lawful permanent residents of the United States (``green card'' holders). Depending on the basis of conviction, those residents may not be deportable at all. But even if they are deportable, depending on the nature of the crime, non-citizens may be eligible to remain in the United States in the discretion of the immigration judge.*17 Eligibility can depend on whether they have resident status and how long they have been lawfully domiciled in the United States, or if have been physically present here for a continuous period of at least seven years.
In some cases, they may be able to adjust to permanent residence or readjust if they already have lawful resident status. Those inmates may have a U.S. spouse and children, and other strong equities in their favor. Their rehabilitation and contributions to the community, their long residence and close family ties and the medical, financial or other personal hardship that deportation would cause to them or their U.S. dependents, are factors that can figure strongly in favor of allowing them to stay.*18
Legal Complexity
The trial of deportation cases on behalf of the alien is difficult. It requires a careful, persuasive presentation of the facts. The legal issues are complex and dynamic. Appeals may be taken to the Board of Immigration Appeals with review by a Circuit Court of Appeals. It is a rare issue of the Federal Reporter that fails to carry such a case.
At the same time, it is extraordinarily difficult for an inmate at Ulster or Downstate to secure representation at a deportation hearing. Excepting Buffalo, the immigration bar is located almost exclusively in the New York City area. Even apart from the inconveniences of interview and preparation, appearance at a hearing held at Ulster means a trip to Napanoch in Ulster County, a two and a half hour ride by bus and cab. Appearing at Downstate involves a trip to Fishkill, in Dutchess County. In either case, a single appearance is an all-day affair.
Few inmates can afford to hire a lawyer. Apparently, the Legal Aid Society will not service these hearings because they are held outside of New York City. Prisoners' Legal Services, a not-for-profit organization that services those already behind bars, has been handicapped by a lack of expertise and by the uncertainty and limitations of funding. The Deputy Commissioner of DOCS, a lawyer, has supported grant applications and appeared at meetings of the American Immigration Lawyers Association to encourage pro bono assistance.*19 Still, the amount of funding remains at a trickle, the number of volunteers, small.
Lawyers we know in the Hudson Valley are reluctant to appear for lack of legal knowledge and experience. Lawyers in New York City have volunteered but find the travel a hardship.
The immigration statute assures to every person in deportation or exclusion hearings ``the privilege of being represented (at no expense to the government) by such counsel . . . as he shall choose.''*20 In practice, at least for inmates in New York State correctional facilities, the privilege has been a meaningless formula. Immigration judges will sometimes grant more than one adjournment to allow the inmate an opportunity to secure counsel. But then the hearing goes on, counsel or no counsel. The judges assist an unrepresented inmate by pointing out the possibilities of equitable relief, and by providing the forms for application. But a judge is no substitute for trial counsel. And without counsel, inmates do not know their chances of avoiding deportation. Nor do they know whether appeals are only likely to protract their prison sentence. Although opportunities for retaining counsel were no better when hearings were conducted at other correctional facilities, mainly located upstate, lawyers are undoubtedly more available for hearings at the INS in New York. Bar associations should do better in encouraging lawyers to volunteer their services, and in holding training sessions to widen expertise in the defense of a deportation case, as they and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights have done in asylum cases. Meanwhile, there remains the question of whether deportation in these circumstances without an effective right to counsel raises a Sixth Amendment issue.
The courts have reminded us on several occasions that deportation hearings are civil and do not entitle the individual to the same due process rights assured in criminal proceedings.*21 The Board of Immigration Appeals has ruled that there is no absolute Sixth Amendment right to counsel in deportation hearings.*22 Even so, courts have held that effective deprivation of counsel necessarily deprives an alien of due process without the need to show prejudice.*23 Do the arrangements at Ulster and Downstate amount to such a deprivation?
One purpose of the Institutional Hearing Program is ``to assist the federal agencies responsible for administering and enforcing the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in deporting an ever increasing number of criminal aliens from the United States.''*24 That purpose may be perfectly valid when viewed by itself. But the federal government must see to it that the arrangements do not sacrifice the right to representation, a critical component of any fair adjudication system, particularly when as here the decision can separate the individual from home and family and deprive him or her ``of all that makes life worth living.''*25 A system for processing deportation proceedings that effectively deprives the alien of representation strains the limits of the immigration statute under implicit constitutional norms.*26
Notes
(1) Sentencing Reform Act of 1995, 1995 N. Y. Laws, Ch. 3 (S. 5281, A. 7991), Sec.40 (McKinney September 1995), amending among other things N.Y. Exec. L. Sec.259-i. Section 30 of the act requires the sentencing court, with the acceptance of any plea of guilty to a felony, to advise the defendant on the record that the plea may have certain prejudicial effects under the immigration laws. One member of the first group of deportees under this provision, see text accompanying infra note 2, who protested as he was being deported that his deportation case was still under appeal, is being returned after a showing by his lawyer of administrative error by the INS.
(2) Ian Fisher, ``Pataki Announces Aliens' Expulsion,'' New York Times, Aug. 29, 1995, at 1, col. 3.
(3) See, e.g., opposing positions by Gov. George E. Pataki and Judy Rabinovitz, staff counsel, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, ``Deporting Criminals -- Is It Fair?'' (New York Daily News) Sept. 10, 1995, op-ed page.
(4) Supra note 2.
(5) According to information furnished by the N.Y. State Department of Correctional Services, of the 68,688 inmates, 59,661 are U.S. born, 8,794 foreign born, 233 of unknown birthplace; of the foreign born, 1,009 are awaiting determination by the INS; 2,694 are illegal aliens; 4,328 are legal permanent residents; 449 naturalized citizens, and 404 are Mariel Cubans. Cf. Cuomo v. Barr, 7 F3d 17, 18 (2d Cir. 1993) (``As of March 1992, New York held approximately 60,000 prisoners in state correctional facilities, 8 percent of whom were known to be aliens and an additional 4 percent of whom were suspected to be aliens.'')
(6) N.Y. Exec. L. Sec.259-i(2)(d) (McKinney 1993; see historical and statutory notes).
(7) Sentencing Reform Act of 1995, 1995 N. Y. Laws, Ch. 3 (S. 5281, A. 7991), Sec.40 (McKinney September 1995), amending N.Y. Exec. L. Sec.259i(2)(d).
(8) INA Sec.276(a), 8 USC Sec.1326(a). See also 3 Charles Gordon, Stanley Mailman and Stephen Yale-Loehr, Immigration Law and Procedure, Sec.85.07[2][d] (as revised, 1995).
(9) Also ineligible are those convicted of a class A-I felony (other than one defined in article 220 of the N.Y. Penal Law, which covers controlled substances offenses). Felony is defined in N.Y. Penal L. Sec.10.00 (McKinney 1987) as an offense for which a sentence may be imposed of more than one year imprisonment. N.Y. Penal L. Sec.55.05 (McKinney 1987) classifies felonies (A through E, with subclasses A-I and A-II) and misdemeanors (A through B and unclassified) for sentencing purposes.
(10) INA Sec.242(h), 8 USC Sec.1252(h).
(11) INA Sec.242(i), 8 USC Sec.1252(i), added by Act of Nov. 6, 1986, Pub. L. No. 99-603, Sec.701, 100 Stat. 3359, 3445. (12) See Cuomo v. Barr, 7 F3d 17 (2d Cir. 1993) (dismissal of New York's appeal) and Cuomo v. Barr, 812 F. Supp. 324 (NDNY 1993) (denial of New York's motion).
(13) Immigration Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101649, Sec.510, 104 Stat. 4978.
(14) INA Sec.242A(1), 8 USC Sec.1252a(1), as amended and renumbered by Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Pub. L. No. 103-322, Sec.130004(c), 108 Stat. 1796. (15) DOCS Today, Autumn 1995, at 18.
(16) See Cuomo v. Barr, 7 F3d 17 (2d Cir. 1993) (sustaining order dismissing application for permanent injunction to require the INS to take custody of criminal aliens in state prison release programs).
(17) See, e.g., INA Sec.212(c), 8 USC Sec.1182(c) (relief from exclusion and deportation for longtime permanent residents), INA Sec.244, 8 USC Sec.1254 (suspension of deportation), INA Sec.245, 8 USC Sec.1255 (adjustment of status to permanent resident with waiver of ground of exclusion or deportation). See generally 3 Gordon, Mailman and Yale-Loehr, supra note 8, at Ch. 74.
(18) See generally 3 Gordon, Mailman and Yale-Loehr, supra note 8, at Ch. 74.
(19) I was so advised of this by Ruth Cassell, of Prisoners' Legal Services, and by Linda Kenepaske, current chair, AILA, N.Y. Chapter, ProBono Committee.
(20) INA Sec.292, 8 USC Sec.1362.
(21) See, e.g., Bugajewitz v. Adams 228 U.S. 585 (1913); Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580 (1952). See generally 3 Gordon, Mailman and Yale-Loehr, supra note 8, at
Sec.Sec.71.01[6][a], 71.02[3].
(22) See 1 Gordon, Mailman and Yale-Loehr, supra note 8, at Sec.4.01[1] (citing Matter of Santos, 19 I. & N. Dec. 105, 1 Immig. Rptr. B1-99 (BIA 1984)).
(23) See Montilla v. INS, 926 F2d 162, 168 (2d Cir. 1991); Castaneda-Delgado v. INS, 525 F2d 1295 (7th Cir. 1975). See also 1 Gordon, Mailman and Yale-Loehr, supra note 8, at Sec.4.01[1]. (24) Application by Department of Correctional Services for Innovations Awards 1995, Council of State Governments, at 1. (25) Brandeis, J., in Ng Fung Ho v. White, 259 U.S. 276, 284 (1922).
(26) See generally Hiroshi Motomura, ``Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation,'' 100 Yale L.J. 545 (December 1990). I am grateful for the patient assistance of several persons in providing me with information on deportation hearings for inmates in New York's correctional facilities, and the background to the New York statute discussed in this article. Among them are Anthony J. Annucci, Deputy Commissioner and Counsel of the New York Department of Correctional Services; Ruth Cassell and Robert Selkov, Prisoners' Legal Services; Linda Kenepaske, current chair, American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), N.Y. Chapter, Pro-Bono Committee; and Judy Rabinovitz, Staff Counsel, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. While I hope I got the facts right, I expect none of these people to agree with all of the conclusions reached or suggested here.
Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)
CA: $600 million to build new "mental health" beds
"The receiver, Robert Sillen, said outside of Karlton's courtroom this week that it was possible that the mental health system could also be placed under his control. Peter Farber-Szekrenyi, the state's top corrections health care official, also said that was a possibility. On Thursday, Karlton accepted an administration proposal that will lead to a smaller-scale construction boom during the next five years. The state built 22 prisons in the past 25 years." __________________
San Francisco Chronicle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
695 new beds to be added in response to class action suit
Mark Martin, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Friday, April 28, 2006
Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has committed to spending more than $600 million to build new mental health facilities for inmates, continuing a prison building boom that has lasted for more than two decades.
U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton approved a long-range administration plan to add 695 new beds for mentally ill inmates Thursday as part of an 11-year-old class action lawsuit against the state. Karlton approved the plan at the end of a two-day hearing in which he called the state's lack of progress in providing constitutionally required mental health care for prisoners shocking and noted that fixing the problem will ultimately be "horrifically expensive.''
Karlton also ordered corrections officials to make several other short-term moves to provide more mental health treatment. The immediate fixes are needed in part because of a population explosion in the prison system that has left authorities with no room to house or treat troubled inmates.
One inmate at San Quentin State Prison who was described as psychotic by prison staff went 20 days without any contact with a mental health specialist and was temporarily kept naked in a cell with no toilet or bed. He later gouged at his own eyes and is now blind, according to court documents filed by attorneys representing inmates. The same report noted that in February only 30 of 230 inmates who were referred for mental health crisis treatment got into a program within the required 24 hours.
The mental health lawsuit is one of many problems facing a prison system that has lost two leaders in the past two months. Schwarzenegger appointed an acting corrections secretary last week after Jeanne Woodford abruptly quit.
Amid overcrowding that has many prisons at more than 200 percent capacity, another federal judge, Thelton Henderson, has taken control of the system's other medical programs.
The move stripped the system of authority to set its health care budget and policies and gave the power to a receiver who began his job last week.
The receiver, Robert Sillen, said outside of Karlton's courtroom this week that it was possible that the mental health system could also be placed under his control. Peter Farber-Szekrenyi, the state's top corrections health care official, also said that was a possibility.
On Thursday, Karlton accepted an administration proposal that will lead to a smaller-scale construction boom during the next five years. The state built 22 prisons in the past 25 years.
The plan calls for new mental health facilities, run by the corrections system, to be built at several prison sites, including Folsom and Vacaville. Construction costs alone are projected to top $600 million, and staffing costs will add much more to the final bill of a prison system budget that has grown by more than 60 percent just in Schwarzenegger's tenure as governor. Taxpayers now spend more than $8 billion each year on corrections.
Michael Bien, the San Francisco attorney representing the inmates, called the plan an important step toward providing adequate care to the 20 percent of the state's inmate population estimated to need mental health care. But he noted the department faces an immediate crisis due to the current population surge.
"The problem is the next five years, and it's a big problem,'' he said.
Karlton ordered the state to provide more bed space during the next year to inmates, and he is expected to require the state to increase the salaries of psychiatrists and other mental health specialists to help increase staffing levels.
Karlton noted in court that due to the closure of state mental hospitals in the 1960s, "the prisons have become, in effect, mental hospitals.''
That policy change is partially responsible for the prison system's predicament, Karlton noted.
"The state has made that judgment, and now the state has to pay the piper,'' Karlton said. "And it's going to be horrifically expensive.''
E-mail Mark Martin at markmartin@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/28/BAGN1IH44L1.DTL&
type=health
Posted by lois at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)
Fears of deportation raids spread among illegal immigrants nationwide
By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ
Associated Press Writer
April 29, 2006, 8:42 AM EDT
MIAMI -- Thousands of illegals immigrants stayed home this week amid rumors of immigration roundups that federal officials say were unfounded, leaving some industries scrambling for workers.
Len Mills, executive vice president of Associated General Contractors of South Florida, estimated at least 50 percent of workers on construction jobs in the region had not shown up for work.
"This is costing millions of dollars a day, and I don't know who is going to pay for it," he said.
Rumors of random sweeps were rampant from coast to coast Friday, prompting many immigrants to stay home from work, take their children out of school and avoid church. Their absences added to immigrants' fears, as some thought their friends and co-workers had been arrested.
Mills said he believed even some legal workers were afraid.
"Everybody's edgy," said Chris Ruske, owner of a southern New Jersey nursery. "There's an awful lot of rhetoric, and you wonder what's true. You wonder if the immigration Gestapo are coming to get you."
Construction and agriculture were among the industries most affected. Katie A. Edwards, executive director of Florida's Dade County Farm Bureau, said nearly a third of farmworkers did not come to the fields this week. Mari Ramos, a Peruvian nanny whose tourist visa ran out in 2003, listened when friends warned her not to take public transportation or risk arrest. "That's when I became nervous. I stopped going to my night job," the 36-year-old Miami woman said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Dean Boyd said the agency has received hundreds of calls about immigration raids in recent days. Such rumors are typical after a raid like the one last week in which more than 1,000 employees of pallet manufacturer IFCO were arrested at more than 40 company sites nationwide, he said.
"However, we don't conduct random sweeps," he said. "All our arrests are the result of investigations, evidence and intelligence."
ICE officials acknowledged they have stepped up arrests under their "Operation Phoenix," an existing program to find and deport fugitive illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds.
Many wondered whether the rumors would deter people from national immigration protests planned for Monday.
The National Immigration Law Center called on organizations nationwide to sign a petition urging ICE to assure the public it won't make any immigration arrests during the protests.
The agency said its policy is not to discuss potential operations. "ICE will continue to operate as it does every day of the year," Boyd said.
The rumors affected a wide variety of businesses. In New Jersey and New York, day-laborer gathering sites drew only a trickle of workers.
"It is the ugliest of rumors because it has intimidated people who are already afraid. They are living in the shadows of society, wondering who is going to knock on the door," said the Rev. Allan Ramirez, pastor of the Brookville Dutch Reform Church in Long Island, N.Y.
Elias Bermudez, an activist and talk show host for a Spanish-language radio station in Phoenix, said many believe they are being punished for participating in recent protests in favor of legalizing the status of many illegal immigrants.
In the rural town of Homestead, Fla., more than a dozen parents lined up early to take their kids out of Redondo Elementary School on Wednesday for fear of a raid, said activist Jonathan Fried, who heads the nonprofit "We Count!"
"It's caused tremendous fear in our community, like I've never seen before," Fried said.
On Friday, ICE announced the arrests of 106 illegal immigrant fugitives and 19 immigration status violators throughout the Midwest over the last 10 days. Of those, 46 had criminal records, according to the department. Earlier this week, ICE announced the arrest of 183 fugitives in Florida alone.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association said Friday it believes some of the concerns may have been fueled by confusion over a widespread fugitive roundup by the U.S. Marshals Service. That roundup lead to more than 9,000 arrests of people wanted for a number of crimes, and ICE assisted in the effort but it said most of those detained were U.S. citizens.
ttp://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--immigrationfears0
429apr29,0,5636290.story?coll=ny-region-apnewjersey___
Associated Press Writers Suzette Laboy in Miami, Bonnie Pfister in New Jersey, Amanda Lee Myers in Phoenix and Adam Geller and Pat Milton in New York contributed to this report.
Posted by lois at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
Single-Faith Prison Program Questioned
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 29, 2006; A02
The Justice Department plans to set aside cellblocks at up to half a dozen federal prisons for an ambitious pilot program to prepare inmates for release. But it has produced an outcry by saying that it wants a private group to counsel the prisoners according to a single faith.
The plans do not specify what that faith must be, but they appear to rule out secular counseling or programs that offer inmates guidance in a variety of faiths.
The Washington-based advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State charged in a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons has tailored its bidding requirements to fit one particular program: an immersion in evangelical Christianity offered by Charles W. Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Outlining 10 ways in which the Bureau of Prisons' request for proposals from private contractors dovetails with Prison Fellowship's "InnerChange" program, Americans United contended that the plan is unconstitutional and urged Gonzales to withdraw it. Gonzales has not responded to the April 19 letter, Americans United said.
Independent experts on constitutional law asked by The Washington Post to review the bidding documents also questioned the plan's legality.
"There are all sorts of gray areas in the interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. This doesn't seem to be in the gray area," said Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. "This seems to favor religion over non-religion, and some religions over other religions. By wanting to fund only one religion, I think it runs afoul of what even the most conservative justices would be willing to tolerate."
Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas School of Law said he believes that "you can run religious programs in federal prisons" and that they "are highly promising." But he said the plan for taxpayer-funded counseling in a single faith, without any obvious provision for a secular alternative, is "problematic."
"One of the questions you have to ask is, 'Does the regular prison program do anything comparable to prepare prisoners for reentry?' " Laycock said. "I don't know the answer, but I've read that most prisons don't do much of anything. So in fact there may be no secular equivalent, and if the only way to get preparation for release is to go into a 'single-faith' program, that seems to be coercion of religion."
Department of Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the plan is noncoercive -- and constitutional -- because participation will be voluntary and the inmates who choose to take part will receive "no reduction in their sentence . . . no better facilities, same food, same privileges and disciplinary rules."
"In fact," Roehrkasse said in an e-mail, "chances are good that if they apply and are accepted for [the program] they must be moved farther away from home to participate, meaning they probably receive no family visits for the 18 month term of the program."
Roehrkasse said the bidding requirements were not tailored to Prison Fellowship Ministries. "Any and all organizations -- of any faith or none -- are eligible and invited to submit a proposal," he said.
On March 30, the Bureau of Prisons put out a formal request for proposals from private contractors to run the pre-release program, which it has named Life Connections. It held a meeting with possible bidders on April 18 and has set a May 16 deadline for proposals.
Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci L. Billingsley said $3 million has been appropriated for the program. She said it is possible that he bureau could approve several proposals and set up, say, a Roman Catholic program at one prison, a Jewish program at another and an evangelical Protestant program at a third.
"It's early to speculate, but we hope we'll have multiple contractors and multiple locations," she said. She added that she did not know whether inmates would be allowed to transfer between prisons to participate in a program of their choice.
Several federal prisons currently have multifaith programs in which inmates can select the faith they wish to study. This is the first time that the Bureau of Prisons has attempted to set up reentry programs built around a single faith, Billingsley said.
The request for proposals said the government "intends to make multiple awards for the provision of single-faith, residential reentry programs at one or more pilot site locations."
It said the purpose of the program is to "facilitate personal transformation for the participating inmates, and thereby reduce recidivism." It required contractors to "match inmates with personal mentors" from a "faith community" or other support groups, and it listed 10 "goal areas," including "spiritual development."
Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship Ministries, said it operates single-faith residential prison programs in six states and is "very interested" in the federal program, but has not decided whether to submit a proposal. He said his organization did not have any advance input.
"We didn't even know it was going to happen -- we just heard about it through the grapevine," he said.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Posted by lois at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
Florence L. Mars, 83, Who Was Spurned for Rights Work, Dies
April 29, 2006
By NADINE BROZAN
Florence Latimer Mars, who defied the society into which she was born to write a searing book about the effects of the 1964 killings of the civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Earl Chaney on her hometown, Philadelphia, Miss., died on Sunday at her home there. She was 83.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Dawn Lea Chalmers, a second cousin. She had been suffering from Bell's palsy and diabetes. An only child who never married, Miss Mars had no immediate survivors.
The author of "Witness in Philadelphia," published in 1977 by the Louisiana State University Press, she repeatedly spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan and other forces oppressing the black population of east central Mississippi. A fourth-generation resident of the area and a member of its landed gentry, she was also a significant source of information for the F.B.I. agents investigating the killings, and she testified before a federal grand jury.
Miss Mars paid dearly for her efforts. The Klan organized a boycott against the stockyard where she sold cattle, forcing it to close, and she was compelled to resign from posts at the First United Methodist Church.
"Less than 24 hours after I testified before a grand jury investigating those murders (and the church burning that preceded them), the Klan initiated a campaign to 'ruin' me, a WASP lady with eight great-grandparents buried in Neshoba County," she wrote in her book, completed with the assistance of Lynn Eden, now the associate director for research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Stanley Dearman, who was editor of The Neshoba Democrat from 1966 to 2000, said: "There was a lot of animosity toward her for being so outspoken. She had threats against her life, anonymous midnight phone calls, and people driving by her house throwing bricks and shouting obscenities. But she had a lot of moral courage and conviction and was not shakable."
In his foreword to her book, Turner Catledge, a former executive editor of The New York Times, who grew up in Philadelphia, wrote of her: "What a witness! She witnessed with her eyes, her ears and her heart. She saw, she heard, she felt and through her own involvement she bore witness to qualities of courage and goodwill that all but evaporated in the climate of passion that flowed from an unreasoning fear of change."
Florence Mars, a diminutive woman barely five feet tall, seemed an unlikely candidate for the defiant role she assumed. She was born on Jan. 1, 1923, to Adam Longino Mars, a lawyer, and Emily Geneva Johnson Mars, known as Neva.
She graduated from Philadelphia High School and attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. She graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1944, and then worked as a reservations agent for Delta Air Lines in Atlanta. In the 1950's, she lived in New Orleans, where she photographed jazz musicians. In 1962, she returned to Philadelphia, raising cattle and owning and running the Neshoba County Stockyards.
She also stepped into the forefront of the battle for civil rights in her town. She allied herself with the Council of Federated Organizations, a consortium of groups like S.N.C.C., CORE and the N.A.A.C.P.
One of her more frightening encounters with the Klan occurred late one night in July 1965 when she was driving home from a party at the Neshoba County fair and was picked up by the sheriff, Lawrence A. Rainey, on trumped-up charges of drunken driving. He dragged her out of her car and jailed her. A member of the Klan, Mr. Rainey was later tried on charges of violating the civil rights of the three young civil rights workers killed outside Philadelphia, and was acquitted.
In June 2005, Miss Mars was in the courtroom in Philadelphia when Edgar Ray Killen, by then 80, mastermind of the ambush of the civil rights workers, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison. (The verdict is being appealed.)
Miss Mars was vindicated not only by her friends but also by her foes. At her funeral service on Thursday, Mr. Dearman said, "People said, 'Florence was right.' People who don't remember how they acted."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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April 28, 2006
‘Landmark’ study shows HIV spread in Ga. prisons
LOCAL NEWS | www.sovo.com
By DYANA BAGBY
Apr. 28, 2006
A study of HIV infection rates among Georgia prisoners released last week by the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention prompted AIDS activists to renew calls to make condoms available to inmates.
"This is the most in-depth study done within the U.S. prison system on HIV transmission, making it a landmark study," said Jeff Graham, senior director for advocacy and communications for Atlanta-based AIDS Survival Project.
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"As advocates, we’ve always known anecdotally that HIV was spread in prisons," Graham said. "But without solid proof, it was hard to make a case for prevention measures. Hopefully we can use this study not only in Georgia but around the country."
The report, "HIV Transmission Among Male Inmates in a State Prison System - Georgia, 1992-2005," was published April 21 in the CDC’s Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report.
In October 2005, the Georgia Department of Correction housed 44,990 male inmates with 856 — nearly 2 percent — reported to be HIV positive. Of that 856 total, 780 (or 91 percent) were infected before incarceration, and 732 (or 86 percent) were black, the report states.
From July 1988 through February 2005, a total of 88 male inmates were HIV negative when sentenced but then contracted HIV while in prison, according to the report.
Not surprisingly, the CDC identified sex between male inmates and sharing needles for tattoos and drug use as the most common risk behaviors for HIV inside prison walls.
"CDC recommends that HIV education, testing, and prevention counseling be made available to populations at increased behavioral or clinical risk for HIV infection, including inmates in correctional facilities," the report said.
CDC epidemiologist Patrick Sullivan, who led the study, noted that the Georgia Department of Corrections offered voluntary HIV testing during part of the study period, from 2003 until 2005, but then stopped it. The CDC is recommending the prison system re-implement the voluntary HIV testing, Sullivan added.
"We know that most people who find they are HIV positive take steps to reduce risk to their partners," Sullivan said. "One-third of inmates said they used some kind of barrier — like rubber gloves or plastic wrap — which shows an interest on their part to want to have protected sex."
The CDC report notes that condoms are provided to some inmates in state prisons in Mississippi and Vermont and jails in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
"Departments of corrections without condom distribution programs should assess relevant state laws, policies, and circumstances to determine the feasibility and benefits and risks of implementing such programs," the report states.
But Yolanda Thompson, public affairs director for the state Department of Corrections, said Georgia has no immediate plans to implement any new HIV initiatives, although the CDC study may spark future discussions.
"What this study will enable us to do is to identify and broaden our definition of public safety and public health," she said.
‘Contraband’ condoms
Thompson confirmed that condoms are considered "contraband" in Georgia prisons and sex between inmates is forbidden by both state law and prison policy.
But according to Graham of AIDS Survival Project, the state needs to reconsider its policies in light of the CDC findings.
"This study really challenges the corrections officials to recreate policy that will make sense in terms of protecting public health," he said.
John Cole Vodicka, director of the Prison & Jail Project, a statewide prisoners’ rights advocacy group, agreed that simply banning sex in prison is ineffective.
"You’d have more success stopping HIV in prison by having better education, better protection like condoms, and more attention to human rights than you would if you just said ‘no sex allowed,’" he said.
© 2006 The Southern Voice | A Window Media Publication
http://www.southernvoice.com/2006/4-28/news/localnews/gaprisons.cfm
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Rush Limbaugh Arrested on Prescription Drug Charges
April 28, 2006
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., April 29 (AP) — Rush Limbaugh was arrested today on prescription drug charges, with his lawyer saying he has reached a deal with prosecutors that will eventually see the charges dismissed if he continues treatment for drug addiction.
The subject of a three-year investigation by prosecutors, Mr. Limbaugh turned himself in to authorities on a warrant charging him with fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Jail.
The 55-year-old conservative radio commentator came into the jail about 4 p.m. with his lawyer, Roy Black, and left an hour later after he was photographed and fingerprinted and he posted $3,000 bail, Ms. Barbera said.
"He just kind of came in and he left," Ms. Barbera said.
Mr. Black said his client and prosecutors had reached a settlement on a charge of doctor shopping filed today by the local State Attorney's Office, which Mr. Black said would be dismissed in 18 months if Mr. Limbaugh complied with court guidelines.
As a primary condition of the dismissal, Mr. Limbaugh must continue to seek treatment from the doctor he has seen for the last two and a half years, Mr. Black said.
Mr. Limbaugh entered a plea of not guilty in court today on the charge and Mr. Black maintained his client's innocence.
"Mr. Limbaugh and I have maintained from the start that there was no doctor shopping, and we continue to hold this position," Mr. Black said in an e-mailed statement. Doctor shopping is when a patient illegally deceives multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions.
According to Mr. Black, Mr. Limbaugh also has agreed to make a $30,000 payment to the state to defray the public cost of the investigation. The agreement also provides that he must refrain from violating the law in the next 18 months, must pay $30 a month for the cost of supervision and comply with other similar provisions of the agreement.
Prosecutors did not immediately return a call for comment.
They began investigating Mr. Limbaugh in 2003 after the National Enquirer reported his housekeeper's accusations. He took a five-week leave from his radio program to enter a rehabilitation program and acknowledged he had become addicted to pain medication. He blamed severe back pain for his prescription drug abuse.
Prosecutors seized Mr. Limbaugh's records after learning that he had received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his house in Palm Beach. The investigation was held up as the prosecutors and Mr. Black battled in court over whether the records had been properly seized.
Mr. Limbaugh reported five years ago that he had lost most of his hearing because of an autoimmune inner-ear disease. He had surgery to have an electronic device placed in his skull to restore his hearing. But research shows that abusing opiate-based painkillers can also cause profound hearing loss.
Before his own problems became public, Mr. Limbaugh had decried drug use and abuse and had mocked President Bill Clinton for saying he had not inhaled when he tried marijuana. He often made the case that drug crimes deserve punishment.
"Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country," Mr. Limbaugh said on his short-lived television program on Oct. 5, 1995. "And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs."
He added, "And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."
On the same show, he commented that the statistics that show blacks go to prison more often than whites for the same drug offenses only illustrated that "too many whites are getting away with drug use."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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New York Killers, and Those Killed, by Numbers
April 28, 2006
By JO CRAVEN McGINTY
The oldest killer was 88; he murdered his wife. The youngest was 9; she stabbed her friend. The women were more than twice as likely as men to murder a current spouse or lover. But once the romance was over, only the men killed their exes. The deadliest day was on July 10, 2004, when eight people died in separate homicides.
Five people eliminated a boss; 10 others murdered co-workers. Males who killed favored firearms, while women and girls chose knives as often as guns. More homicides occurred in Brooklyn than in any other borough. More happened on Saturday. And roughly a third are unsolved.
At the end of each year, the New York Police Department reports the number of killings — there were 540 in 2005. Typically, much is made of how the number has fallen in recent years — to totals not seen since the early 1960's. But beyond summarizing the overarching trends, the police spend little time compiling the individual details.
The New York Times obtained the basic records for every murder in the city over the last three years, and while the events make for disturbing reading, the numbers can hint at trends, occasionally solve a mystery and in at least some straightforward way answer for the city the questions of who kills and who is killed in the five boroughs.
From 2003 through 2005, 1,662 murders were committed in New York. No information, beyond an occasional physical description, is available on the killers in the unsolved cases.
Of the rest, men and boys were responsible for 93 percent of the murders; they killed with guns about two-thirds of the time; their victims tended to be other men and boys; and in more than half the cases, the killer and the victim knew each other.
The police said they were more interested in disrupting crime patterns. "We're looking for things with operational implications — time of day, day of the week — to see that we deploy officers at the right times and in sufficient numbers," said Michael J. Farrell, deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives.
The offender and victim were of the same race in more than three-quarters of the killings. And according to Mr. Farrell, they often had something else in common: More than 90 percent of the killers had criminal records; and of those who wound up killed, more than half had them.
"If the average New Yorker is concerned about being murdered in a random crime, the odds of that happening are really remote," Mr. Farrell said. "If you are living apart from a life of crime, your risk is negligible."
Criminologists confirm that assessment. "People will be shocked to see how safe it is to live in New York City," said Andrew Karmen, a sociology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert on victimology. "Victims and offenders are pretty much pulled from the same background. Very often, young victims have young killers. Very often, the victim and killer knew each other."
But plenty of times, events diverge from the norm.
At least a quarter of the city's murders in these three years, were committed by strangers, and in those instances, most were the result of a dispute. Stranger homicides now happen at almost twice the rate of 50 years ago, when, according to a classic study by Marvin Wolfgang, a criminologist, about 14 percent of murders were committed by strangers.
"Homicide used to be regarded as an acquaintance phenomenon with relatively rare incidents involving strangers," said Steven F. Messner, a homicide expert and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany. "It's still characteristically an acquaintance event. But the stranger homicides are now nontrivial."
After four years as commander of the Brooklyn North homicide squad, Lt. John Cornicello said the murders in his section of the borough had begun to run together. Yet from memory, he rolled off the details of several: The good Samaritan shot for his Lincoln Navigator after offering a ride to a group of stranded people. The ".40-caliber killer," a serial murderer who shot and killed but did not rob four shopkeepers because he believed they were Middle Eastern.
"More and more, they seem to be the result of stupidity," Lieutenant Cornicello said. "Take the Potato Wedge Killer."
In that recent case, a customer at a KFC restaurant became incensed when he did not receive enough starch with his fried chicken order. After demanding both a refund and an order of potato wedges, he later confronted the cashier with whom he had argued and stabbed him to death.
Among all the city's victims, the oldest was 91; she died during a robbery. Whites and Asians, who seldom murdered, were also infrequently killed: Together, they represented 75 or fewer victims each year. Most homicides occurred outdoors. The deadliest hour was 1 to 2 a.m.
And a small but unsettling number of children were among the victims, including 21 infants and 32 children ages 1 to 10, most of whom died at the hands of a parent.
According to Professor Karmen, 10 is the safest age. "You're too old to be abused or neglected as a child," he said, "and you're not old enough to be out on the streets."
An interesting, though uncommon, group of murders that made it into the police accounting in these years involved a handful of victims who died of injuries they had first suffered in crimes committed one or more years before.
Stabbed, shot, beaten or burned, they survived long enough to be counted as murder victims in another calendar year.
Sixty-nine victims fit this description.
In some instances, they were injured decades ago. The medical examiner alerts the police when such deaths occur, according to Sgt. Edward Yee of the Police Department's crime analysis unit, and the police add the victims to that year's murder tally.
For example, 21 deaths that were counted as murders in 2005 resulted from injuries that occurred in earlier years.
The oldest involved a shooting in 1975, when a man attacked his brother in a domestic dispute. That raised the murder toll to 540, the lowest figure recorded by the city in four decades, but only 519 murders were committed last year.
Subtracting these belated deaths makes the recent decline in the number of homicides — which has grabbed headlines — seem even more stunning. But for the purpose of generating the annual murder tally, the police do not distinguish between fresh and delayed murders.
"No one does," Mr. Farrell said, referring to other police departments.
Within the city, 40 percent of the murders occurred in Brooklyn. The 75th Precinct, with 90, had the most of any precinct, but there were hot spots scattered throughout the city,