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July 31, 2006
Tipping the Scales of Justice
Tipping the scales of justice
By NEAL PEIRCE
July 31, 2006
Syndicated columnist.
Daily Hamphire Gazette, Northampton, MA
With a recent uptick in crime, tough prosecutors who are ready to convict and imprison perpetrators are likely to be more popular than ever.
But a warning flag is being hoisted by American University law professor Angela J. Davis, past director of the District of Columbia Public Defender Service (and no relation to the more famed liberal activist Angela Y. Davis).
Prosecutors, notes Davis, are ''the most powerful officials in the criminal justice system'' - more so even than judges. Why? ''The charging and plea-bargaining power they exercise almost predetermines the outcome of most criminal cases. Over 95 percent of all criminal cases are resolved by a guilty plea.''
Consider a person arrested for having a quantity of drugs on him or her. Depending on the amount, the prosecutor can charge simple possession (a misdemeanor), or possession with intent to distribute (a felony that in most jurisdictions means a mandatory prison sentence). So it's the prosecutor, through his charge and plea-bargaining powers, who really decides prison time (and most likely a wrecked life) for the defendant, or not.
The most serious system-wide issue, argues Davis in her forthcoming book, ''Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor,'' isn't the isolated, fairly rare case of a prosecutor coercing witnesses, fabricating evidence or consciously targeting racial minorities.
Rather, it's the lack of controls on, or accountability for, the everyday decisions of prosecutors. Their legal responsibility isn't just to represent the state in seeking convictions; it's to pursue justice. But too often, Davis asserts, prosecutors exercise their discretion ''haphazardly at worst and arbitrarily at best, resulting in inequitable treatment of both victims and defendants.''
There's the ''win-win-win'' ethos in many prosecutors' offices - elected prosecutors and their staffs out to show how tough they are on crime, or how eager to impose death penalties in heinous cases (especially when there's strong media interest, or photogenic victims). Sometimes prosecutors overcharge grossly so they can wring heavier plea bargains out of defendants, or they adopt a ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy toward potential police abuses in the arresting phase.
Views on class and race, even unconsciously, lead prosecutors to make shoot-from-the-hip decisions easily at odds with true justice, Davis asserts: ''I saw it all the time in the D.C. system. A rich kid comes in (though few are arrested) with parents and family lawyer, explaining 'Little Johnny has a drug problem and let's put him in a program, not lock him up.' The prosecutor usually agrees. But a poor, black or Latino kid comes in on a parallel drug case, maybe with a public defender, and the prosecutor figures - 'I can't let you back into the neighborhood, I'll send you to jail.'''
Davis also pinpoints how appointed U.S. attorneys, pursuing the country's ''war on drugs,'' have focused relentlessly on convicting and incarcerating even small-time neighborhood drug dealers and their girlfriends and family members, especially from inner-city neighborhoods, even on the scantiest of evidence. Federal drug prosecutions tripled between 1981 and 1990.
Under our system, all officials wielding government power should be and are subject to checks - but we've ended up, Davis asserts, ''giving prosecutors a pass'' - no effective control by voters, legislatures or the judiciary itself. Voters have little idea of how prosecutors are actually handling cases. Legislatures (and Congress) pay scant attention beyond frequently bolstering prosecution powers.
The U.S. Supreme Court has severely circumscribed conditions under which prosecutors' judgment can be questioned at all, referring cases to states' attorney disciplinary authorities that are themselves known to be weak. From 1970 to the mid-1990s, one study found, there were only 44 cases nationwide in which prosecutors faced disciplinary hearings of misconduct; even then, a reprimand was generally the worst punishment.
So what's to be done? Prosecutors themselves have traditionally resisted oversight. The public has been inundated with television programming that justifies prosecutors going right up to the edge on ethics and the law to get the ''bad guys.'' The American Bar Association publishes standards of behavior for prosecutors, but the strictures have no teeth - they're just ''aspirational,'' Davis notes.
Davis would have national, state and local bar associations conduct in-depth investigations to determine the adequacy of current prosecutorial misconduct controls, and possible reforms. She'd have bar associations set up state and/or local prosecution review boards - not only to receive specific complaints brought by the public, but also to undertake random reviews of prosecutions and (with colleges and universities) launch surveys to reveal discriminatory practices by race or class.
The idea is that an outside eye could discourage arbitrary, hard-to-justify choices by prosecutors without chilling the essential, fair law enforcement we all depend on prosecutors to perform.
Against the formidable, entrenched power of today's federal-state-local prosecutorial systems, any prospect of significant culture reform seems remote. But if we're ever to dare a start, Davis offers a group of eminently reasonable first steps.
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
Posted by lois at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)
VT: Feds Seek More Cells
Feds seek more Vermont prison beds
By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau
July 27, 2006
http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060727/NEWS/607270371/1002/NEWS01
MONTPELIER — State officials are not the only ones facing the problem of what to do with the growing number of Vermont prisoners. Because of a shortage of prison beds, federal authorities are shipping many of those accused of federal crimes in Vermont out of state, and they expect the problem to get worse.
U.S. Marshal John Edwards asked state legislators Wednesday to consider building a new prison that could house both federal and state detainees who are awaiting trial.
Lawmakers said state budget pressures make the construction of such a facility, which could cost $65 million, unlikely.
Edwards said his agency and other federal authorities find it "almost impossible" to find space for detainees.
U.S. Marshals have custody of roughly 100 to 120 pretrial prisoners at any given time in Vermont. They have a contract for only 40 beds in the state's prisons, however, and as a result, prisoners are being driven to Vermont federal court appearances from 15 prisons in five states, Edwards said. Some come from as far away as Rhode Island. Moving those prisoners is expensive, time-consuming and dangerous, he said.
After trial, those prisoners are freed or taken to federal prisons elsewhere. Vermont also houses about 100 detainees from other federal agencies, many of them people being held on immigration-related charges.
Meanwhile, the state houses roughly 450 of its own prisoners in Kentucky and Oklahoma —roughly equal to the 400 or so pretrial state prisoners Vermont holds in state facilities.
If the state were to build a 650-bed prison — probably somewhere in Chittenden County — it could house federal and state detainees and also allow Vermont's own prisoners to be returned from out of state, officials said.
"This is an issue we have been talking about with the state for some time," Edwards said.
Commissioner of Corrections Rob Hofmann agreed that federal authorities face a real problem. He also said it would be good for the state to be able to separate detainees who have not yet been tried from those who have been convicted and are serving time.
"The people who are out of state would not have to be there if we could solve our detainee problem," Hofmann said. But, he added, "I don't see the capital money being there in the near term."
Building a massive prison — the state's newest prison in Springfield has only 350 beds — is unlikely to happen soon, if ever.
There is a possibility that $5 million in federal money could be set aside for building such a facility in Vermont, one of only a few states where the shortage of beds for federal prisoners is considered severe, Edwards said. The federal government would pay a per-prison, per-day rate to the state for operating the facility.
But even if that $5 million was approved, it wouldn't begin to touch the cost of the new facility, which at roughly $100,000 per bed could reach $65 million, lawmakers said. For comparison, the state spends a little over $40 million a year on all of its capital projects.
"The money just is not there," said Sen. Susan Bartlett, D-Lamoille, a member of the Corrections Oversight Committee.
Meanwhile, the state continues struggling with other costly projects, including replacement of the ailing Vermont State Hospital and the building of a new corrections work camp. Sen. Richard Sears, D-Bennington, vice chairman of the committee, said community opposition could throw up additional roadblocks.
"I think it is very, very unlikely that any community in Vermont is going to want a 650-bed facility," Sears said.
Vermonters who are convicted or accused under state law cost about $20,000 to house in private prisons out of state. Housing them in Vermont costs twice that amount. So, even while state officials would like to eliminate the practice of sending Vermonters to out-of-state prisons, doing so would be costly.
Strengthened enforcement of laws following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 has doubled the number of federal detainees, Edwards said. Federal authorities would like access to 150 beds in Vermont as they plan for the future.
Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield, chairwoman of the committee, said increased enforcement of drug crimes, not detentions related to terrorism, is driving the increase in the number of federal detainees. She called it an example of the federal government putting fiscal pressure on the states.
"It is the states that are going to be paying the cost," Emmons said.
Contact Louis Porter at louis.porter@rutlandherald.com.
Posted by lois at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)
CO: Will more private prisons Solve the Crisis or Create Mess?
Will more private prisons solve crisis or create mess?
By R. SCOTT RAPPOLD THE GAZETTE
July 31, 2006
http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1319756
Colorado prison officials, faced with unparalleled crowding, are poised to embark on the state’s largest private-prison expansion in years.
By the time three companies build medium-security prisons for 3,776 inmates by the middle of 2008, one in three Colorado inmates will be housed in forprofit facilities.
Despite the state’s growing reliance on private prisons, Department of Corrections officials still have deep concerns about the projects, and numerous issues remain that could derail them — including two companies’ insistence their cells be filled before those in state-run prisons.
If the strategy doesn’t work, Colorado faces severe problems: state prisons overflowing, inmates being left in already crowded county jails for long periods, and others released onto the streets for lack of beds.
If it does work, critics say Colorado will have adopted a justice system that doesn’t look at cutting sentences or reducing recidivism, but merely locking people up. Colorado is one of a few states increasing its investment in private prisons.
“I don’t believe they’re cheaper in general,” said state Rep. Buffie McFadyen, a Pueblo Democrat and opponent of private prisons. “As long as you have stockholders wanting more bodies and cells, there’s no incentive for that company to reduce the number of people in prison.”
Contracts have been awarded for one new prison and two prison expansions for men, and one new prison for women. Implementation agreements must still be worked out.
Neither company building or expanding the male prisons — the bulk of the planned new work — has an impressive track record in Colorado. But the DOC, with only one staterun prison in the construction pipeline, says it has no choice to meet the immediate crisis.
“They (private-prison firms) kind of know they’ve got us over the barrel,” said Dave Schouweiler, purchasing manager for the DOC. “If we don’t use them, we’ve got to ship people out of state.”
Colorado’s prison crisis — state budget analysts estimate a shortfall of 1,428 beds by the 2007-2008 fiscal year — is the result of longer sentences and growth in the state’s court caseload, with judges sentencing about 1,000 people a year to prison.
At the same time, legislators coping with a recession and a tight budget slashed DOC funding requests for 2,061 beds from 2000 to 2004. The only new state-run prison planned is the 948-bed expansion of the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, to open in 2009.
Colorado faced a similar situation in the late 1990s, and private prison companies rode to the rescue, opening four prisons in small towns in eastern Colorado from 1996 to 1998, built on speculation the DOC would need them.
Times have changed. The bottom has fallen out of the private-prison industry nationwide because of overbuilding that left profit-generating cells empty.
“In the ’90s, it was like the roaring ’90s and then everybody was investing in private prisons,” Schouweiler said. “Now they’re much more cautious about building.”
Five companies submitted proposals for the three planned new private prisons, but three of those firms were dismissed by an evaluation committee of DOC officials because they didn’t meet their basic requirements of a privately run medium-security prison with two-person cells and locking cell doors, Schouweiler said. One company proposed a dormitory-style, pre-release facility. Another offered to build a prison and turn it over to the state to run. Another design had 16-person cells lined with bunk beds.
“I think our evaluation committee sort of reluctantly conceded those were the only two real prison designs we got,” Schouweiler said of proposals from Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group. of Boca Raton, Fla.
Several key issues still must be worked out in both projects.
Corrections Corporation of America was awarded contracts for 720-bed expansions at its prisons in Las Animas and Burlington.
At the Kit Carson Correctional Facility, the company’s original proposal called for employing just 59 guards, later revised to 64, for an expanded inmate population of 1,562, a ratio of 1 to 24.
Similarly, at the Bent County Correctional Facility, the company proposed to have 61 guards — later increased to 66 — for an expanded population of 1,457, a ratio of 1 to 22.
The officer-to-inmate ratio in the state prison system is 1 to 4.6, according to the DOC.
Alison Morgan, head of the DOC’s private prison monitoring unit, said she is confident her office and CCA can reach a consensus on staffing before an implementation agreement is signed.
CCA spokesman Steve Owen on Friday declined to elaborate on the negotiations, but he said the company feels its original proposal provided for adequate staffing.
It isn’t the first time staffing at a CCA prison in Colorado has been a concern.
In 2004, a riot broke out at the company’s Crowley County Correctional Facility, and an audit put much of the blame on low staffing levels. CCA signed new contracts with the DOC, allowing officials to issue fines for staffing deficiencies.
CCA was recently fined $103,743 for leaving 701 mandatory shifts vacant from Nov. 1 to Jan. 10 at the Kit Carson prison, Morgan said. The company was fined $23,000 for 157 unfilled shifts at the Crowley County prison and $2,651 for 18 vacancies at the Bent County prison.
Private prisons pay less than state prisons, and critics say most have high turnover.
Despite the fines, Morgan said CCA is making an effort to correct the staffing deficiencies.
“They had a problem two years ago, and they owned up to the problem and they increased staffing in the prison,” Morgan said.
For the other proposed facility for men, a new 1,500-bed prison in Ault, officials aren’t concerned about staffing but whether it will be built by winning bidder GEO.
The company was awarded a contract in 2003 to build a 500-bed pre-release, parole-revocation facility in Pueblo, but the project was held up by a location change, then a design change, and has not been built.
The DOC has dropped the facility from its bed-space plan and, according to a report of the Colorado General Assembly Joint Budget Committee, “The Department has expressed concern that it may not ever be built.”
McFadyen has doubts about the company’s ability to finance a new prison.
“If the Department of Corrections was that concerned about space, they would have forced GEO to fulfill its 2003 contract,” McFadyen said.
Morgan, though, said the company has the ability to build the prison.
“They provided a very strong bid. We awarded based on that bid, and we expect them to live up to it,” Morgan said.
Said McFadyen: “We’re choosing between a company that has a history of failing on an RFP (request for proposals) and another company that has been fined $120,000 for lack of compliance with the state. Those aren’t good choices.”
The new women’s prison is less controversial. Only two companies submitted bids, and the DOC awarded a contract to Houston-based Cornell Companies Inc. to build an 832-bed prison in Hudson. The firm’s only Colorado facility is the Southern Peaks Regional Treatment Center, a 160-bed adolescent facility in Cañon City.
Another point of contention: CCA and GEO demand to have first claim to every person sentenced to state prison.
It’s a condition Schouweiler said DOC officials are not comfortable granting. But the fact the companies made it a condition of their proposals — at least so far — shows how the climate has changed since the 1990s.
“To a large extent, we can’t dictate to them like we did in the ’90s,” he said. “They would like to see us in crisis when they open their doors.”
Morgan, who is negotiating the implementation agreements, declined to comment on the first-rights issue.
Said CCA spokesman Owen, “It’s normal and I think perfectly understandable we would try to reach in some way some assurances that what we bring on-line will be utilized.”
McFadyen has asked the General Assembly’s Legislative Audit Committee to look into the selection of both bids. According to the state auditor’s office, it will be discussed at the committee’s Aug. 21 meeting.
Although the state appears to save money — paying private firms $51.91 per inmate per day compared with the DOC’s daily cost of $67.73 for medium-security inmates — she sees “hidden costs” for communities and law enforcement.
Plus, McFayden worries there will be little motivation to look at reducing recidivism and cutting sentences when corporations depend on bodies in cells to make a profit.
A study released in May by The Institute on Money in State Politics found the private prison industry, in states with those facilities, spent $3.3 million in 2002-2004 supporting longer sentences and tough-oncrime candidates.
In Colorado, one of 10 states the institute examined, private prison firms and lobbyists contributed $81,525 to candidates and campaigns, and they helped to kill legislation that would have prohibited them from taking out-of-state inmates.
PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE PRISON COSTS
- Daily rate the state will pay private-prison operators: $51.91
- Annual rate: $18,947 per inmate
- Average daily cost to house an inmate in a medium-security state-run prison: $67.73
- Annual rate: $24,722 per inmate
COLORADO’S PRIVATE PRISON POPULATION
- June 30: 4,299 inmates, one in five Colorado Department of Corrections inmates
- DOC population: 22,012
- August 2008, projected privateprison population: 8,075, one in three DOC inmates
- Projected DOC population: 24,000
Posted by lois at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2006
An Illinois town is held cative by a still-empty prison
POSTED ON APRIL 20, 2006:
IDOC’s white elephant
An Illinois town is held captive by a still-empty prison
By Jamie Murnane
THOMSON, Ill. — The new signs at the north and south ends of Thomson give the town’s population as 600, but nobody remembers 50 people moving in since the last census. In this small Mississippi River community in northwest Illinois, they surely would have noticed. Dubbed by locals the “Melon Capital of the World,” Thomson is the quintessential small town, where everybody seems to know everybody else’s business.
But there is one thing in Thomson no one knows or can explain: Why, after nearly five years, the state of Illinois hasn’t opened the nearby $143 million maximum-security prison.
A few residents say they’ve heard that the prison is sinking into the soft, sandy soil on which it was built, but those rumors have no foundation, state officials say. The reason this new prison sits empty is simpler: Thanks to the state’s budget woes, the Illinois Department of Corrections hasn’t had the money to operate the Thomson Correctional Center.
So the town of Thomson waits.
Merrie Jo Enloe’s family moved to Thomson when she was a child, in the early 1950s, and she’s been the village president since 1983. Enloe says she stayed in Thomson because it’s a “quiet, peaceful community,” but the town has seen better days, and good jobs are hard to find.
“Carroll County has had the third-largest unemployment rate of all the counties in the state of Illinois,” she says. “It’s been running that way now for the last five years.”
Unless you’re a farmer, teacher, or otherwise self-employed, the best opportunities involve second-shift factory work grinding metal or packaging dog food in neighboring towns. These are considered good-paying jobs in Thomson, where the average household income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is $36,667.
The prison was supposed to change all that, with more than 750 jobs. As Jack Hartwig, former warden of the empty prison, says, “Anytime you can bring that kind of an industry to a town that needs jobs, open arms is what you get as a welcome sign.”
Former Gov. Jim Edgar put plans for the maximum-security prison in motion in the late 1990s. At the time he left office, a site hadn’t been selected, and several communities were in the hunt.
“When they offered to put it here, it was something that I personally felt would be good for the area,” Enloe says.
Not everyone was thrilled, despite the fact that the town would earn approximately a quarter-million dollars a year by hosting the prison — an amount that Enloe says is more than three times the town’s current operating budget. But when any major change is about to take place, there’s bound to be opposition.
A few residents even sold their homes and left, Enloe says. These people didn’t like the looks of a prison, she says, and a few were “concerned about the criminal element that might follow the inmates themselves — that there might be more crime.”
The prison sits on property donated to the state by Galena, Ill.-based Alliant Energy. Donna French, former owner of the popular Watermelon Café, says her family used to own that land when she was growing up. At the time Alliant donated it, one of her brothers was renting it to grow watermelons.
The power company purchased the land from her parents with the intention of putting a power plant there but found that the ground, which was riverbed before the Mississippi River shifted course, wasn’t stable enough, she says. If the ground could not hold a power company, many began to wonder, what made anyone think it would hold a prison?
Mark Gerardot, project manager for the Illinois Capital Development Board, says that the sand was actually “a blessing” during construction.
“The sand helped because there’s usually times when you get so much rain that it will stop work and everybody goes home for the day,” Gerardot says. “Up there, if it rained, they’d wait a half hour after it quit and they’d continue work. . . . The rain would just drain away.”
Gerardot’s agency completed construction and turned over the prison to the Department of Corrections in May 2001.
It remains the newest and most modern maximum-security facility in the state and one of the most expensive public works projects in state history, says Sergio Molina, IDOC spokesman.
It’s easy to see why.
The 146-acre complex comprises 15 buildings, including eight cell houses with 1,600 maximum-security cells. There’s also a 200-bed minimum-security unit that Gov. Rod Blagojevich wants to open this fall, contingent on funding from the General Assembly.
A visit shows that the facility’s ready for inmates. The concrete floors are shiny, as though they’ve just been poured; the only sound is trickling water, left running to protect the expensive plumbing system. The control room looks like something from the Sci-Fi Channel, ready to take off at any given moment. Touch screens control lights, cell doors, and cameras. Even toilets can be shut down — that’ll stop prisoners from trying to flush away contraband during a shakedown. Of course, with 350 cameras on the premises, it’d be hard for them to hide anything in the first place.
The kitchen is full of shining stainless-steel equipment, most still wrapped in the manufacturer’s packing; the offices are complete with new swivel chairs that reek of new plastic. Taxpayers pay nearly $2 million a year just to keep the lights and phones on at Thomson, according to a report released late last month by the state auditor general.
“What most people don’t realize is that we’re ready to go,” says assistant chief engineer Dan Sutzmore, head of operations and facilities. “People think it’s just sitting out here completely empty, but everything’s ready to go — office supplies, kitchen equipment, and mattresses. All we need is food and people.”
Because there’s little to look after, Sutzmore and assistant warden Vickie Wright are the only two state employees who work at the prison. A private company has a security guard stationed there to deal with trespassers. Every now and then, discarded beer cases are collected from the prison grounds.
Hartwig, warden of the empty prison for its first three years until he took early retirement, says that his stint there was like “getting a large city ready to run — getting everything you need to manage that city without the people, because tomorrow they may be there.”
Area residents who have waited for the prison to open have his sympathy, Hartwig says.
“Having it built is like waving the candy in front of a kid for four years and saying, ‘You can’t eat it yet,’ ” Hartwig says. “Pretty soon, they’re gonna lose interest or they’re gonna get mad or they’re just gonna take it.”
As soon as ground was broken for the prison, residents began preparing to cash in. New businesses were built and old ones remodeled; homes were renovated, built, and put on the market. Thomson no longer was just a place where people lived because they liked to stare at the stars, listen to the corn rustle, or catch fish.
Because of the prison, lawyer and longtime resident Lawrence Bruckner got into the hotel business. He opened the Thomson House Café and Lodge at a cost of $750,000, but business has been horrible, he says.
“If I didn’t have it paid for, I would have gone bankrupt three years ago,” Bruckner says. “I mean, we do well in the summer because of the fishermen and people going to Galena, but six months out of the year it’s an utter disaster.”
The Thomson House has been for sale since the day it opened — and that’s how Bruckner planned it. “Once they got the bond authorization, I said, ‘It’s a done deal’ — never thinking that they would build it and then not open it,” he says. Bruckner was so angry, he ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, making opening the prison the focus of his campaign. He came in fourth in a field of four in last month’s primary election.
Other residents share Bruckner’s frustrations and disappointment.
French, who sank nearly $70,000 into the relocation of her Watermelon Café to larger quarters, struggled for three years before recently selling her business.
“At first, business was absolutely excellent,” she says, “but it just died down — just like everything else in our town.”
Wayne James may have the saddest story. When James, longtime owner of a local auto-repair shop, heard that the prison was coming, he invested his entire life savings in a new gas station. After four years and a staggering $850,000 in debt, James had to seek bankruptcy protection. Today he works the second shift at a factory near Thomson.
“It’s such a shame,” French says of James’ loss. “He did everything he possibly could to keep it going.”
Since 2001, Thomson residents have made numerous trips to Springfield, hoping to get state government to open their prison. They’ve managed to secure grants to pay for their new water tower. This year, there’s a glimmer of hope: The Blagojevich administration wants to open the minimum-security portion of the prison, but that’s only a small part of the facility.
If lawmakers move quickly on the governor’s request, the minimum-security portion could be operating by September, says Derek Schnapp, an IDOC spokesman. The department needs about $1.2 million to begin hiring and training staff and another $6.5 million for operations in fiscal year 2007, he says.
What about the maximum-security part?
“That’s not even been discussed,” Schnapp says.
Hartwig, the former warden, says that the town shouldn’t give up hope.
“They certainly have no intention of building a $140 million capital asset and letting it sit empty forever. It will work. It will be safe. It will be a good neighbor.”
URL for this story: http://illinoistimes.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A5236
Posted by lois at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)
July 29, 2006
NY: "The State Should Target The Real Drug Kingpins"
The state should target the real drug kingpins
BY ANTHONY PAPA
Anthony Papa is a communications specialist for the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based organization working to reform drug policies, and author of "15 to Life."
July 26, 2006, Newsday, NY
Ashley O'Donoghue is a low-level, nonviolent offender currently serving a 7-to-21-year sentence for the sale of 2 1/2 ounces of cocaine. In September 2003, the Oneida County district attorney claimed that the 20-year-old was a major drug kingpin and needed to face a life sentence under the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
Reacting to a commonly used scare tactic, O'Donoghue agreed to a plea bargain. His A-1 felony, the highest possible felony, was reduced to a B felony. Like magic, O'Donoghue was no longer a kingpin - that is, a drug dealer distributing extraordinarily large quantities.
There are thousands of defendants just like O'Donoghue, whom prosecutors claim are kingpins one day and then, through plea negotiations, kingpins no more.
I went through the same experience in 1984 when I was arrested for the sale of 4 ounces of cocaine. A Westchester assistant district attorney claimed I was a major kingpin. But in the months that followed he offered me a plea bargain of three years to life. He told me if I refused the offer I would not see my 7-year-old daughter until she was 22 years old. This really frightened me, and I did not want to leave my family alone.
I decided to go to trial and was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life. In 1997, after serving 12 years, I was freed by Gov. George Pataki through executive clemency.
Recently, a report released by Bridget Brennan, New York City's special narcotics prosecutor, proclaimed that kingpins and people convicted of high-level drug offenses are being released under the new Rockefeller Drug Law revisions. The report, titled "The Law of Unintended Consequences," is a lopsided review of the Drug Law Reform Act of 2004. The modest changes to the Rockefeller Drug Laws have allowed approximately 1,000 people convicted of A-1 and A-2 drug felonies to apply for resentencing. The controversial findings in the report bolster Brennan's final conclusions: a clarion call for a kingpin statute and opposition to any additional reforms to the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Critics quickly questioned the validity of the report, claiming that it contained skewed data and its creation was politically motivated.
The report is questionable in many aspects, but I agree with Brennan on one point: New York needs a kingpin statute. Allowing prosecutors to define this term has meant that people like O'Donoghue and me are kingpins one day but not the next. New York needs a clear and reasonable kingpin statute that can be applied to real kingpins - bona fide major traffickers - not people convicted of low-level offenses. The kingpin statute that Brennan calls for is both unreasonable and incompatible with justice, because it is so broad.
Brennan's report highlighted 84 drug cases handled by her office, with 65 applicants receiving judicial relief under the new law. Contrary to Brennan's tabloidlike insinuation that the prison gates just opened up, each prisoner seeking resentencing had to go through a lengthy application process in order to see a judge for resentencing.
Right now there are almost 4,000 B-level felons serving time in New York State for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses for small amounts of drugs. Many of the defendants have drug-addiction problems. These thousands of offenders are not classified as kingpins. So why would Brennan actively oppose reforms to release them? It costs taxpayers millions of dollars to incarcerate these people when community-based treatment costs less and has proved more effective than incarceration in treating addiction.
Brennan needs to be reminded that the governor, State Senate and Assembly leaders agreed reforms were necessary to equally balance the scales of justice in applying the law with the needs of protecting our communities.
To cause a panic by releasing a questionable report is nothing more than additional punishment for those incarcerated and an underhanded political tactic to stop further needed reform. If Brennan wants a kingpin statute, let's fashion one for real kingpins, not for the low-level offenders.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-oppap264829295jul26,0,5218697.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines
Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)
MA: "Two Years in Jail for a Joint?"
Two Years in Jail for a Joint?
By Anthony Papa, AlterNet. Posted April 14, 2006.
The drug war, and the hard-nosed zealots who wage it, have reached new lows in Massachusetts.
On June 30, 2004, detective Felix Aguirre, employed by the Drug Task Force, was assigned the duty of going undercover to buy drugs from kids who hung out in a parking lot in Berkshire County in Massachusetts. Merchants had complained to police about the kids. Mitchell Lawrence was there with his pipe and a few buds of marijuana. He had no idea the parking lot was less than 1,000 feet from a preschool located in the basement of a church, nor did he know this parking lot was the site of a police sting operation.
Aguirre approached Mitchell and asked him if he had any weed. Mitchell pulled out a small bag of marijuana. The cop offered him $20. Mitchell hesitated; Aguirre insisted. Mitchell, who had seen Aguirre hanging out with other kids, motioned the cop to follow him up the street where he intended to smoke with him. Aguirre waved the $20 in his face. Mitchell, who was broke at the time, took the money, the first time he had ever accepted money in exchange for marijuana.
In the months that followed, Aguirre approached Mitchell again for marijuana. This time, however, Mitchell refused. Weeks later, a crew of undercover cops stormed Mitchell's home and placed him under arrest. Mitchell was found guilty of distribution of marijuana, committing a drug violation within a drug-free school zone and possession.
On March 22, 2006, Mitchell Lawrence was sentenced to two years in prison.
While this outrageous case happened in a sleepy burg in Massachusetts, the case of Mitchell Lawrence is one of countless tales of drug war madness that takes place on America's streets daily.
Mitchell Lawrence's story was eerily familiar to me. In 1985, I was the subject of a police sting operation after passing an envelope containing four ounces of cocaine to undercover officers in Mount Vernon, New York. I was set up by someone who offered me $500 to transport the package. The individual who introduced me to the cop was an informant facing life in prison. He was offered a deal -- the more people he helped ensnare, the less time he would serve. I received a sentence of 15 years to life under New York's draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws.
Mitchell Lawrence's disproportionate sentence was handed down one day before the release of a national report by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) titled, "Disparity by Design: How Drug-free Zone Laws Impact Racial Disparity and Fail to Protect Youth," which includes research from Massachusetts.
The JPI study, commissioned by the Drug Policy Alliance, found that drug-free zone laws do not serve their intended purpose of protecting youth from drug activity. The Massachusetts data on drug enforcement in three cities found that less than one percent of the drug-free zone cases actually involved sales to youth. Additionally, Massachusetts researchers found that nonwhites were more likely to be charged with an offense that carries drug-free zone enhancement than whites engaged in similar conduct. Blacks and Hispanics account for just 20 percent of Massachusetts residents, but 80 percent of drug-free zone cases.
"School zone laws have remained unchanged in Massachusetts because the legislature has been promised that prosecutors use discretion," said Whitney A. Taylor, executive director of the Drug Policy Forum of Massachusetts. "Unfortunately, the life of a young man has been sacrificed, proving that discretion is not being used, and that the law must be changed."
Mitchell Lawrence was not the only person arrested in an undercover drug operation in the summer of 2004. There were a total of 18 others, including five young people who are still awaiting trial for alleged sales that took place at the same Great Barrington parking lot.
District Attorney David F. Capeless is the man behind Berkshire County enforcement and entrapment. Capeless is a hard-nosed drug war zealot, who insists that these laws are effective in combating drug use -- even if it means ruining a young man's life in the process.
Mitchell Lawrence was set to graduate from high school this spring. Instead, he will watch his fellow classmates graduate from his prison cell.
The common thread between my case, Mitchell's case and drug-free school zones nationally is the abuse of power from the prosecutors through the application of mandatory minimums. These laws handcuff judges and force them to impose harsh sentences.
Mitchell Lawrence's conviction inspired a group of concerned Berkshire County residents to seek Capeless' ouster in the upcoming district attorney race. Defense attorney Judith Knight answered the call to fill this role. Knight, a former assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, said Mitchell Lawrence's conviction was "the tipping point" for her decision to run against Capeless in the upcoming Democratic primary election in September.
"A tough prosecutor is tough on crime and also has the ability to demonstrate compassion and insight when the case calls for it," Knight says. She hopes to follow in the footsteps of David Soares, who ran for district attorney and defeated Paul Clyne in Albany, New York, in 2004. Soares ran a race primarily on the platform of Rockefeller Drug Law reform. He easily defeated the sitting district attorney, who refused to change his views on the draconian drug law legislation of New York.
It is heartening that communities like Berkshire County are fighting back and attempting to hand reckless district attorneys and other politicians the pink slip. Choosing to destroy lives and indiscriminately apply laws does more harm than good, ultimately, and it doesn't make our streets any safer.
Anthony Papa is the author of "15 To Life: How I Painted My Way To Freedom" (Feral House).
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July 27, 2006
Q&A: Solitary Confinement & Human Rights
Life in Solitary Confinement
Q&A with Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch
by Maria Godoy
PR.org, July 27, 2006 · Prisoners confined to long-term segregation live in isolation, in small, often windowless cells, for years or even decades. They are passed food trays through slots in the doors. A few times a week, they are let out, in handcuffs and shackles, for a shower or to exercise in a small, enclosed space. As a general rule, they have almost no human interaction except with guards, no access to newspapers or television, and are allowed few personal items -- a few photographs, perhaps a book.
Estimates suggest at least 25,000 U.S. prisoners are held in such "Supermaximum security" conditions, which were designed to hold the most violent of inmates. The rising use of long-term segregation has drawn sharp criticism from human-rights experts.
NPR discussed these concerns with Jamie Fellner, director of the U.S. program for Human Rights Watch. She has been researching and writing about prison conditions in the United States, with a focus on Supermax confinement, for more than a decade.
Q: Is there good reason to keep prisoners in long-term segregation in U.S. prisons?
The massive use of long-term segregation reflects a failure of correctional policies. Segregation has become routine because of exploding prison populations, which strain meager prison budgets. That has made it difficult for officials to provide humane prisons with educational, counseling and rehabilitative activities. And we know that prisoners who have access to education while incarcerated, for example, are more likely to remain law-abiding once they're released.
That said, there may always be a few inmates who simply prove too dangerous to be in the general population. For them, some form of segregation may be the only option. But even then, the nature of segregation should be rethought. No one should be confined in small, empty cells with nothing to do -- and no one to talk to -- day in and day out, year in and year out.
Q: What worries you most about long-term segregation?
Our research shows that segregation is used far more frequently, for far longer periods of time, and under far harsher conditions than is legitimately needed to manage inmate security.
Supermax facilities have been built in excess of the number of truly "worst of the worst" prisoners they were ostensibly intended to house. They're often used for any troublesome inmate -- including those who break minor rules, are in a single fight or are mentally ill and act out.
The conditions of isolation are harsh and degrading. For many, the absence of normal social interaction, of mental stimulation, of exposure to the natural world -- of almost everything that makes life human and bearable -- is emotionally, physically and psychologically destructive. The experience is hardly conducive to successful re-entry to the community. No other Western democracy imposes such conditions of confinement for prolonged periods on so many people.
And segregation can last for decades. Officials have complete discretion when to release an inmate; there's no guarantee good behavior will secure a release. Corrections officials must be able to exercise their professional judgment -- but such discretion must be tempered to minimize the risk that an inmate is unnecessarily sent to or kept in segregation. Principled leadership, careful staff training and effective internal-review processes can help. But external, independent scrutiny is also needed to prevent abuse and give inmates recourse against arbitrary and unfair treatment.
Q: What do human-rights experts believe to be most problematic about the day-to-day conditions of long-term segregation?
More than a decade ago, a federal judge noted that prolonged segregation pushes the bounds of what human beings can tolerate. Whether or not it produces clinical psychiatric symptoms, living in such conditions for years is likely to produce unfathomable misery and suffering.
Some inmates with no prior history of mental illness develop clinical symptoms of psychosis or severe affective disorders. For prisoners with a history of mental illness, the isolation, lack of social interaction and lack of structured activities can aggravate their symptoms. Even worse, mental health service for prisoners in segregation is usually far worse than for the general population. The result is mental agony, sometimes to the point of suicide. Inmates whose illness becomes acute may be transferred to mental hospitals -- but once their condition is stabilized, they are returned to segregation, where the cycle of illness begins again.
In several states, lawsuits have resulted in bans against placing mentally ill prisoners in segregation. But elsewhere, in state after state, a disproportionately large number of prisoners in long-term segregation are mentally ill.
Q: Prison officials say a burgeoning gang problem is one reason for long-term segregation. How can they deal with gangs without housing offenders in isolation?
The problem of violent gangs in prison is serious -- and growing. But there's no evidence that long-term segregation is the solution. California, for example, has a horrific problem with gangs -- despite the fact that it has been locking gang members in segregation for years, refusing to let them out unless they renounce the gang and identify members.
Gangs in prison serve many purposes: They provide status and respect, a sense of purpose, protection and an opportunity to acquire goods and services. Punishing gang members does little to change this function or to reduce the allure and power of gangs.
Many corrections experts believe a solely punitive response to gangs is doomed to fail in prisons, as it has in communities. What's needed is an approach that combines "law enforcement" with better prison conditions: reduced crowding, increased educational and productive activities, more mental health counseling, and more staff to increase safety.
Q: Some prison officials say some inmates are too violent to remain in the general population. If they aren't sent to isolation, what should be done with them?
There would be much less violence in prison -- and much higher prospects of successful reintegration into the community upon release -- if public policies and correctional practices yielded something other than today's barren, overcrowded warehouses for people.
But prison officials can't do it alone. The single biggest problem they face is the staggering and ever-growing size of the prison population. Too many people are sent to prison for crimes for which alternatives to incarceration would be appropriate, and their sentences are far too long. Public officials have been willing to give the United States the largest prison population in the world, but they haven't been willing to allocate the funds to ensure humane confinement.
Elected officials should put prison reform on their agenda. They should give prison officials a clear mandate to provide productive confinement, they should give them the necessary resources, and they should hold them accountable when they fail. If prison were dramatically improved, long-term segregation would be needed for very few.
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In U.S. Prisons, Thousands Spend Years in Isolation
Life in Solitary Confinement
by Laura Sullivan
NPR.org, July 26, 2006 · Over the past two decades, solitary confinement has moved out of the prison basement and into whole facilities built just for isolation. These places have many names -- Supermax, intensive-management units, secure housing -- but the meaning is the same: years alone, out of the public view and away from public oversight.
Isolation today means 23 hours a day in a concrete cell no bigger than a bathroom. One hour a day is spent alone in a concrete exercise pen, about the length and width of two cars.
Most inmates held in solitary have no contact with the outside world other than the U.S. mail. Depending on the state, inmates have limited access to visitors. Most can't watch television, call anyone on the phone or even touch another person while in the units.
Some inmates have been incarcerated in these conditions in U.S. prisons for more than 20 years. Most have been there for more than five years.
Conservative estimates say that there are more than 25,000 inmates serving their sentences this way in 40 states. The inmates aren't in these facilities because of what they did on the outside. No one is sentenced by a court or a judge to serve their time in isolation, except in the rare occurrence of terrorists who could pose a threat to national security.
Inmates are put in isolation because of something they did on the inside. Prison officials say inmates are placed in isolation because they are the most violent, dangerous prisoners. Officials say most inmates in the units are members of gangs that are making their prisons too risky for the officers and the other inmates. But over the years, the violence rates in U.S. prisons have not decreased, nor has the strength of the gangs.
In many states, inmates held in solitary confinement have almost no way out. Many stay in isolation until their sentences run out. And that's pretty common. Almost 95 percent of the inmates in isolation in this country will be released back to the public one day. Many of them will receive little, if any, help with the transition. Texas, for example, took 1,458 inmates out of isolation in 2005, walked them to the prison's gates and took the handcuffs off.
A few states are trying to implement programs to help inmates work their way out of isolation. Several states, including Oregon and Colorado, have started a system that allows inmates to earn back privileges with good behavior and eventually work their way out of isolation. Oregon also offers inmates therapy sessions with a visiting psychologist to work on anger management. And a dozen states now rely on a panel of prison officials outside the prison to decide who goes into isolation and who gets out, so it's no longer solely at the discretion of the warden.
Prisoner advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are calling for an end to long-term isolation, arguing that it may make inmates more violent and render them unable to rejoin society. But many prison officials and correctional officers say isolation units are necessary, allowing them to control prison gangs and keep prisons safe for the rest of the inmates.
At Pelican Bay Prison, a Life in Solitary
NPR.org, July 26, 2006 · Associate Warden Larry Williams is standing inside a small, cement prison cell. Everything is gray concrete: the bed, the walls, the unmovable stool. Everything except the combination stainless-steel sink and toilet.
You can't move more than eight feet in one direction.
"Prison is a deterrent," Williams says. "We don't want them to like being in prison."
The cell is one of eight in a long hallway. From inside, you can't see anyone or any of the other cells. This is where the inmate eats, sleeps and exists for 22 1/2 hours a day. He spends the other 1 1/2 hours alone in a small concrete yard.
This is the Security Housing Unit -- or the SHU (pronounced "SHOE") -- at Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California. With more than 1,200 inmates, it's one of the largest and oldest isolation units in the country, and it's the model that dozens of other states have followed.
Although all the inmates are in isolation, there's lots of noise: Keys rattle. Toilets flush. Inmates shout to each other from one cell to the next. Twice a day, officers push plastic food trays through the small portals in the metal doors.
No Contact but the 'Pinky Shake'
Those doors are solid metal, with little nickel-sized holes punched throughout. One inmate known as Wino is standing on just behind the door of his cell. It's difficult to make eye contact, because you can only see one eye at a time.
"I've got my paperwork, my books to read, my little odds and ends," he says, pointing to the small items carefully organized throughout his cell.
Wino fears he'll get in trouble for talking; he asks that NPR not use his real name. Wino is a 40-something man from San Fernando, Calif. He was sent to prison for robbery. He was sent to the SHU for being involved in prison gangs. He's been in this cell for six years.
"The only contact that you have with individuals is what they call a pinky shake," he says, sticking his pinky through one of the little holes in the door.
That's the only personal contact Wino has had in six years.
'Pods' of Isolation Cells
There are five other hallways like this one, in what prison officials here call a "pod" of cells. The hallways shoot out like spokes on a wheel. In the center, high off the floor, an officer sits at a panel of blue and red buttons controlling the doors. The officer in the booth can go an entire shift without actually seeing an inmate face to face.
Far below, an inmate walks a few feet from his cell, through a metal door at the end of the hallway, and out into the yard.
The exercise yards at Pelican Bay are about the length of two small cars. The cement walls are 20 feet high. On top is a metal grate -- and through the grate is a patch of sky. Associate Warden Williams says they don't allow inmates to have any kind of exercise equipment.
"Most of the time, they do push-ups. Some of them just walk back and forth for exercise," he says. "We don't allow them to have any type of balls or -- I don't know what you call it -- any kind of activity out here. It's just basically to come out, stretch their legs and get some fresh air."
Monitor. Control. Isolate.
Inside the SHU, there's a skylight two stories up. But on an overcast day, it's dark, and so are the cells. There are no windows here. Inmates will not see the moon, stars, trees or grass. They will rarely, if ever, see the giant, gray building they live in. Their world -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year -- is this hallway. There are 132 hallways at Pelican Bay just like this one. They are all full.
More than 40 states operate facilities like Pelican Bay. Inmates aren't sent here by judges or juries. No prisoner is sentenced to isolation. It makes absolutely no difference what crime you committed on the outside. It's how you behave on the inside that counts, and every state has different rules for how you get here. In some parts of the country, the decision belongs to a small group of state officials; in other states, it's up to the warden.
Prison officials at Pelican Bay say the 1,200 inmates here are in segregation because, since arriving in prison, they have been the most violent, dangerous inmates in California.
"The intent is to monitor, to control, to isolate," says Lt. Steve Perez, who has worked at Pelican Bay for 17 years. "This is in response to their behavior. That's why you have facilities like this."
Each month, officers squeeze soap, shampoo and toothpaste into paper cups for the inmates. They are issued a jumpsuit, but in two days at the facility, there doesn’t seem to be a single prisoner wearing one. All of them are wearing their underwear, white boxer shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops.
'It Breaks You Psychologically'
"You find yourself being by yourself, and sometimes you don't like what you see," said one inmate named Jason, a young-looking 39-year-old from Sacramento.
Four years ago, Jason violated his parole on a robbery charge and was sent to prison. A few months after he arrived, prison officials suspected he was involved in a prison gang and sent him to isolation. He's been in the SHU ever since.
"A lot of guys go [crazy], really, and sometimes I ask myself, 'Am I losing it, right?'" Jason says behind his small cell-door holes. "It breaks you psychologically, right? People do develop phobias. You start thinking people are talking about you when they're not."
When inmates do go crazy, there is another part of the prison for them -- the psychiatric SHU.
Treating Mental Illness in Solitary
In the psychiatric SHU at Pelican Bay, one inmate stands in the middle of his cell, hollering at no one in particular. Another bangs his head against the cell door. Many of the inmates are naked, some exposing themselves.
The psychiatric SHU is full -- all 128 beds. One in 10 inmates in segregation is housed here. There's even a waiting list.
Lt. Steve Perez points to the board outside the unit, where little markers describe some of the psychiatric problems of inmates held there.
"Here we are with Vic -- indecent exposure. He's got to be in a jumpsuit," Perez says. "Nichols -- he's on a razor restriction. This guy Flores -- staff assault through the food port."
The board says one inmate had his shoes taken because he kept kicking the cell door over and over.
'Group Therapy' in a Cage
Lt. Troy Woods works in the psychiatric SHU. He says they treat mental illness by monitoring the inmates and sending them to what he and others call "group therapy." It consists of a small room with six phone-booth-sized cages.
"Depending on what the group is, they'll either listen to music, watch movies, play games, have art, current events -- a lot of different types of groups," Woods says.
There are no therapists in group therapy. Woods says the idea is to help inmates socialize with each other and behavior normally again.
"Normal" for these prisoners means they don't smear feces on themselves or throw urine at the officers. They shower when able, eat when told and keep their cells tidy. For the most part, when prisoners do achieve this, the reward is a return to the regular SHU.
Experts say it can cost $50,000 more a year to house these inmates in isolation -- regular or psychiatric. But if you ask prison officials in this state why they need facilities like this one, they have one answer: to control the prison gangs.
Controlling the Grip of Gangs
Outside in the yard, hundreds of prisoners from general population are playing basketball games, exercising and crowding around cement tables. On this day, without exception, every inmate is divided by race -- and gang membership.
"You've got your white group there on that one dip bar. You've got your southern (Mexicans) -- they're always on that one table. You have your blacks," Lt. Steve Perez says, looking out onto the yard.
Prison officials like Perez say a lot of crimes happen on the yard right in front of them.
"Right now, business is being conducted," Perez says, pointing to the group of prisoners gathered on the yard. "There's gambling that's going on, drugs that are being passed and sold."
Assaults, stabbings and attacks on staff are weekly occurrences here. Two former gang members sit at a table in the yard, long after most other prisons have been sent back inside. They're kept separate because they recently left the gang. Because they fear for their life, they asked that NPR not to use their names.
They say the gangs run the prisons.
"If they keep killing people, you are going to do what they tell you to do -- out of fear, out of self-preservation," one of the inmates says. "If you're 90 days at the house, and a gang member tells you, 'You go stab that dude right there,' or 'Go back in and stab your cellie,' out of self-preservation, you are going to do what you are told. Because if you don't, you are going to be killed."
Associate Warden Larry Williams acknowledges that prison gangs are an enormous problem that prison officials do not have control over.
"Every time we pluck one out, a new one pops up," he said.
'There Are Times When You Lose Control'
Officials say 70 percent of the inmates in California's prisons are in some way affiliated with prison gangs.
When asked whether the gangs control Pelican Bay, Williams says: "The biggest part of me wants to say no. But you know, prisons only run with the consent of the inmates -- and that's all the inmates. The administration and the officers do have control of the prisons. But there are times when you lose control."
Associate Warden Larry Williams says it has been this way since the 1980s, when the number of inmates exploded, and rehabilitative programs disappeared. The gangs filled the void left from increasingly tense conditions and utter boredom. California's answer to the gangs was, and is, the SHU.
Even locked in isolation, some inmates have managed to find ways to kill each other and assault staff. On a recent afternoon, a half-dozen officers spent an entire day tearing apart the cells in one hallway, searching desperately for a metal binder clip they believed one of the inmates was hiding. Officer Buchanan discovered the paper fastener hidden inside a crack in the concrete wall. It had been sharpened into a deadly razor.
In the cell next door, Sgt. France held up a couple of staples she found.
"They use the staples. They sharpen them to a point, wrap paper around them real tight, and make a spear out of it," France says. "It will go through the perforations on the cell. They can spear someone with it."
Isolation Breeds Deadly Ingenuity
Lt. Steve Perez explains that inmates pull out the elastic from their underwear and braid it into a kind of super-powered bow to fire their weapons.
"They can project a spear coming out of there at 800-square-pounds per foot," Perez said. "And 800 pounds per foot, into your neck, it'll drive that right in there. And now we've got to go in there, and what does he have on it? Does he have feces? HIV? Does he have herpes? TB? Hepatitis? And that's not unusual."
Prison officials say that removing the most dangerous gang members and putting them in segregation makes regular prisons safer for the rest of the inmates -- and it weakens the gangs.
But Jim, a 38-year-old SHU inmate from Long Beach, says that's wishful thinking. He says that to gang members, being sent to the secure-housing unit is an honor.
"Coming up here was the big thing," Jim says from inside his cell. "Put in work. Come up here, be with the big homeys. Because this is the only place you're going to be around the fellas, you know."
'You're a Target Because of the Color of Your Skin'
Jim says gang leaders still control the gangs from within the SHU, mostly by mailing each other letters. And he says if you show up to prison and don't join the gang of your race, you'll be a target for the other gangs within days.
"When there's a war, there's a war," Jim says. "You're a target just because of the color of your skin, so you might as well. You're going to have to defend yourself. The lines get divided. You've gotta take sides."
Jim was sent to prison 10 years ago for armed robbery. Several years later, he was put in segregation for assaulting other prisoners when he joined a prison gang called the Nazi Low Riders.
"It's definitely racist," Jim says. But he says he wasn't racist before he came to prison. "Prison made me that way. My mom and dad taught me to respect everybody, no matter who it was. It's funny because I still remember, to this day, my dad telling me, 'You respect every man until he proves differently.'"
'It's Designed to Break You'
There are really only two ways out of Pelican Bay's SHU. Either you have to prove to prison officials that you have not been involved in gang activity for six years -- which is rare -- or you have to tell everything you know about your gang. It's called debriefing. It can sometimes take two years. That's what Jim is trying to do now.
But it has a cost. Jim says he's already been warned through the grapevine that if he gets out of the SHU, he's a dead man. But after seven years in isolation, Jim says he doesn't care anymore.
"A place like this is designed to drive you crazy," he says. "It's not just designed to isolate you from the general population. It's designed to break you. It sucks. It's hard. It's made me different. It's made me spiteful."
Is Solitary Working?
Associate Warden Williams says that without the SHU, the gang problem would be even worse.
But after almost 20 years, California is now holding more inmates in solitary confinement than it ever has -- and its gang problem is worse than it has ever been. And over the years, the violence rates at Pelican Bay have actually gone up.
Williams says he worries a little that segregation could be making the inmates worse.
"I can't totally disagree that it may affect the inmates in some kind of way," Williams says. "It may make them mad for a while. But the benefit of these security housing units is that we take the people who go out there and cause the trouble, and we lock them up here, to get them off the mainline so that it can functions the way it's designed to -- and the way we would like it to, and the way the inmates would like it to."
Almost 95 percent of the inmates in Pelican Bay's SHU are scheduled to be released back into the public at some point. They'll spend a few weeks in a local prison before rejoining society, with little, if any, preparation for how to live around people on the outside. And for every inmate that leaves, there is another one waiting to take his place.
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As Populations Swell, Prisons Rethink Supermax
by Laura Sullivan
Laura Sullivan, NPR
Brian Belleque, the warden of the Oregon State Penitentiary, says that isolation alone doesn't work; inmates need an opportunity to change.
All Things Considered, July 27, 2006 · A growing number of prisoners are spending years in solitary confinement in prisons across the country. These prisoners eat, sleep and exist in their cells alone, with little, if any, physical contact with others.
Experts say there are more than 25,000 inmates serving their sentences this way. A handful of them have been in isolation for more than 20 years.
Almost every inmate in isolation will be released back into the public one day. But there are a few prison officials who are rethinking the idea of isolation -- and wondering if there might be a better way.
One of them is Don Cabana. He began his career in corrections the way most people did 30 years ago in the South: On the back of a horse, a shotgun in one hand and 100 prisoners below him, picking cotton.
The inmates were prisoners at a place called Parchman, a prison deep in the farmlands of Mississippi.
"Parchman was like any other prison: Nobody ever cared about it or cared what went on there," Cabana says. "And there's no question inmates were beaten and abused. I would go so far as to say some were probably even murdered."
Locking Down a Lawless Prison Environment
For almost a century, Parchman was notoriously violent. It was known as a place where inmates did hard time. By the time Don Cabana became warden in 1981, things had changed at Parchman. Much of the prisoner abuse had subsided, but there were new problems.
It was overcrowded, underfunded and full of bored, violent inmates -- the result of an explosion in gangs and drug crime. Assaults on staff were increasing. Instead of worrying about the guards killing the inmates, Cabana says he worried about the inmates killing his guards.
"I had three officers stabbed one morning by one inmate," he says, "and the only reason he stabbed them is because he was trying to elevate his status in the Aryan brotherhood. Damn near kills all three of them. You know, you take your staff being injured by these people very personally, because you feel like you have failed somehow. And a warden's worst nightmare is losing a staff person."
For Cabana, that was the last straw. He pulled the inmate into his office and shut the door.
"I sat there and I said, 'Well, Bubba. I tell you, you've made it to the big time,'" Cabana says, describing his conversation with the inmate. "'Are you prepared for all the benefits?' And he said, 'Well, like what?' And I said, 'I'm going to lock this place down so tight and so long that you'll never see the sunshine. And you see, I'm going to do it to a thousand inmates in here, not just you.'"
That's just what Cabana did.
He looked at states including California, Arizona and Illinois and saw they were creating a new place to put bad inmates: 1,000-bed, high-tech isolation units known as Supermax prisons. That meant 23 hours a day in a cell, one hour alone in an exercise pen. No television, no contact with the outside world, nothing but a concrete cell.
Making Meaner Inmates
Cabana says he didn't have any trouble getting money to build the Supermax prison, or getting state lawmakers to support the idea.
And for a while after it was completed, the facility seemed to work well. Cabana says the threat of going to long-term isolation was making the rest of the inmates in general population behave.
But then, Cabana says some things started to trouble him. Inmate behavior got worse, in ways that seemed almost unbelievable. Inmates were smearing themselves with urine and feces and throwing it at the officers.
"Some inmates were crazy, and wouldn't know they were throwing urine at somebody, others were just mean and doing it out of pure spite," Cabana said. "But many of them did it out of utter frustration."
And there was another problem: the staff.
"A lot of the staff would just be flat-out abusive to the inmates. They would taunt them, ignore them," Cabana says.
Cabana says he would lie awake at night under the pressure of having to decide whom to send to isolation and whom to release. Then one day, as he walked the tier of his Supermax facility, Cabana says something occurred to him.
"Inmate hauls off and spits at you -- yeah, you want to slap the total crap out of them into the next cell," Cabana says. "Problem is, that takes you down to his level, and we're supposed to be better than that. And as a society, one of the best measures of how far a society has come is what their prisons are like. I think what we're doing in Supermax is, we're taking some bad folks, and we're making them even worse. We're making them even meaner."
Second Thoughts About Supermax
Don Cabana is no longer the warden of Parchman. He retired last year. But his feelings about Supermax haven't changed.
"The biggest single regret I had in my career was having built that unit," he says.
Cabana is not the only one with second thoughts. Brian Belleque, the warden of the Oregon State Pennitentiary in Salem, has them, too.
"We realize that 95 to 98 percent of these inmates here are going to be your neighbor in the community," Belleque says. "They are going to get out."
In 1991, Oregon built something it calls the Intensive Management Unit, or the IMU. Inmates are locked in their cells all day long, for years. It's dark. There are no windows inside.
On a recent visit, many inmates were pacing back and forth in their cells, talking to themselves or hollering at inmates down the hall.
Rethinking Isolation
The IMU looks like a standard isolation unit. But these days, there are some big differences, including therapy for many of the prisoners.
One prisoner named Gregory says that therapy has really helped him.
"Some changes took," Gregory said recently while having a session with the psychiatrist. "I was just a mess. I was a straight mess. I was an animal, and I acted that way."
Oregon has also adopted a system that allows inmates like Gregory to earn their way out of isolation. The longest an inmate can stay in isolation is three years.
And the decision of who is and isn't sent to isolation is no longer in the warden's hands. A three-person panel outside the prison system decides.
Mitch Morrow, the deputy director of the Oregon Department of Corrections, instituted many of the changes.
"This department, for as long as I have been here, has always believed that inmates are people," Morrow says.
'You Need to Change the Inmate'
But changing the system wasn't an easy sell. It took years. Morrow says even now, there are state officials who cling to the idea of long-term isolation.
"It feels good today to lock them up, and for that given moment, you feel safer," Morrow says. "But if that's where you stop the conversation, then you are doing your state a serious injustice. Because you need to change the inmate. You need to provide the inmate the opportunity to change. And if you don't, if you just feel good about locking somebody up, it's a failed model."
Oregon no longer releases inmates directly from segregation to the streets. Now they send them first to classes, and then to prison jobs in the general population, so they can get used to being around people again.
That's not the case in other states. Last year in Texas, prison officials took 1,458 inmates out of their segregation cells, walked them to the prison gates and took the handcuffs off. There's almost no research about the effects of isolation on how well inmates cope on the outside.
That troubles Walter Dickey. Dickey used to run Wisconsin's prisons. Now he's been appointed by a court there to oversee the conditions at the state's Supermax facility.
Dickey says many officials in his state don't see a downside to having a Supermax. He says the state built it because legislators thought they needed it, and most prison officials went along.
"If you are running a corrections system, and you are offered a greater level of control than you otherwise could have, you are going to take it," Dickey says. "Because there's a part of them that says, 'We don't need this,' but there's a part of them that says, 'If you are going to build it, I'll take it, because I can find some use for it.'"
It's the numbers that bother Dickey. When he ran the state's prisons, he says there were, at most, a dozen inmates so dangerous that he took them out of general population. Today, the 500 beds at Wisconsin's Supermax are full -- and most inmates have been there since it opened seven years ago.
Keeping Inmates Out of Long-Term Segregation
At a small California prison on the Nevada border called High Desert, a group of prison officials gather around a metal desk each week. An inmate in a jumpsuit is also there, eagerly waiting for the results.
One prison official recommends that the inmate be released from a new, experimental program because his progress has been so good.
These weekly meetings are part of a new program meant to keep inmates out of long-term segregation. High Desert Warden Tom Felker started the program six months ago. He said he was tired of sending hundreds of inmates to years of isolation.
"I, like a lot of people, looked at it as, 'There's probably a better way,'" Felker says.
Felker took his 40 worst inmates and housed them together. He's taken all their possessions: radios, books, televisions. He banned them from the yard. He told them that if they want these privileges back, they would have to earn them by following a specific, itemized list: attend therapy, school and weekly anger-management classes with a local college professor. The staff keeps detailed notes about their progress.
A Model for a Balanced Approach?
"Just straight rehabilitation in its own right -- that's not realistic. But just warehousing inmates? That's not going to work, either," Felker says. "You have to have a balanced approach."
In the past six months, the results so far have stunned even Felker. Almost every inmate has graduated from the program, and they've stayed out of trouble back in general population. Recently, Felker has been visited by staff from several other prisons in California asking how they can start a program like his.
Before Don Cabana retired from Mississippi's Parchman prison, he tried to reform much about the segregation unit. He wanted to send most of the inmates back to general population. But there are still 1,000 inmates in the unit today.
"Prisons have always had prisons within prisons," Cabana says. "I mean, every prison has its jailhouse for the guys you have to lock up. But the numbers of people we're incarcerating under Supermax conditions in this country -- it's just run away from us. That's not how it's supposed to be."
Like prison officials in Oregon, Wisconsin and California, Cabana says he found that building an isolation unit is a lot easier than taking one apart.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5587644
Posted by lois at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)
Timeline: Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons
by Laura Sullivan
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5579901
PR.org, July 26, 2006 · An overview of key moments in the history of solitary confinement.
1829 - The first experiment in solitary confinement in the United States begins at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. It is based on a Quaker belief that prisoners isolated in stone cells with only a Bible would use the time to repent, pray and find introspection. But many of the inmates go insane, commit suicide, or are no longer able to function in society, and the practice is slowly abandoned during the following decades.
1890 - In an opinion concerning the effects of solitary confinement on inmates housed in Philadelphia (Re: Medley, 134 U.S. 160), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller finds, "A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community."
1934 - The federal government opens Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay to house the nation's worst criminals. Most inmates spend many hours outside in the yard and on required work details. But a few dozen are kept in "D Block," the prison’s solitary-confinement hallway. One cell in particular is called "The Hole" -- a room of bare concrete except for a hole in the floor. There is no light, inmates are kept naked, and bread and water is shoved through a small hole in the door. Although most inmates only spend a few days in the hole, some spend years on D Block. Conditions are better than in The Hole -- inmates have clothes and food -- but they are not permitted contact with other inmates and are rarely let out of their cells. The most famous inmate on D Block is Robert Stroud, known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz,” who spends six years there. A 1962 movie about Stroud -- and subsequent media reports on the conditions on D Block -- made solitary confinement a fixture of the American imagination for the first time.
1983 - Two correctional officers at a Marion, Ill., prison are murdered by inmates in two separate incidents on the same day. The warden at the time puts the prison in what he calls "permanent lockdown." It is the first prison in the country to adopt 23-hour-a-day cell isolation and no communal yard time for all inmates. Inmates are no longer allowed to work, attend educational programs, or eat in a cafeteria. Within a few years, several other states also adopt permanent lockdown at existing facilities.
1989 - California builds Pelican Bay, a new prison built solely to house inmates in isolation. By most accounts, it is the first Supermax facility in the country. There is no need to build a yard, cafeteria, classrooms or shops. Inmates spend 22 1/2 hours a day inside an 8-by-10-foot cell. The other 1 1/2 hours are spent alone in a small concrete exercise pen.
1990s - The building boom of Supermax or control-unit prisons begins. Oregon, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin and a dozen other states all build new, free-standing, isolation units.
1994 - The U.S. Bureau of Prisons builds ADX Florence, the federal government's first and only Supermax facility, in Florence, Colo. It's known popularly as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies." It currently houses 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, Unibomber Ted Kaczynski, former FBI agent and convicted spy Robert Hanssen, Olympic Park and abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, and many others.
1995 - A federal judge finds conditions at Pelican Bay in California "may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable" (Madrid v. Gomez). But he rules that there is no constitutional basis for the courts to shut down the unit or to alter it substantially. He says the court must defer to the states about how best to incarcerate offenders.
1999 - A report by the Department of Justice finds that more than 30 states are operating a Supermax-type facility with 23-hours-a-day lockdown and long-term isolation. The study finds that some states put 0.5 percent of their total inmates in this kind of facility, while other states lock up more than 20 percent of their inmates this way.
2005 - Daniel P. Mears, an associate professor at Florida State University, conducts a nationwide study and finds there are now 40 states operating Supermax or control-unit prisons, which collectively hold more than 25,000 U.S. prisoners.
Posted by lois at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)
Charles Colson's Faith Based Prison Program Shut Down
Charles Colson's faith-based prison program shut down
Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange
07.20.06 - After serving time in prison for Watergate-related crimes, Charles W. Colson embraced Christianity, founded Prison Fellowship Ministries (website) in 1976, and has since become a high profile, well-respected and oft-quoted Christian conservative leader. Over the past several years, Colson's InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) has partnered with prison authorities in several states, including Texas, Minnesota, Kansas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri, to provide prisoners with a Christ-centered rehabilitation program.
In June, however, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pratt, chief judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, handed Colson's operation a setback. Judge Pratt ruled in favor of a suit filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State (Americans United) which claimed that IFI's operation at Iowa's Newton Correctional Facility violated the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.
Judge Pratt ordered an end to the program within 60 days, and also ordered InnerChange to reimburse more than $1.5 million to the state of Iowa.
"For all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional, and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates," wrote Pratt. "There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates."
Pratt also pointed out that "The level of religious indoctrination supported by state funds and other state support in this case in comparison to other programs treated in the case law ... is extraordinary."
In late June, Prison Fellowship Ministries, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative and the State of Iowa notified the courts that they would appeal Judge Pratt's ruling. "It is our belief that the InnerChange Freedom Initiative is constitutional and well within the framework of the safeguards of the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution," Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley said in a released statement. The appeal was made to the U.S. District Court in Iowa and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a story posted June 14 at the American Enterprise Institute's The American Enterprise Online, Joseph Knippenberg, a professor of politics and associate provost for student achievement at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, pointed out that while he generally "support[s]" the faith-based initiative, as well as "religious efforts to put the penitence back in penitentiaries," he basically agreed with Judge Pratt's ruling: "In this particular case ... the state and Prison Fellowship self-consciously tested the outer bounds of current church-state jurisprudence, they went too far."
According to Knippenberg, Judge Pratt found that:
# While Iowa prison officials were primarily interested in a low-cost program that promised to reduce recidivism among inmates, they "gerrymandered" the Request for Proposals that led to the contract with InnerChange, which was the sole bidder.
# The nature of the InnerChange program is such that it is impossible to clearly distinguish and separate its religious and secular elements. There is one clearly secular class--"Computer Training." Other classes that have secular analogues in therapeutic rehabilitative programs, like "Anger Management," are taught from an essentially Christian point of view.
# While the InnerChange staff attempted to distinguish between their secular and religious work, and bill the state accordingly, their efforts fell short. Where so much of the program is devoted to inculcating a Christian worldview, it is difficult, if not impossible, to precisely delineate what portion of a staffer's time, or what fraction of a piece of equipment's value is devoted to secular, as opposed to religious, purposes.
# In addition to formal coursework, the program imposes numerous religious requirements, including attendance at regular Friday night revival meetings and at Sunday morning worship services.
# There is no comparable secular or religious program elsewhere in the Iowa prison system. Inmates who want a long-term comprehensive rehabilitation program have no other choices.
# The living conditions and privileges afforded InnerChange participants are sufficiently superior to those afforded the general prison population as to be incentives to join the program. In effect, inmates are rewarded for their participation in a religious program.
In a series of published commentaries defending the InnerChange program, Mark Earley called the suit by Americans United, and similar suits initiated by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, attacks that go beyond merely opposition to President Bush's faith-based initiative: "It's a religious battle being waged by groups whose religion really is no religion. Our nation's prisons are merely the newest theater of operations in the campaign to scrub every influence of religion from American public life."
Earley's op-ed pieces cited "Confronting Confinement," a recent report issued by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, which found according to Earley, that "the key to reducing recidivism, enhancing security within the prisons, and protecting the public is comprehensive rehabilitative programming."
In a conversation a while back with Dr. Terry Kupers, a longtime prison reform advocate and the author of "Prison Madness: the Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About it," a comprehensive and highly readable study of the growing mental health crisis in America's prisons, he suggested that most studies show that a fair amount of resources directed toward comprehensive rehabilitation programs will generally prove to be worthwhile.
While "Confronting Confinement" encourages "invest[ment] in programs that are proven to reduce violence and to change behavior over the long term," it says nothing about the efficacy of faith-based prison programs.
For Earley, however, "comprehensive rehabilitative programs" clearly means a program saturated with Christianity. He appears to believe that only faith-based programs can be effective in reducing recidivism rates among prisoners. He is quoted by Christian Newswire as arguing that the effort to remove faith-based programs from prisons "fosters a 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' approach to fighting crime. It assumes that by warehousing criminals and providing no services to help them change, society will be safer when they get out. Nothing could be further from the truth."
In early July, Earley and Al Quie, the former governor of Minnesota and chairman of the IFI Board of Directors, responded to what they charged were "some erroneous statements in its June 15 editorial on the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) program at Minnesota's Lino Lakes prison," published by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
While acknowledging that IFI's program is "faith-based," Earley and Quie maintained that the program is not coercive and has "help[ed] the state to reduce recidivism, enhance security (through improved inmate accountability), and lower correctional costs."
Earley and Quie capped their argument by citing "An independent study by the University of Pennsylvania [that] showed that graduates of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative in Texas were far less likely to return to prison within two years than inmates who did not participate in IFI (8 percent compared to 20 percent)."
But the study cited by Earley and Quie -- and frequently referred to in Earley's commentaries -- was thoroughly debunked in an August 2003 piece called "Faith-Based Fudging: How a Bush-promoted Christian prison program fakes success by massaging data," written by Mark A.R. Kleiman, a Professor of Policy Studies at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, and published by Slate online magazine.
"You don't have to believe in faith-healing to think that an intensive 16-month program, with post-release follow-up, run by deeply caring people might be the occasion for some inmates to turn their lives around. The report seemed to present liberal secularists with an unpleasant choice: Would you rather have people "saved" by Colson, or would you rather have them commit more crimes and go back to prison?
"But when you look carefully at the Penn study, it's clear that the program didn't work. The InnerChange participants did somewhat worse than the controls: They were slightly more likely to be rearrested and noticeably more likely (24 percent versus 20 percent) to be reimprisoned. If faith is, as Paul told the Hebrews, the evidence of things not seen, then InnerChange is an opportunity to cultivate faith; we certainly haven't seen any results.
"So, how did the Penn study get perverted into evidence that InnerChange worked? Through one of the oldest tricks in the book, one almost guaranteed to make a success of any program: counting the winners and ignoring the losers. The technical term for this in statistics is 'selection bias'; program managers know it as 'creaming.' Harvard public policy professor Anne Piehl, who reviewed the study before it was published, calls this instance of it 'cooking the books.'" Joseph Knippenberg maintained that the Iowa ruling could have long term ramifications for other current and future faith-based prison programs: "I'm not convinced that the outcome in this particular case is likely to be different in any other courtroom. This is surely significant in the long run for many of the InnerChange prison units in other states ...for other religious pre-release programs in other states, and for the Bush administration's effort to bring such programs into the federal prison system.
"At the very least, and even before any further decisions are handed down, additional lawsuits will be filed. Indeed, perhaps anticipating this very outcome, the Freedom From religion Foundation has filed a suit challenging the Federal Bureau of Prisons' faith-based "Life Connection Program", currently piloted at five federal prisons and, until recently, scheduled for expansion."
Despite the Iowa ruling, it's not all gloom and doom for Colson's prison enterprises. In the June issue of Americans United's Church & State magazine, Jeremy Leaming reported that Colson's group was the main candidate for a new Justice Department initiative seeking to establish a "single-faith" prison rehabilitation program.
The initiative's stated purpose was to "facilitate personal transformation for the participating inmates through their own spirituality or faith...." and "match inmates with personal mentors and a faith-based community, community organization or support group at their release destination to promote successful reintegration."
Leaming reported that Americans United Senior Litigation Counsel Alex Luchenitser "argued that the program was troubling because it seemed designed to benefit a specific charity - Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. The solicitation listed 10 requirements, all of which mirror the features of Colson's Inner-Change prison program."
(c) 2006 Working Assets Online. All rights reserved
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=21119
Posted by lois at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2006
MA: Editorial: Vote on clean needles is based on the facts
Wednesday, July 19, 2006, Editorial: Springfield (MA) Republican
The Legislature voted for life.
Lawmakers had passed a bill that would allow for the sale of hypodermic syringes without a prescription, but Gov. W. Mitt Romney vetoed the measure. Thankfully, both the state House and Senate votedlast week to override the governor's veto, paving the way for the sale of hypodermic needles beginning on Sept. 18.
The new law also calls for the creation of collection centers for used, dirty needles at police and fire stations, pharmacies and public health offices.The facts behind the new law are clear: The sharing of contaminated needles contributes to the spread of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis C and AIDS.
Making new needles available without a prescription - to those 18 and older - will reduce the spread of such diseases.
Lawmakers from both houses who voted to override the governor's veto did the right thing by seeing past the hyperbolic and illogical rhetoric that was repeated by the most vehement opponents of the clean needle law. Selling hypodermic syringes without a prescription in no way encourages illegal drug use. But it does save lives.
In the Senate, the veto was overridden by a 25-11 vote. The House trumped the governor by a vote of 113-42.
Lawmakers took the next practical step by establishing centers for the collection of used needles. Medical waste companies will pick up the containers.
Drug users will now be able to obtain clean needles and will have a way to safely dispose of used ones. This is the kind of law that can make a real difference. Lawmakers took a look at what is happening in the real world and found a way to make things better. Opponents saw something altogether different. They imagined a world in which people will be encouraged to use drugs because hypodermic syringes will be sold over the counter without a prescription. Do they believe also that people are encouraged to create methamphetamine labs
because the makings of the drug are readily available in local stores?
It's difficult to say exactly what Romney and other opponents were imagining. Thankfully, the great majority of lawmakers looked instead at the facts at hand
- and made a rational decision that will help save lives.
©2006 The Republican
Posted by lois at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)
CT: Govenor akes Heat on Juvenile Justice
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-ctjuvjustice0720.artjul20,0,472838.story?coll=hc-headlines-local
Rell Takes Heat On Juvenile Justice
State Workers Critical Of Leadership, Vision
By COLIN POITRAS
Courant Staff Writer
July 20 2006
NEW BRITAIN -- State employees criticized Gov. M. Jodi Rell on Wednesday, saying she has consistently lacked leadership and vision in dealing with juvenile justice programs, particularly the troublesome Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown.
With the training school scheduled to close in 24 months, union leaders representing hundreds of training school employees used an afternoon press conference to urge Rell to develop more programs, hire more staff and expand community services to help juvenile delinquents.
The workers - members of Council 4 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Connecticut State Employees Association - awarded Rell a juvenile justice "report card" full of F's to highlight their concerns. Rell failed when it came to leadership, programs, communication and vision, the workers said.
"We don't have anybody right now who is actively doing something for our kids," said Paula Dillon, a training school teacher. "We believe a lot more could be done."
Rell's office issued a statement defending her record. In the statement, Rell supports the hard work juvenile justice workers have done during the difficult period of transition. Rell reiterated that the training school, which housed 106 boys on Wednesday, should close and be replaced by smaller, more local detention centers that can help ease the boys' return home.
Rell and state juvenile justice officials pointed out that a new counseling and support program, designed to help youths do better in local schools after leaving the training school, will begin in Hartford next month. Other community programs are also in the works, they said.
Union leaders have complained that they have not been involved in planning juvenile justice changes since the former Long Lane School closed five years ago and the new training school opened. Staff members have repeatedly expressed their frustration through protests, press conferences and several votes of no-confidence in top administrators, the latest targeting Donald DeVore, the head of juvenile justice at the Department of Children and Families.
Union leaders said many of the changes touted by DeVore, Rell and others are not living up to expectations. For instance, they said that a new Boys & Girls Club at the training school is providing more recreation and leisure time than the counseling and support that was promised. Training School Superintendent John Dixon defended the program, saying it is meeting its objectives.
Union leaders again expressed frustration over staffing. They said one-third of the training school's teachers have left for other jobs or personal reasons in recent months, yet 15 jobs remain unfilled, putting stress on the staff and making it more difficult to help children.
Joanna James, another teacher at the school, warned that the lack of proper staff and programs increases the chances that young offenders will get into more trouble after they return home and will return to the expensive, high-security training school - where it costs taxpayers more than $500,000 a year to house a single child.
"We need a better educational transition," said James, a union representative.
Union leaders worry that boys at the training school will be cast adrift when the facility closes, as happened to juvenile girls when Long Lane closed. DeVore said much better planning has been done this time around and those pitfalls should be avoided.
Contact Colin Poitras at cpoitras@courant.com.
Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant
Posted by lois at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)
WI: Practice of Shackling Women During Childbirth Ends
Posted on Thu, Jul. 20, 2006
Prisons set new policy on shackling inmates during childbirth
Associated Press
APPLETON, Wis. - A practice of shackling pregnant prison inmates during childbirth has been replaced by a policy that bans the restraints in Wisconsin prisons except when security reasons require their use.
The written policy comes six months after state Corrections Secretary Matt Frank ordered the practice of shackling prisoners during childbirth stopped.
Frank had learned of the practice from a series of stories in The Post-Crescent of Appleton about women in state prisons, including Taycheedah Correctional Institution near Fond du Lac.
With the new policy, "the intent is to achieve a balance between the humane treatment of inmates with legitimate safety concerns," said John Dipko, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections.
The department declined to release a copy of the written policy, which took effect July 13, citing security concerns.
But officials released a memo from Steve Casperson, administrator of the agency's Division of Adult Institutions, to Frank summarizing the changes.
According to the memo, inmates about to give birth and immediately after giving birth are not to be placed in restraints "unless there are security reasons that require restraint."
An inmate determined to be a risk to herself or others can be restrained if top administrators give prior approval.
"There is going to be a high level of oversight to ensure that inmates are not unnecessarily restrained," Dan Westfield, the division's security chief, said Wednesday.
In the memo, Casperson said that since Frank's verbal order, 15 inmates safely delivered babies in medical facilities, and there were no security problems.
He also said the prison system had increased the minimum number of officers who escort a pregnant inmate to a hospital.
State Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, a member of the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Corrections and Privacy, said the new policy sounds more rational than the old one, which he previously called "cruel and degrading."
The new rules "should have been in place earlier, in my opinion," he said.
Information from: The Post-Crescent, http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent
Posted by lois at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)
CO: 300 attend meeting to discuss (and oppose) GEO prison
Even tho this story makes it sound like there were equal numbers of people both for and against this GEO prison, the facts are that only 12 to 14 people testified in favor of it.
Two of them were from the White family. The head of that family stands to make $2 M for selling his property to GEO. His wife would also make money off the sale, as she is a realtor in town.
Apparently, the GEO people and the Town Board were shell-shocked by the numbers of people against the prison. At the Board meeting following the public meeting, the Board refused to even bring up the subject of GEO. The Board spent most of the night trying to get rid of the Mayor. This action has nothing at all to do with the prison.
d
300 residents show up at Ault meeting to discuss prison
Emma Schmautz, reporters@greeleytribune.com
July 19, 2006
http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20060719/NEWS/107190069
Debate over whether to allow a men's medium security prison to be built in Ault has divided the normally quiet community.
Almost 300 Ault residents overwhelmed Tuesday night's town board meeting to discuss the pros and cons of allowing the Florida-based company Geo Group Inc. to build a 1,500 bed private prison in Ault. So many people showed up that the meeting had to be delayed half an hour to move the meeting to the larger VFW building.
The issue pitted neighbor against neighbor with strong opinions and statements made by nearly 50 people on both sides of the issue.
"Geo is like Wal-Mart. They could care less about this town," said John Jablonski of Ault. "They want to use us to make money."
The majority of the crowd was strongly against the prison but faced opposition from a vocal minority of Ault's business owners. They believe the prison will be the economic boost Ault's dwindling economy needs to survive.
Sheila Kelsey, owner of the House of Bargains, has lived in Ault for 34 years and said that during all that time little economic growth has occurred.
"The prison would be in my front yard, but we desperately need the business," Kelsey said. "If we do not get this business, this town will die. It will be a ghost town."
Many of those against the prison did not like its close proximity to town and called it a safety hazard, a drain on resources such as water and an overall detriment to the well-being of Ault.
Amber Kauffman, who has lived in the town for five years, said she is all for growth but not at the expense of having to live near a prison.
"We came here to live in a small town and a small community," Kauffman said. "A prison would change the dynamics of this town."
Her husband, Ty Kauffman, said that if the prison does go in, the company wants to run water and sewer lines across his fields which would hurt his annual hay crop.
Ty Kauffman said that if the prison does come to Ault, he will be out of town in two weeks.
"You do so much to your home to loose it all," he said. "It's a nightmare."
Ken Fortier, a representative from Geo, said the prison would bring jobs and purchasing power to Ault.
He said that Geo is the largest private corrections facility company in the world and operates high and medium security prisons on many continents including the world's largest private prison in South Africa and a facility that is part of the Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba.
"Step away from the emotions to the notion of what economically 300 jobs mean to the town of Ault," Fortier said.
There was still a lot of questions left in the air on Tuesday. Board members did not tell the crowd when, or if, they would sign a contract with the company.
Posted by lois at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2006
Study Documents "Ghetto Tax" Being Paid by the Urban Poor
July 19, 2006
Study Documents ‘Ghetto Tax’ Being Paid by the Urban Poor
By ERIK ECKHOLM, NY Times
WASHINGTON, July 18 — Drivers from low-income neighborhoods of New York, Hartford and Baltimore, insuring identical cars and with the same driving records as those from middle-class neighborhoods, paid $400 more on average for a year’s insurance.
The poor are also the main customers for appliances and furniture at “rent to own” stores, where payments are stretched out at very high interest rates; in Wisconsin, a $200 television can end up costing $700.
Those were just two examples among several cited in a report Tuesday showing that poor urban residents frequently pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in extra costs for everyday necessities. The study said some of the disparities were due to real differences in the cost of doing business in poor areas, some to predatory financial practices and some to consumer ignorance.
The study, from the Brookings Institution, said finding ways to eliminate these added costs, often called a “ghetto tax,” could be an important new front in the fight against poverty.
At a meeting connected with the report’s release, officials from three states — New York, Pennsylvania and Washington — said they were already doing just that through a variety of programs to draw banks to poor neighborhoods, help finance the construction of supermarkets and encourage innovative insurance schemes.
“There’s a large and for the most part overlooked opportunity here to help low-income families get ahead,” Matt Fellowes, the Brookings researcher who wrote the report, said in an interview. “That is to reduce their costs.”
Measures that reduced the price of essential goods and services for low-income Americans by just 1 percent would put an additional $6.5 billion a year in their hands, said the report, titled “From Poverty, Opportunity.”
Sheldon H. Danziger, a poverty expert at the University of Michigan, noted that $6.5 billion was roughly one-third the benefit the same families have gained through the earned-income tax credit. “Certainly these measures could be an important source of income,” Professor Danziger said of the report’s findings. “But I don’t see them as competing with things like raising the minimum wage, raising child subsidies and providing health insurance.”
Citing other examples of the ghetto tax, the report found that nationally, 4.5 million low-income customers, defined as families making less than $30,000 a year, paid an average of two percentage points more for car loans than did middle-class buyers. And the common use of storefront check-cashing services by poor people, it said, comes at a steep price that varies with local regulations; in 12 cities studied, the fee for cashing a $500 check ranged from $5 to $50.
Part of the problem, the study found, is a discrepancy between the poor and the middle class in consumer skills and mobility: people who comparison-shop, especially on the Internet, tend to pay hundreds less for the identical car than those who walk onto a city lot and buy.
But the disparities can be reduced, the report said, not only by consumer education but also by some combination of incentives to lure banks and stores into poor neighborhoods and tighter regulation on things like the fees of storefront lenders.
The New York State Banking Department has drawn major banks into underserved neighborhoods by placing deposits of government money, sometimes at below-market interest, in the new branches. These may enable more residents to open accounts and reduce reliance on costly check-cashers and lenders, said the state’s superintendent of banks, Diana L. Taylor.
In Pennsylvania, a program led by a Democratic state legislator, Dwight Evans, used state and private financing for construction of supermarkets in areas where residents had previously had to rely on costly small stores or drive long distances for groceries.
Washington State’s insurance commissioner, Mike Kreidler, described efforts to restrict the use of personal credit scores by sellers of home and car insurance.
In a practice that has recently come into wide use in the industry, insurers study credit history to help judge the likelihood that a customer will file insurance claims; those with worse credit records are charged higher premiums, because, insurers say, the industry has found a correlation between poor ratings and the filing of claims.
But Mr. Kreidler and some consumer groups say that the insurers’ approach is not transparent and consistent and that their method is likely to increase prices unfairly for poor people and minorities.
The insurance industry, on the other hand, argues that the new approach benefits many low-income consumers. “We think the use of credit scoring has allowed us to better serve urban areas,” David F. Snyder, vice president of the American Insurance Association, said in an interview. Mr. Snyder said that with this more individualized tool, companies were less likely to raise rates for entire neighborhoods or categories.
Posted by lois at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)
CO: Allowing Parolees to Vote Would Rebuild Lives
7/16/2006 01:00 AM
perspective, Denver Post
Allowing parolees to vote would rebuild lives
By Neema Trivedi and Jenny Rose Flanagan
Colorado is moving into a lively and important election season, but more than 28,000 citizens of the state will be barred from participating because of felony convictions. Like every American, they have much at stake in the upcoming elections, but they will have no voice unless current law is changed.
Felony disenfranchisement laws vary significantly from state to state. Maine and Vermont allow people in prison to vote. But Florida, Kentucky and Virginia bar people from the polls even after serving their full criminal sentences. Twelve states and the District of Columbia restore the right to vote to individuals upon release from prison. In Colorado, people with felony convictions are denied the right to vote while in prison and on parole.
What this means is that many Colorado residents who have done their time in prison are still unable to register and vote when they re-enter society. Nearly 7,000 of those who are disenfranchised in Colorado because of felony convictions are living, working and raising families alongside the rest of us. Though they pay taxes and are concerned about the future of their communities, they have no say in the way their lives are governed.
In his 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush noted, “America is the land of second chances, and when the gates of the prisons open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.” A better life includes the right to vote and the ability to participate meaningfully in civic life.
Instead of opening the path to a better life, the state's felon disenfranchisement law sends a loud and clear message to people who are trying to rebuild their lives: “No matter how hard you try, and no matter how much you contribute, you are still a second-class citizen.” Removing the stigma of past mistakes and encouraging people to participate as full citizens is far more likely to promote their successful reintegration into their communities.
In fact, studies have shown that ex- offenders who vote are less likely to be re-arrested than those who do not vote. Restoring the vote thus not only helps those individuals who have lost their voting rights, but more broadly promotes public safety by allowing people coming out of prison to feel invested in their neighborhoods.
States are increasingly recognizing that it makes sense to lower the barriers to full civic participation. Since 1997, 12 states have made legislative or policy changes restoring the vote to at least some people with criminal convictions or easing clemency procedures. Yet, nationwide, more than 5 million Americans are still unable to vote because of a felony conviction.
In an election year, there will undoubtedly be speculation about how people with felony convictions in Colorado would vote if given the chance. There might be speculation about whether they would vote at all. But we do not deny people the right to vote because we disagree with their political views. And we do not deny people the right to vote because they might not exercise that right.
Interviews and studies show that people with felony convictions do want to vote. Restoring their rights promotes faith in the possibility of inclusion and fair representation in the political process. It is time for Colorado to give people with felony convictions the chance to participate as full citizens.
In 2007, the Colorado legislature should change the law and make it clear that people who have served their prison time are able to vote while on parole. In addition, there are steps Colorado agencies can take right now. The Colorado secretary of state, county clerks and law-enforcement offices should increase their efforts of outreach to released felons, explaining in clear terms their voting rights and encouraging them to register and vote.
Jenny Rose Flanagan is associate director of Colorado Common Cause, and Neema Trivedi is a research associate in the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)
WA: People with felony convictions Denied Basic Right to Vote
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/277513_sentencing14.html
Ex-felons denied basic right to vote
Friday, July 14, 2006
By MARC MAUER
GUEST COLUMNIST
A federal court rejection last week of a decade-long challenge to Washington state's felon disenfranchisement policy highlights the complex dynamics of race and the criminal justice system and raises fundamental questions about fairness and democracy. In the case of Farrakhan v. Gregoire, minority plaintiffs questioned whether discrimination in the justice system contributed to the state's high rates of disenfranchisement among people of color.
The Farrakhan case centers on the state's disenfranchisement policy, which denies voting rights to anyone convicted of a felony and serving a sentence in prison or on probation or parole. The right to vote is restored only after completing a sentence, including payment of fines and costs. This latter requirement is currently being challenged as a modern day "poll tax" on low-income people.
Because Washington's provisions are more restrictive than many other states, it's not surprising that the number of people affected by those policies is higher, as well. One of every 28 adults in the state is ineligible to vote, a rate 50 percent higher than the national average. Although African Americans make up only 3 percent of state population, an astounding one in six is disenfranchised.
For some people, those statistics are interpreted as unfortunate but merely a reflection of greater involvement in crime. That is, if African Americans or other groups are more likely to commit crimes, they will also be more likely to lose their right to vote. But that contention gets to the heart of the Farrakhan challenge. Looking at the long history of racial discrimination in the justice system, the plaintiffs argued that the high minority rate of disenfranchisement was not just a result of involvement in crime but rather reflected disproportionate processing by the criminal justice system. Substantial documentation was presented to the court of biased decision-making in policy and practice, particularly in regard to drug law enforcement whereby drug crimes committed by blacks and Latinos had been more likely to be subject to prosecution.
The federal court agreed with the plaintiffs that they had submitted reports with "compelling evidence of racial discrimination and bias in Washington's criminal justice system" but found that under a "totality of the circumstances" legal doctrine, they failed to constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
It remains to be seen whether the decision will be appealed, but the case raises fundamental questions for policy-makers and the public. As we approach a national election this fall, an estimated 5.3 million Americans will be locked out of the ballot box, not because they are uninterested in voting, but because of the consequences of a felony conviction. Given the broad sweep of those laws, three-fourths of those people are not even in prison, but are living in the community under probation or parole supervision, or have completed their sentences but are disenfranchised under the "ex-felon" provisions of a dozen states.
Those men and women are working and paying taxes in the community, but are denied one of the country's most basic rights. In addition, the interests of public safety argue for having them engaged in the political process. Given high rates of recidivism for people leaving prison, the broader community needs to find ways to encourage them to take on the obligations and responsibilities of other citizens. People who feel a connection to the community will be less likely to victimize others.
When this nation was founded as an "experiment" in democracy, it was in fact a very limited experiment. White male property holders granted themselves the right to vote, thereby excluding women, African Americans, illiterates, poor people and felons.
Today, after 200 years of struggle for democracy, all of the previously excluded groups have been granted the right to vote except people with a felony conviction. We now look back on those former restrictions with a great deal of national embarrassment. Court decisions can determine whether particular laws are constitutional, but policy-makers must determine whether they are wise or necessary.
Marc Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project and the author of "Race to Incarcerate."
Posted by lois at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)
Geo Group Stock Soars on Revised Forecast
Prison firm's stock soars on revised forecast
By Stephen Pounds, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 19, 2006 http://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/content/business/epaper/2006/07/19/a1d_geogroup_0719.
html
Shares in The Geo Group Inc. soared almost 19 percent Tuesday after the
company revised its revenue and earnings forecast upward for the second
time since May.
The Boca Raton-based builder and manager of federal, state and local
prisons bumped its second-quarter earnings expectations to 67 to 70 cents
a share from its revised forecast of June 19, when it said it would make
55 to 58 cents a share.