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August 30, 2006

Hurricane Katrina Update: Finding Faith in Our Darkest Hour

Finding Faith in Our Darkest Hour
A New Orleans Update

By Xochitl Bervera, August 30, 2006
Friends and Famiies of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
NOTE: FFLIC continues to need financial support. For contact information go to the end of this posting.

Friends from around the country ask us: “How are things in New Orleans? Are things getting better?” I always have to pause, surprised that people haven’t heard. I forget that the national media has abandoned us, that George Bush flew into town for five minutes to make promises of federal support which gave the rest of the country and the world permission to look away. I am stunned that people don’t know how much worse it is in New Orleans today for our organization, for our members, for our community than it was even six months ago.

When people ask, I have to tell them: It’s worse than you think. It’s not what people want to hear, but it’s the truth that isn’t being reported in the mainstream media, so I have to keep telling them. And every time, I draw on a renewed commitment on the part of FFLIC and many others in New Orleans and around the country to hold onto faith and to the knowledge that the spiritual and material power of people who believe in and work for justice will one day prevail - and so we keep moving forward. Because it is always darkest before dawn and New Orleans, a year after Katrina, is due for the brightest of dawns.

How are things in New Orleans? For the young people and families who are FFLIC’s heart and soul, things are not well. Besides the chaos of still-unrepaired infrastructure (traffic lights are still broken, garbage pick up remains illusive, levees are insufficiently repaired, and entire neighborhoods remain exactly as they did in October of last year) the clear plan of developers and the business community to deny the right of return to New Orleans’ Black community is being implemented in the ugliest of ways. HUD recently unveiled its plan to demolish 5000 units of public housing. The Recovery School District will simply not open its schools that serve poor Black neighborhoods. Officials refuse to re-open Charity Hospital, the source of health care for New Orleans’ poor and working class. All are part of a plan that has been in the works since the day after the storm. We are witnessing the normally gradual process of gentrification sped up to its logical conclusion, with developers interested in eliminating (and quickly!) all public infrastructure that supports the lives of poor and working class Black communities, and politicians eager to accommodate them. Politicians publicly make their commitment to welcome everyone back while quietly making the policy decisions that guarantee its impossibility.

And yet, people keep coming home! Black New Orleanians, whose land and city this is, are finding their way back every day despite all the predictions and efforts to the contrary. Our families and communities made it back to vote and made their numbers and power felt. Folks are back looking for jobs which don’t exist and housing which is boarded up and vacant.

What does this mean? It means there are hundreds of children in the city with no public schools to attend in their neighborhood. It means there are thousands of people suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (only psychologists tell us there is no “Post” to our PTSD as the stress of daily life in New Orleans is newly traumatizing each day) with no mental health care. It means people still have no consistent place to live, no sense of protection from a future storm, no jobs to make a living, no health care to treat even basic medical needs. It means folks come back, are forced to leave again, come back and forth and back and forth…

It means that the institutions that stabilize a community – like churches, schools, and grandmas – are absent, while instability and stress factors are through the roof.

It means that there has been a 25% jump in the mortality rate, including a threefold increase in the suicide rate. It means that Arsenio and Markee Hunter, Warren Simeon, Iraum Taylor and Reggie Dantzler, – all New Orleans youth and several of whom were friends and children of FFLIC’s – were slaughtered on a street corners not 5 blocks from our offices, gunned down with a submachine gun that somehow make it back into the city and onto the streets. It means we have lost Kerry Washington, a son and a father, who died mysteriously inside the overcrowded, overheated Orleans Parish Prison –where he paid with his life for an old warrant of simple drug possession. It means Ronald Smith who was gunned down by police will never get to see how beautifully his brother testified at a city council hearing two months ago. It means our members and families live in fear of both the violence on the streets and the violence of the police who are supposed to protect them.

It means, in short, that the clash between the gentrifying forces and the Black community - who were not meant to survive, endure, and return – has turned deadly. Where the lack of schools, housing and healthcare fails to keep people away, those in power will turn to the police and prisons.

If there was ever any doubt that the criminal justice system would be used to keep Black New Orleanians from returning, the last few months have eliminated the last of it. With 300 National Guardsman called in to patrol (with M-16s which are “locked and loaded”) the empty streets of the neighborhoods where the lack of infrastructure has slowed efforts to rebuild, the NOPD has been able to turn its attention to “protecting” the neighborhoods that have been rebuilt. By consistently profiling, harassing and arresting poor people of color, NOPD are now making over 140 arrests per week. The vast majority of these arrests are for minor violations, including spitting on a sidewalk. The kinds of charges being put on people – resisting arrest, obstruction of justice, battery on a police officer - speak more to the tension between NOPD and community than to public safety.

The rise in NOPD arrests occurs at a moment when the Orleans Parish Prison is becoming made increasingly dangerous by its overcrowding and lack of adequate health care. Harsh criticism from national media and lawyers of Sheriff Gusman’s operation of OPP has not stopped him from opening new “temporary” beds at breakneck speed and sending hundreds of prisoners up to the state penitentiary in Angola to try and keep up with the new arrests.

So how are things in New Orleans?
But, there is a beacon of light. Undeniably, organizing has taken root in the city. From neighborhood associations to workers rights, environmental justice, and public safety reform groups, people are beginning to come together and use their people power, their power to disrupt, to shame, to confront elected officials and demand that they do what they were elected to do: serve the people of this city.

An inspiring example of how organizing and reform work are together making a difference is in the juvenile justice system itself. Even as news coverage concentrates all the blame for crime on young Black men, and the demonized threat of these young Black men is used to justify everything from shutting down public housing to bringing in the National Guard, the juvenile justice system itself is continuing on the path of reform that had just begun when the storm hit.

The changes in New Orleans’ juvenile justice system are real. During the six months before Katrina, there were over 4000 juvenile arrests in New Orleans. In these last six months, there have been 169. After the storm, Orleans Parish Juvenile Court Chief Judge David Bell took leadership in implementing many reforms that had previously been discussed, but never implemented. For starters, he brought in Attorney (and FFLIC friend) Ilona Picou to work as the court's recovery coordinator. Ilona, well versed in juvenile justice reform, coordinated 38 volunteer attorneys from outside Louisiana to winnow down the number of active cases from 26,500 to 2,500.

A new set of procedures on how to deal with kids has dropped the number of kids being arrested by police from over 100 a day to an average of 17 per day. Police are no longer arresting kids for trespass, for example, for sitting on a basketball court after school. The Court has been able to use savings from such basic changes to upgrade its computer and phone systems. It has also purchased vehicles for use by families in need of supervision, drug court, weekend detention and alternatives to detention programs. Money that had been used to put kids in jail before the storm is now being used to bring support families need to keep their kids at home.

So, why is juvenile justice improving at the very same moment criminal justice for adults is spinning out of control, and despite the recent blame-the-victim policy responses of curfews and increased law enforcement? In part, it is because juvenile justice reform efforts – led by FFLIC and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana – were already underway when Katrina hit. Before the storm, FFLIC, a voting member of the Children and Youth Planning Board was actively engaged in getting the many stakeholders to agree that detention reform in Orleans Parish was necessary. After touring the decrepit Youth Study Center and witnessing first hand the horrific conditions in which over 100 of our children were detained on any given day, FFLIC made a commitment to ensure that any reforms of the juvenile justice system would include the closure of that facility and the reduction of the number of children held at any given time. FFLIC worked hard with other stake holders, including the juvenile court judges, to recruit the Annie E. Casey Foundations Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) to come to Orleans to implement their proven program to reform local juvenile justice systems and help jurisdictions spend less on incarceration and more quality community based programs for kids and families.

So when the storm hit, the adult system and the juvenile system responded in precisely opposite ways. The juvenile system which had been forced to see children as the precious human being they are, and detention beds as the costly, ineffective burden they are, chose to speed up its reform process. The adult system which had made no such culture shift and no such commitment to change, has continued down its path of death and destruction.

What does this mean? To FFLIC, it is a reminder that our work has impact, value and indeed can make a very real difference in people’s lives and in the systems which affect our lives. To all of us, it shows that issue based organizing has the potential to result in system shifts that can withstand a racist onslaught even of the magnitude we are witnessing in New Orleans today. It also tells us that FFLIC must not be content to just see the changes in the juvenile system, knowing more children each day are being bumped into the adult system and that no matter what the courts say, our 17 and 18 year old children are no less human, no less ours, no less worthy of our commitment to keep them safe from the harm of the streets, safe from the harm of law enforcement, safe from the harm of racism and displacement. As FFLIC looks forward, we must re-commit ourselves to organizing, to building our membership base and to our mission of improving the lives of Louisiana’s youth, especially those at risk of getting involved in the juvenile justice system in the context of today’s it’s-worse-than-you-think New Orleans. If we and the many others in New Orleans who have begun, keep on organizing, we have hope that we may soon be able to answer the question differently, “So how are things in New Orleans?”

Xochitl Bervera
Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
188 Williamsburg Street
Lake Charles, LA 70605
337) 562-7083

1600 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd
New Orleans, LA 70113
(504) 606-8846

Posted by lois at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Cell Block- City Whip Out Plans for a New Bronx Jail---not in our wasteland, say opponents

Cell Block
City suddenly whips out plans for a new Bronx jail. Not in our wasteland, say opponents.

by Jarrett Murphy
August 29th, 2006 8:30 AM

In the bad old days when the Bronx was burning, some of the ashes apparently found their way to a slab of land between the Bruckner Expressway and the East River called Oak Point. Over the next two decades, other debris from construction and demolition projects was illegally dumped at the same site, but that wasn't Oak Point's only baggage. There were also multiple bankruptcies, back taxes, dueling lawsuits, a factory that never was, power plants that never came, a felonious businessman, and links to the Gotti family.

But on April 25 of this year, the city offered to give Oak Point a new lease on life—as the site of a $375 million, 2,000-bed jail. In testimony to the City Council Committee of Fire and Criminal Justice Services, a top Department of Corrections official said that an Oak Point jail, along with the proposed reopening of the Brooklyn House of Detention, would shift a significant chunk of population off of Rikers Island—with its decaying infrastructure and unwieldy size—and into the boroughs, where inmates' families and lawyers could visit them more easily.

It's a fairly momentous shift for corrections policy in the city, where jails handled more than 100,000 admissions last year. But the D.O.C. didn't exactly shout this big news from the rooftops.

Corrections commissioner Martin Horn tells the Voice he had been thinking about the project for at least two years. Norman Seabrook, the head of the corrections officers' union, says he heard about it 18 months ago. But local council members were briefed about the plan only a few days before the hearing. And community activists, for the most part, didn't know about it at all.

A few activists happened to be at the hearing, and when it ended, they began spreading the word. Now a host of groups from Hunts Point is ramping up opposition. But on the other side of the fence are some of their traditional allies, like Legal Aid, the Women's Prison Association, and the Fortune Society. John Boston from Legal Aid told the council that "getting as many detainees as practical away from Rikers Island is an excellent idea," arguing that the huge size of Rikers, its physical deterioration, and its remote location make it a bad place for inmates and people who visit them. Elizabeth Gaynes, executive director of the Osborne Association, a social-service agency for prisoners, puts it this way: "Rikers Island is a nightmare."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's not just that it's a bad commute. Rikers Island, which holds 10 jails and about 15,000 inmates, is in a flood zone, so it's vulnerable to hurricanes, and near fuelfarms that can blow up. In 1957, a DC-6 taking off from LaGuardia crashed there. The island is 80 percent landfill, and as that fill settles it can break water mains. There's lone bridge connecting the island to Queens. What if a criminal group knocked the bridge out? The whole justice system would grind to a halt, corrections officials say.

"I don't think we'll ever totally abandon Rikers Island, but I think the city needs to spread its risk," says Horn. He wants to move thousands of prisoners out of their decaying, temporary modules on Rikers and into either newly refurbished facilities on the island or new jails in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Each borough jail would hold people awaiting trial there. Women and the Rikers nursery will probably be moved off the island, as well. Horn vows that citywide jail capacity will not increase, and actually will shrink, under the plan.

That promise is key to the support the city is getting from advocates for the imprisoned, who always fear an "if we build it, we fill it" mentality when it comes to jails. "If any site that is chosen," says Gaynes, "is replacing cells and not adding to them and if it is going to improve the ability of people to stay connected to their families and the community that they're from, I think it's OK."

But it's not clear exactly how big the Brooklyn jail would be or just where the women and babies would go. Horn says he doesn't know whether the Oak Point site will need 11 acres or 16. The corrections union wants an academy for its officers on the site. What's more, eminent domain mightbe needed to obtain the site; Horn says talks with the landowner are at an impasse.

If the city moves to take the land, it won't be the first time Oak Point ended up in a legal dispute. After the city stopped dumping at Oak Point, a company named Britestarr bought the land for a modular-home factory but used it as an illegal dumping ground instead and racked up heavy state fines. The Dinkins administration considered putting a jail there, but that was scotched when a Gotti associate was found to be connected to Britestarr. Britestarr president David Norkin pled guilty to federal fraud and racketeering charges in 1996, and the company went bankrupt in 2002. The court appointed Steve Smith, an energy executive, as the new president of the troubled firm. Amid continued legal battles with Norkin and others, Smith teamed up with KeySpan to propose a power plant for Oak Point. But their application for state approval has stalled, probably because a jail is the city's priority there.

Horn contends that the Oak Point jail proposal was born two years ago when Smith approached the city to see if it "was interested in building a power plant and jail." But Smith disputes that, saying the city contacted him about the jail, also in 2004. Smith also has told state regulators that the city has "expressed its desire to acquire the entire site" if KeySpan ends its power-plant proposal. KeySpan tells the Voice it hasn't "formally discussed" the city's proposal for a jail.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the jail-versus-power-plant contest, locals pick "none of the above," but right now, the jail seems the more imminent threat. Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo, who represents Oak Point, says the area near the proposed jail site is already home to two juvenile lockups, a prison barge, several waste-transfer stations, multiple homeless shelters, and heavy truck traffic. "We're just tired of more of the stuff nobody else wants in their neighborhood," she says. She acknowledges that a borough jail might make sense. She just wants it somewhere else.

Other opponents of the jail strenuously avoid the NIMBY line. Some argue that the site could be used for something better. Sustainable South Bronx is working on a feasibility study for a "recycling industrial park." While most jail opponents aren't signing on to that particular idea, local activists insist that they were talking about what to do with the Oak Point site long before the jail proposal came up.

There are also some practical doubts that Oak Point can deliver what the D.O.C. says it will. Bronx Defenders represents low-income people in the borough's courts and therefore would seem to be benefit from a closer jail. But it opposes the plan. Oak Point isn't that easy to reach, says organizer Maggie Williams. And getting to the jail is only part of the difficulty in visiting inmates: Passing through security and waiting in line for a brief visit also make it hard. Until the city knows exactly what it's doing in Brooklyn, there's no reason to touch a new site in the Bronx, Williams adds, especially given the environmental concerns about Oak Point after the years of dumping. "No one should have to live on that land," she says. "It's not appropriate for residential living. And a jail is residential."

Most importantly, the opponents simply don't want new prison space, even if it is replacing existing jails. From 2001 to 2005, the city crime rate dropped 17.5 percent, but the average population in the city's jails fell only 6 percent, probably because cops now have time to arrest people for low-level crimes, and they serve their sentences in the city rather than upstate. "The building of a jail in Riverdale wouldn't make us feel any better," says Kelly Terry-Sepulveda, executive managing director of the Point, a community-development corporation. "The fact is there doesn't need to be another jail built, end of story. The community doesn't feel we need more jail beds. That's not where we want to send our children."

Opponents of the Oak Point jail hate the process as much as the proposal. Since the April hearing, the D.O.C. has briefed only the chairman of Community Board 2—not the whole board or any other group. The agency promises it will reach out, but opponents are trying to derail Oak Point before it gets to that stage. "We believe as soon as the process starts it's going to be very difficult to stop them," says Carlos Alicea of For a Better Bronx.

The Bronx had its own jail for many years: the House of Detention at 151st Street and River Avenue—far closer to the courthouses than Oak Point. The aging 469-bed facility was put into reserve status in 2000, but any possibility for its reopening vanished when the city conveyed it to the Related Companies as part of the Bronx Terminal Market redevelopment, which Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión championed.

While other elected officials in the area have come out against the Oak Point plan, Carrión has not. A spokesman tells the Voice in a statement: "The Borough President feels it is premature to comment on any proposed land use for Oak Point. The Borough President is committed to working with local elected officials and the community to ensure that every possibility is considered . . . "

http://villagevoice.com/news/0635,murphy,74312,5.html

Posted by lois at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Coalition for Effective Public Safety Opposes New Legislation to Build More Prisons

FLOOR ALERT
REJECT NEW PRISON BEDS

OPPOSE AB 17XX AND SB X2-10
Borrows $606 million -- without voter approval -- to build 5,340 new prison beds and plan for another 10,900 more

OPPOSE AB 16XX AND SB X2-9
Adds 4,500 new prison beds for people in women’s prisons

The Coalition for Effective Public Safety (CEPS), a statewide coalition representing organized labor, faith, criminal justice reform, civil rights and community groups, believes you can’t build your way out of this problem.

The CDCR has many problems. But building more prison cells won’t solve any of them. Building more cells will divert even more funds away from programming, reentry services and social services that might keep people from going to prison in the first place.

Increasing the number of cells will only increase the number of people in prison and California’s extraordinary $8 billion prison budget. Increased capacity has never solved the problems of overcrowding, lack of programming or poor conditions.

California voters don’t want more prisons. A 2006 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found only 3% of Californians named prisons as an infrastructure priority and poll after poll has found that Californians favor cuts to prison spending over any other area of state spending.

We strongly oppose the use of Lease Revenue Bonds to build new prisons. The only reason to use lease revenue bonds is to bypass voter approval, as LRBs will end up costing taxpayers nearly twice the amount borrowed.

California needs to follow the lead of other states and reduce the number of people in prison. We can’t build our way out of this problem.

CONTACT: John Lum, Public Policy Coordinator 916-995-2379

The Coalition for Effective Public Safety (CEPS)
is a capitol based statewide coalition of 38 organizations committed to creating safer communities and lowering prison costs.

Action Committee for Women in Prison
All of Us or None
American Civil Liberties Union
American Friends Service Committee
A New PATH
Behind the Walls
Books Not Bars
CA Attorneys for Criminal Justice
CA Families Against Mandatory Minimums,
CA Prison Moratorium Project
CA State NAACP
Center for Young Women’s Development
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
Centerforce
Citizens for the Three Strikes Reform
Critical Resistance
Drug Policy Alliance
Education not Incarceration
ESPINO (Youth Organizing for Equal Justice and Education) Coalition
Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes
Friends Committee on Legislation
Get on the Bus
Justice Now
Justice Policy Institute
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
Lutheran Office of Public Policy
Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation
National Action Network-California Chapter,
A New Way of Life
PICO California Project
Progressive Christians Uniting
SEIU Local 535
SEIU Local 1000
SEIU State Council
Women & Criminal Justice
Youth Against Youth Incarceration
Youth In Focus
Youth Justice Coalition/Free L.A.!

Posted by lois at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)

CA: 3 parts of Governor's Plans to Expand Prisons Move Forward

This is from Craig Gilmore in LA....

3 parts of the Gov's prison expansion plan moved
out of committee last night after a brief evening
of public committee meeting. Those are 1)
contracting for 4,500 beds for women 2) building
5,000 beds at existing prisons and planning
10,000 new medical and mental health beds and 3)
transferring non-citizens out of state. Two
related bills not part of the Gov's package also
passed providing grant assistance to counties
with parolees and establishing a committee to
advise the CDCR on its disfunctional computer
systems. Floor votes expected today or tomorrow
on all.

Below are the Times and SacBee stories on yesterday's deal.....

California Prison Reform Plan Falls Short
Lawmakers, calling it faulty, say they'll reject
most of the governor's $6-billion proposal to
ease crowding.
By Jenifer Warren and Jordan Rau
Times Staff Writers

August 30, 2006

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
sweeping proposal to ease overcrowding and other
woes inside California's beleaguered prison
system hit a wall Tuesday as lawmakers said they
would reject major pieces of his $6-billion
package.

One result: California's teeming penitentiaries -
already packed to twice their intended capacity -
will run out of bed space by June, officials say,
and nobody can agree on a plan to quickly create
more room.

Assessing the prospects, Corrections Secretary
James Tilton said he would be forced to close
prison doors to incoming inmates next summer.
Counties with caps on their jail populations
probably then would be forced to release inmates,
he said.

"I'm out looking for every available bed," Tilton
said in an interview. "It's a struggle, and I
hope the Legislature will reconsider and help us
find some immediate relief."

Schwarzenegger had proposed two short-term moves
to free 9,000 beds: the transfer of 5,000 felons
facing deportation to prisons in other states and
the use of private facilities to house 4,000
low-security inmates.

Members of the Legislature's Democratic majority,
however, said the mandatory transfers might be
unconstitutional. As for the 4,000 private prison
beds, it was unclear whether they were even
available, lawmakers said.

Legislators described Schwarzenegger's plans as
hastily assembled and lacking basic pieces of
information, and asked that the administration
flesh them out when lawmakers reconvene in
January. Democratic leaders submitted alternative
legislation containing parts that they found
acceptable.

"It was apparent in the [legislative] hearings
that the governor's ideas weren't ready for prime
time," said Mike Machado (D-Linden), chairman of
the Senate's committee on the special legislative
session on prisons called by Schwarzenegger.

The special session, concurrent with the regular
session, allows lawmakers to bypass many
legislative rules and adopt bills more quickly
than usual. Any legislation that is approved
would take effect 90 days after the session
concludes rather than at the beginning of next
year.

The Senate and Assembly plan to vote on the
legislative package today or Thursday.

Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) joined other
lawmakers in criticizing the governor for failing
to focus on dysfunctional parole and sentencing
laws, which she called the root of overcrowding.
Romero also accused him of using the special
session as a campaign stunt.

"This special session is show time for the
governor," Romero said. "He wants the blaring
trumpets and big hurrahs because there's an
election coming up. He should have dealt with
these problems last October when he was warned
about the population crisis."

Lawmakers embraced only one piece of the
governor's package: the transfer of 4,500
nonviolent female inmates - about 40% of the
total number of incarcerated women - to
correctional centers in their communities. Each
center would house as many as 200 offenders,
providing them with education, vocational
training, substance abuse treatment and other
services to increase their odds of success after
release.

Experts say such a move would be a groundbreaking
shift in policy and would reduce the recidivism
rate for California's female offenders, now
housed in prisons at Chowchilla, Chino and Norco.
Many of the new beds, however, may not be
available before 2008.

Corrections - an $8.6-billion-a-year operation in
the throes of a long-running crisis - became the
subject of a special session this month after
Schwarzenegger said urgent attention was
warranted to alleviate crowding.

The state's 33 prisons house about 173,000
inmates, with more than 16,000 of them bunked in
gyms, hallways and other spaces not intended as
living quarters. Projections show that the state
will receive 23,000 more felons over the next
five years.

Officials warn that the packed prisons - staffed
by officers stretched thin because of vacancies -
are on the brink of a violent outbreak.
Schwarzenegger said a failure to address the
crisis could prompt a federal judge to seize the
prison system and order the early release of tens
of thousands of inmates.

In addition to the shifting of female convicts,
the governor's initial proposal called for $6
billion to build two prisons, expand existing
lockups and open mini-prisons - called reentry
centers - in urban areas for inmates nearing
their release dates.

Since then, however, Schwarzenegger has scrapped
his plan for new prisons and now embraces a
suggestion by the federal receiver in charge of
prison healthcare: the construction of medical
and mental health facilities for 10,000 inmates.

Legislation put forth by Democrats this week
would authorize that move and provide $14 million
to design the facilities. The legislation also
would provide funding to build space for 5,340
more inmates at existing prisons, design the
reentry facilities, and build a new Southern
California academy to train correctional officers.

In all, lawmakers propose to fund less than $1
billion of the $6-billion package originally
proposed by Schwarzenegger.

In other action Tuesday, lawmakers sent to the
governor's desk bills that would:

* Allow registered domestic partners to file
joint state tax returns just as married couples
may. SB 1827 by Sen. Carole Migden (D-San
Francisco) was a priority of gay rights groups
and opposed by social conservatives and the
California Catholic Conference.

* Require large retail stores to set up in-store
recycling programs for plastic bags. AB 2447 by
Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys) requires
stores larger than 40,000 square feet to offer
places where customers can drop off used plastic
bags that the store would recycle.

* Prohibit school textbooks and instructors from
teaching anything that "reflects adversely" on
homosexuals. SB 1437 by Sen. Sheila Kuehl
(D-Santa Monica) originally required textbooks to
note gay people of historical significance, but
that portion was removed.

* Require remodeled pools to include the same
safety features that new pools must have, such as
a cover or fence. AB 2977 by Assemblyman Gene
Mullin (D-San Mateo) also would add two safety
features that would meet those requirements:
removable mesh fences and alarms in swimming
pools that ring if someone enters the water.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

####
Democrats offer own prison plan
Four bills are alternative to governor's bid to deal with overcrowding. By Andy Furillo -- Bee Capitol Bureau Published 12:01 am PDT Wednesday, August 30, 2006 Democratic legislative leaders Tuesday presented
an alternative to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
plans for addressing prison overcrowding, one
administration officials said would force county
jails to release thousands of inmates by next
June.

The four bills would provide $918 million in bond
and general fund financing for prison expansion,
authorize the state to move 4,500 women to
community correctional facilities, offer $25
million in grant money for neighborhood parole
programs and allow for voluntary inmate transfers
to out-of-state institutions.

But the package falls well short of the $6
billion expansion plan the governor is seeking.

State Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, chair of the
select committee that reviewed the
administration's prison bills in the ongoing
special legislative session, acknowledged that
Democrats are taking an incremental approach.

"But in no way does it hinder the Department (of
Corrections and Rehabilitation) from getting to
where it has to go over time," he said. "It
doesn't in any way impede them."

Acting Corrections Secretary James Tilton said in
a statement that he was "encouraged" by the
Legislature's "focus" on the issue. But Tilton
said the bills ignore the Republican governor's
call to move 4,000 male inmates into private
prison beds and to involuntarily transfer 5,000
foreign nationals serving time in California to
out-of-state prisons.

"As a result, these bills do not solve the
state's short-term capacity problem," Tilton said
in the statement. "The lack of a short-term
solution will create an emergency situation
whereby the department will run out of beds by
June 2007. When that day comes, the department
will be forced to stop accepting inmates, and
will notify counties that (the prisons) can no
longer accept felons sentenced by the courts."

Tilton said 18,000 inmates a month already are
getting early releases from county jails due to
their own overcrowding problems, which he
predicted will worsen with the Legislature's
prison package, thereby "severely impacting the
public safety of our communities."

Machado, however, did not back off from the
Legislature's prison proposal. He said the
administration "couldn't demonstrate" a detailed
plan on the private prisons for men and that the
proposed out-of-state transfers raise
constitutional questions.

Moreover, Machado said, his prison committee
proposed a review of re-incarcerating low-risk
parolees who violate the terms of their freedom
as a way to stem prison overcrowding.

The Democrats' plan -- offered in identical
Assembly and Senate bills -- calls for $606
million in revenue bonds and $312 million from
the general fund to kick off a new, long-term
prison construction program. The program includes
groundwork for both the community "re-entry"
facilities for short-term inmates and medical and
mental health facilities for prisoners.

The money also would fund an expansion program at
existing prisons for 5,340 inmates (short of the
14,000 sought by the administration) and lay the
groundwork for the construction of a new training
academy in Southern California and the conversion
of a women's prison in Stockton into a reception
center for men.

Schwarzenegger's plan to move the 4,500
nonviolent female offenders into private prisons
may be running into some resistance, however,
from the companies that run the facilities.

Mark Nobili, a lobbyist for Cornell Cos. Inc.,
which operates a private prison in Sutter County,
said his client is not interested in bidding for
the new women's prisons. He said requirements in
both the governor's and the Legislature's bills
that the prisons be staffed with state
correctional officers would impede Cornell's
ability to run its own programs, but still leave
it liable.

"If we don't have the authority over our staff
and over our programs, we've got no quality
control," Nobili said, adding that lobbyists for
other private prison companies have told him they
won't be bidding on the facilities, either.

Wendy Still, the prison system's head of female
institutions, said several companies -- including
some focused primarily on drug treatment -- have
expressed interest in bidding on the private
prison contracts.

"We're going to get a different kind of bidder," she said.

About the writer:

* The Bee's Andy Furillo can be reached at
(916) 321-1141 or afurillo@sacbee.com.

Copyright C The Sacramento Bee

Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

An exit strategy for the drug war

An exit strategy for the drug war

By Neal Peirce
This syndicated column ran in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA 8-28-06
SEATTLE -- Is it time to forge an ''exit strategy'' for our prolonged ''war on drugs''?

That question -- normally considered a ''no-no'' in legal circles, especially among prosecutors and police -- has been raised by the prestigious King County (Wash.) Bar Association since 2000. And the results have been impressive. King County is sending minor street drug users and sellers through drug courts instead of incarcerating them; its average daily jail count is down from 2,800 to 2,000. The Washington Legislature was persuaded to cut back drastically on mandatory drug possession sentences, apportioning funds to adult and juvenile drug courts, and family ''dependency'' courts. Tens of millions of dollars have been saved.

''This project isn't for fringy ponytailed pot smokers,'' insists Roger Goodman, director of the bar association's Drug Policy Project. ''We did it for the courts. We can't get civil cases heard for three years. And the drug cases are mostly so petty.''

The uncomfortable truth is that despite decades of aggressive government crackdowns, U.S. drug use and drug-related crime are as high as ever. Made profitable by prohibition, violent criminal enterprises that purvey drugs are flourishing. Harsh criminal sanctions, even for minor drug possession, have packed jails and prisons. Public coffers have been drained of funds for critical preventive social services,

Internationally, we're discovering that America's heavy-handed campaign of illegal drug eradication in countries such as Colombia is about as successful as our parallel military adventure into Iraq. Despite the stunning $4.7 billion we've spent since 2000 on planes fumigating Colombia's coca crop, farmers there are producing just as much cocaine as before our aerial assault.

Back home, ''street'' prices for cocaine have dropped and purity remains high. Prohibition has failed equally to stamp out markets and quality, or increase street prices for heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. The drug war kicked off by President Nixon in the 1970s, and copied by state and local governments nationally, costs $40 billion or more a year. It is a massive, embarrassing, destructive failure.

But politicians are normally afraid to question the system for fear of being called illegal drug apologists. So how did the King County Bar get the ball rolling? ''It's the messenger, not the message'' -- the credibility of the bar association, says Goodman. The King County Bar in fact assembled a nationally unprecedented coalition of supporters, ranging from the Washington State Bar Association to the King County and Washington state medical associations, the Church Council of Greater Seattle and the League of Women Voters of Seattle and Washington.

And the first-stated goals weren't scuttling drug laws. Instead, the bar association announced its platform as (1) reductions in crime and disorder ''to undercut the violent, illegal markets that spawn disease, crime, corruption, mayhem and death''; (2) improving public health by stemming the spread of blood-borne diseases; (3) better protection of children from the harm of drugs, and (4) wiser use of scarce public resources.

Now the bar association and its allies are asking the Washington Legislature to establish a commission of experts to design how the state can switch from punitive approaches to a focus on treatment, shutting down the criminal gangs that now control the drug trade.

As controversial as it sounds, programs for victims (most likely adults) of such dangerously addictive drugs as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine may be easiest to fashion. Rather than leaving them to the streets and black market exploitation, there may -- as some European models suggest -- be ways to register addicts, provide controlled amounts of drugs in medical settings, and try to guide them into treatment.

For marijuana, control by cartels that now provide huge quantities might be broken by state licensing of home production (like brewing) and non-commercial exchanges. Or a state distribution system like state liquor stores, demonstrably effective in denying sales to youth, could be established.

The toughest issues may surround protection of children. Today, it's noted, they get contradictory messages -- ''Take a pill to feel better,'' and ''Just say no, except when you're 21 and then you can drink.'' Youth see commercial advertising pushing a wide variety of mind-altering, pleasure-inducing substances, even while society leaves control of so-called ''illicit'' drugs to criminal gangs. Plus, kids do like to experiment.

A realistic program could start with respecting young people, providing them honest information, on uses -- and the demonstrable dangers -- of alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Goodman notes that in the 13 states where medical use of marijuana is authorized, teen use is down. ''It's not as cool when grandma uses marijuana for cancer pain,'' he says.

There's surely no risk-free ''exit'' from today's terribly destructive drug war. But we have to try -- and should thank communities and states with the courage to lead.

Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.

Posted by lois at 07:44 PM | Comments (0)

IL: Town's Long Wait Over as Empty Prison Readies to Open

Tiny town's long wait nearly over as empty prison readies to open
By JAN DENNIS
Associated Press Writer

August 27, 2006, 10:07 AM CDT

THOMSON, Ill. -- Instead of inmates counting down their sentences, it's the people of this tiny Mississippi River town that have been waiting for nearly five years as a newly built state prison sat empty after falling victim to Illinois' budget crunch.

The $136 million lockup will finally be unlocked in the next two weeks, with a scaled-down opening approved last spring that will bring in about 200 of the 1,800 inmates the state-of-the-art prison was built to house.

With fewer prisoners, only 75 of the nearly 700 jobs promised will be filled when the prison opens on the outskirts of this job-hungry town, about 40 miles northeast of the Quad Cities.

Still, townspeople say it's better than nothing in a struggling region where unemployment has swelled over the last decade as area factory jobs vanished and an Army depot was shuttered in nearby Savanna.

"It always baffled me that they put that much money in a prison they didn't open. ... I guess I won't believe it until I see them unloading that first batch of prisoners," said Barb Kessler, a clerk at a produce market in this town of about 550 people that bills itself as the melon capital of the world.

Such skepticism seems justified after hopes were raised then dashed for years as Illinois battled massive budget deficits that tied up the $50 million a year needed to open the state's newest prison.

Some worry now that the $7.7 million for the partial opening -- proposed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich and approved by the Legislature -- was just election-year sleight of hand. They fear the money won't follow to fill Thomson's eight sprawling cell houses, completed in late 2001.

Blagojevich spokeswoman Rebecca Rausch said it's too early to speculate on the governor's budget plan for next year if he's re-elected. But one area lawmaker says the rest of the prison could open as soon as next summer if the state's improving finances hold.

"I don't like to give anybody false hope. I've tried to keep this situation one of reality, but I think it's looking good. I don't know what kind of odds I'd put on it if I was a gambling man, but I think it looks good," said state Rep. Mike Boland, D-East Moline.

Officials say the scaled-back opening will provide little economic boost for this rural bedroom community, where some residents drive nearly an hour to work and the Mississippi River draws flocks of hunters and fishermen.

"The jobs are one-tenth of what we were promised. So is it good? Yes. Is it going to change the economy? No," said Lawrence Bruckner, a Thomson native and former lieutenant governor candidate who built a hotel and restaurant that has struggled as the prison sat idle.

Acting village president Randy Starr agreed, saying Thomson won't get a real economic jolt until all of the prison's jobs and cells are filled. But he said some merchants are already reporting better sales as workers ready the prison for 200 minimum-security inmates who will start arriving in groups of about 25 by early September.

"Things have picked up for us. Not dramatically, but anything is an improvement," said Mike Wheetley, who owns a downtown bar and grill where business fell 30 percent after prison construction wrapped up.

But officials say Wheetley's watering hole and the other handful of businesses in Thomson will flourish if the state comes through with money to fully open the prison, adding about 600 jobs and 1,600 inmates, who also will draw a steady steam of visitors.

"That will be a real shot in the arm," said Boland, a state lawmaker since 1995. "That will be just like putting megavitamins into the area's economy."

Chamber of Commerce president Jonathan Whitney says growth would be solid but not explosive if the prison is filled. Housing in and around Thomson could increase by about 10 percent and new restaurants and taverns could open, but probably not the grocery store and fast-food outlets many want.

Still, even more growth could lie ahead, said Whitney, publisher of The Carroll County Review, a weekly newspaper.

He said Thomson's prison could further boost its inmate population -- adding even more jobs -- if the state opts for two prisoners to a cell instead of one, the practice at most of Illinois' other 27 lockups. And other projects also are in the works, including a planned ethanol plant that would could create about 60 new jobs.

"We need jobs. Most of them are so far away. If you find something around here, you're lucky," Brandy Arnold of Savanna said last week while helping her fianc De's sister with a yard sale in Thomson.

The long wait on the prison proved too long for some Thomson business owners, who were forced to sell after building or expanding to serve an expected throng of workers and visitors who never came.

Some residents also wonder whether an earlier opening could have saved the town's schools, which merged last year with nearby Savanna and Mount Carroll, leaving only fourth- and fifth-graders in Thomson.

But others say the frustrating delay also quieted dissent over the prison that once divided the small town. Even opponents, they say, think the prison should be used now that it's there.

"I'm sure there are still some who are against it," said William Wagner, an 82-year-old Thomson native who came back home from Chicago after retiring 20 years ago. "But they're not doing any talking to speak of."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/illinois/chi-ap-il-thomsonprison,1,6833500.story
Copyright © 2006, The Associated Press

Posted by lois at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

LA Critical Resistance Seeks Organizer

Critical Resistance Los Angeles, a grassroots organization working to end the prison industrial complex (PIC), seeks a full-time organizer.
Responsibilities and duties:

Take lead role in development and coordination of actions and events

Facilitate ongoing campaign planning and evaluation

Organize bi-monthly CRLA meetings

Build membership and capacity of local chapter through ongoing outreach and follow up with new constituents

Develop and maintain relationships with ally organizations and individuals working against the PIC and related activism in Southern California and represent CRLA in local coalitions

Create and maintain clear pathways for new member involvement, including involvement of LEAD Project participants

Represent CRLA publicly through public speaking, workshops, and media opportunities

Administrative responsibilities: keep data base, manage basic finances, respond to email and phone inquiries

Supervise/coordinate volunteers and interns

Some research support
Qualifications:
Understanding of PIC issues and commitment to CR's mission
Grassroots organizing experience
Facilitation skills
Grassroots fundraising and grant writing ability
self-starter; able to work independently; problem-solver
Good written and verbal communication skills
Ability (and inclination) to do office work
Ability to balance multiple responsibilities
Be accountable to multiple organizers in a non-hierarchical organization
Basic computer skills (word processing, database, basic layout)
Spanish language skills a plus
Former prisoners, family members of prisoners, victims of policing/INS, and people of color are especially encouraged to apply.
Please email letter of application and resume by September 15, 2006.
Critical Resistance Los Angeles
EMAIL: crla@criticalresistance.org
For more information about Critical Resistance, please visit our website (www.criticalresistance.org)
***********************

Posted by lois at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2006

AL: Ruling May Alow Some With Felony Convictions to Vote

Ruling may allow felons to vote
Thursday, August 24, 2006
VAL WALTON, The Birmingham (Alabama) News
News staff writer

Alabama must allow all felons to register to vote under current state law, a Jefferson County judge ruled Wednesday - a decision Secretary of State Nancy Worley said could lead to polling places in prisons.

Circuit Judge Robert Vance Jr. said any felon should be able to register and vote until the state Legislature passes a law that defines crimes of moral turpitude. No such definition exists under state law, Vance said.

Vance said his order is on hold, however, until the state submits the voting change to mandatory review by the Justice Department under the federal Voting Rights Act.

Vance's decision sets the stage for people convicted of felonies such as driving under the influence and drug possession to register immediately. Prior legal precedents such as attorney general opinions have determined that moral turpitude doesn't apply to those crimes and a handful of others.

Responding to Vance's 50-page decision, Worley said having voting stations in prisons "would be a serious problem to handle."

Vance's decision stems from a 2005 lawsuit that contended Worley violates Alabama's constitution by giving voter registrars instructions to require all felons to apply to the Board of Pardons and Paroles to have their voting rights restored.

The suit argued the state constitution is clear that people convicted of certain felonies including DUI and drug possession - unlike murder, rape or robbery - do not lose their voting rights and do not need to apply for an eligibility certificate from the board.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit after the Jefferson County's registrar refused in late September 2005 to register Richard Gooden because in 2002 he was convicted of DUI for a third time, raising the crime to a felony.

The state has a long practice of removing from voting rolls anyone convicted of a felony, whether drug possession or murder. The suit revived the issue of what felonies involving moral turpitude would bar convicts from voting, prompting Attorney General Troy King to weigh in and provide some examples, but not an exhaustive list.

Vance's ruling Wednesday said the power to designate crimes as acts of moral turpitude rests with Legislature.

"Only the Legislature has the constitutional power to decide which crimes involve moral turpitude so as to justify the removal of a fundamental civil right for which so many have fought and died," Vance's ruling said.

Vance said he realizes his order changes a practice that dates back many years, but given the fundamental issue of the right to vote, he wrote, he must conclude that every citizen otherwise eligible to register in the state may not be denied that right solely because of a prior felony conviction.

Sees positive side:

Edward Still, a Birmingham lawyer handling the suit, said Vance's decision is good news for hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who do not have the more serious felony convictions and who have been denied the right to vote.

"They should register to vote immediately," Still said.

Still said the requirement allowing all felons to vote is good for society because it helps reintegrate ex-convicts into the community.

Meanwhile, Worley said Wednesday's decision also clouds the issue of what wording should appear on voter registration forms that refer to a prior criminal conviction as basis of disqualification. She said her office would send a letter to the attorney general's office Wednesday night seeking direction.

"Obviously, there is the potential for appeal," Worley said. "In the meantime, we need some clear guidance."

Suzanne Webb, a spokeswoman for the attorney general, said the office was reviewing Vance's decision.

© 2006 The Birmingham News
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/115641128138740.xml&coll=2

Posted by lois at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2006

Registries for People Convicted of Selling Meth Proliferate

By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY, 8-22-06

States frustrated with the growth of toxic methamphetamine labs are creating Internet registries to publicize the names of people convicted of making or selling meth, the cheap and highly addictive stimulant plaguing communities across the nation.

The registries ‹ similar to the sex-offender registries operated by every state ‹ have been approved within the past 18 months in Tennessee, Minnesota and Illinois. Montana has listed those convicted of running illegal drug labs on its Internet registry of sexual and violent offenders since 2003. Meth-offender registries are being considered in Georgia, Maine, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington state and West Virginia.

SAFETY : Illinois communities back meth registries

The new registries represent the latest effort by governments against meth, which can be made from household ingredients such as cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine. As meth labs have spread east from California during the past decade, most states have increased penalties for meth manufacturing and restricted the sale of medicines used to make the drug. Those laws have contributed to a decline in meth labs, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, which reported that authorities found more than 17,000 labs in 2003 and more than 12,000 last year.

Tennessee has more than 400 people in its meth-offender database, which was created partly in response to complaints from landlords and other property owners about the toxic waste created after chemicals are "cooked" to make meth.

Illinois lawmakers approved a meth-offender registry in June, and last month Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty used his executive powers to create a registry that is to be online by Dec. 31.

The registries generally include the names, birthdates and offenses of convicted meth manufacturers, dealers and traffickers. The dates of their convictions and the locations of their crimes also are included. The listings are not as specific as those in sex-offender registries, which include offenders' addresses and photos.

Officials in Minnesota and elsewhere say residents and landlords will be able to use the registries to check for meth offenders in their communities. "We want to arm citizens with information, so they can protect themselves and their communities," says Brian McClung, a spokesman for Pawlenty.

The meth-offender registries have not been challenged in court, but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other critics say there are legal and practical drawbacks to them.

Graham Boyd, director of the ACLU's Drug Policy Litigation Project, says the prospect of being listed on a meth-offender registry for at least several years after a conviction amounts to an extra punishment "that's not allowed under our Constitution."

However, three years ago the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a similar double-jeopardy argument when it upheld state registries for sex offenders, who the court said posed a unique threat to communities.

If meth registries are challenged in court, a key question would be whether meth offenders are as much of a threat to public safety as sex offenders.

Studies consistently have shown that offenders who abuse drugs have high re-arrest rates. Recidivism rates among sex offenders can vary widely.

Boyd also says drug users could use meth-offender registries to locate dealers. "One group for whom this registry is going to be an incredibly good resource is people looking to buy methamphetamine," he says.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-22-meth-registries_x.htm

Posted by lois at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

Can We Pass The Second Chance Act in 2006

Published by Western Prison Project (http://westernprisonproject.org)
Can We Pass the Second Chance Act in 2006?
Created Aug 17 2006 - 11:20am
An interview with Gene Guerrero

Justice Matters’ editor Kathleen Pequeño interviewed Gene Guerrero of the Open Society Policy Center [1] about the federal Second Chance Act, S 1934 & HR 1704. Guerrero, who lobbies Congress on criminal justice and civil liberties issues, previously worked with Human Rights First and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Justice Matters (JM): What is the Second Chance Act? What are the most important changes that you think it will create if it passes?

Gene Guerrero (GG): The Second Chance Act is a comprehensive piece of legislation designed to provide better planning and coordination for people coming out of incarceration and federal support for demonstration programs to provide needed re-entry services. Most of the people who work in the field of corrections agree that transition planning should begin as soon as someone has been sentenced. There ought to be someone thinking about what that person needs, addressing the problems the person has: addiction, educational needs, and then providing transitional services to that person.

One of the most important features of this bill is that it asks — it requires — states that are seeking funding for re-entry services to engage in a collaborative planning process to establish the re-entry priorities for that state. State officials should be talking with local officials, half-way houses, nonprofits, and faith-based groups to decide jointly what the state needs. To ask, what's the best way to use limited federal funding in that state?

The collaborative planning process is modeled after something good the Bush administration has done since they took office. They've been having meetings with various people in the relevant federal departments — the Department of Justice, HUD, Labor, Veterans Affairs, Education — to talk about what happens to people coming out of prison and figure out how to cut the high recidivism [2] rates in this country.

JM: Can you tell me more about how high recidivism rates are?

GG: Nationally, the Department of Justice has reported that 2/3 of people released are re-arrested within three years. Meanwhile, other countries incarcerate fewer people, and in the other industrialized nations, their crime rates are lower. We waste a lot of money incarcerating people who don't really need to be imprisoned and wouldn't be if they had committed their offense in France, or Germany, or Finland, or Spain. Among other things, incarceration is really expensive. We could be using other punishments that are less expensive and have less likelihood of recidivism and we could better use limited public funds on programs that offer much better promise of reducing crime. We need to really look at changing the direction of our criminal justice policy --- having a more constructive approach instead of a destructive approach.

JM: Why is this a good time to pass this bill?

GG: I have been around these issues for many years. I've thought year after year that things couldn't get worse, but year after year, they do get worse. Now, we're at the point that with 5% of the world's population, the United States has about 25% of all the prisoners in the world. We have a terrible problem in this country. For the first time in my life, I see the potential to turn this around. There are several reasons for this opportunity for real reform:

1. Crime rates are down.
2. At least for the moment, crime is not the political football it was a few years ago.
3. Now just about everyone acknowledges that the drug war has been a failure.
4. The whole faith-based initiative has opened the eyes of people to the fact that something needs to be done to help people coming out of prison.

We've made surprising progress with this act. We now have 28 sponsors in the Senate and 112 in the House of Representatives. It's passed out of the House committee, and has a really good chance of passing, especially as we line up more sponsors.

JM: You mention that crime rates are down. But if crime rates were increasing, would it be to okay to leave the system the way it is now?

GG: No, the central goal should be crime reduction. We want to cut recidivism because we want to cut crime. All the evidence shows that most of these programs do in fact cut recidivism rates. Even modest reductions not only cut crime but save money because it's so expensive to incarcerate people. Plus, you're helping people, giving them a chance to redeem themselves.

JM: What sort of response are you getting from people on Capitol Hill as you talk with them about the Second Chance Act? Have any of the responses surprised to you?

GG: There's a lot of support. The sponsorship is fairly evenly-divided between Republicans and Democrats. In the House of Representatives our lead sponsors for the Second Chance Act are Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), Congressman Danny Davis (D-IL) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH). In the Senate the lead sponsors are Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA), Sam Brownback (R-KS), and Joseph Biden (D-DE). Co-sponsors are a diverse group including, for example, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).

Part of the reason for the strong Republican support is Bush's inclusion of this issue in the 2004 State of the Union address, saying, "America is the land of second chance." After that address, the re-entry working group --- an informal network of organizations: civil rights groups, faith groups, and service providers --- began to work with Rep. Rob Portman. He was representing Ohio at the time, and the White House asked him to take a lead on whatever came out of the process following the State of the Union address. We've also worked with Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), who is a former prosecutor and a former judge from Cleveland, and with Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL). They've all been leaders on this in the House. Representative Davis is known as “Mr. Re-entry.” In the Senate, Senators Biden, Specter, and Brownback took the lead.

The surprise is that people are so willing to look at these issues comprehensively. The act creates two different types of grants. The first, main grant program is for the demonstration grants. If states go through the collaboration process, that helps them get a grant. The idea is to show that transition programs are cost-effective and to encourage their replication more broadly. Then the second grant program goes straight to nonprofits and faith-based groups for mentoring programs.

Meeting with conservative members of congress, they are very supportive of mentoring and programs in prison. There's a growing recognition that an overly harsh sentence can do more harm than good.

JM: Is there any resistance to the Second Chance Act? Where is it coming from?

GG: There hasn't been much opposition, but it's been mostly one of two things. There are still a few conservative people who argue that nothing about rehabilitation works. Then secondly, there's argument from some conservatives that the federal government shouldn't take this role, which should be done by the states.

Oh, and some Democrats are nervous about crime issues. We've had to work to get them to support the bill.

JM: You're hoping to pass this in session (which wraps up at the end of September). What will happen if it doesn't pass?

GG: We'll start again with the new Congress. It will be re-introduced in February or March of 2007.

There's a lot of interest from corrections people, and there's been a lot of effort to pass this. A failure to pass it would be a setback. This is a significant change of policy.

This is primarily a state issue --- most people are leaving state prisons. But the federal government plays a leadership role for bad or good. The federal government can set a positive example and can push the states in a constructive direction.

JM: So what's next for this bill?

GG: Congress is on break in August, and one important thing people can do is contact their local congressional offices in August to express support. When Congress returns in September, we have one month to pass it. We're hopeful. It's made it onto the House floor. There are a couple of situations in which it might pass, including being inserted into another bill as an amendment or passed by unanimous consent in the Senate and then making its way through the House. People need to let their congressional members know that they support this bill, especially while Congress is back in their home districts in August.

Right now, if you look at what is being done about re-entry --- there are good programs out there. The challenge is to make these programs more widely available to reach all the people, families, and communities who need them.
This interview was done in August, 2006 for the Summer/Fall issue of Justice Matters.
Source URL:
http://westernprisonproject.org/info/nation/story/920

Posted by lois at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)

On Prisons, Blacks, HIV

DERRICK Z. JACKSON
On prisons, blacks, HIV

By Derrick Z. Jackson | August 19, 2006, Boston Globe

SEVENTEEN YEARS ago, time enough for a new generation to start the next generation, Robert Fullilove tried to warn the nation about the rising impact of AIDS on black people. He and his wife Mindy were researchers in San Francisco at the nation's largest research center of color that is working on AIDS.

``We have a series of epidemics that work against dealing with AIDS," he told me in 1989. ``Homicide is caught up in drug abuse. Drug abuse is caught up in AIDS. AIDS is caught up in crack use. Crack use is caught up in STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] . STDs are caught up in AIDS. Now, AIDS is threatening to make tuberculosis common again to many people who don't have AIDS. It could start looking like 200, 300 years ago."

This week, Fullilove spoke at the 16th International Conference on AIDS in Toronto to warn participants that the series of epidemics continues to grow. ``The whole issue of black men in prison is one we also have to talk about if we're serious about this," he said over the phone. ``There is growing evidence that this is the major contributing factor that we have not paid enough attention to to connect the dots as to why infection rates are so disproportionate (in the United States) among black people."

Fullilove, 62, now at Columbia University, cited a study of HIV transmission in Georgia's prisons from 1992 to 2005, published in April in the Centers for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The study found that the prevalence of HIV infection among inmates is nearly 5 times the rate of the general population. While black inmates make up 63 percent of the Georgia prison population, they accounted for 86 percent of inmates who were infected with HIV before entering jail.

The older the prisoners and the longer their sentences, the more likely it was that they would transmit or contract HIV behind bars, primarily through male-to-male sex or tattooing. With no differences in risk behaviors among racial groups, the percentage of black inmates who contracted HIV in prison, 67 percent, roughly mirrored their share of the prison population. According to the CDC study, only 15 percent of inmates reported using ``improvised barrier protection methods" during sex. An editor's note to the study said, ``Departments of corrections without condom distribution programs should assess relevant state laws, policies, and circumstances to determine the feasibility and benefits and risks of implementing such programs." The CDC only cites state prisons in Mississippi and Vermont and city jails in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as having condom distribution programs.

Massachusetts, despite years of urging from AIDS prevention activists, does not distribute condoms in state prisons.

With 1 out of every 3 black males facing the chance of prison in their lifetimes, according to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group that promotes sentencing alternatives, Fullilove said that if prisons do not make changes soon, the loaded dice will explode in many more transmissions. ``There is . . . reason to assume that this is probably similar all across the country," he said. ``These young men go in because they lost hope, and when they come out, in many states, their prison record means they can't vote, they find it difficult to get a job or loans for education and qualify for housing subsidies. We're creating an underclass."

It is one being created as a bipartisan failure. Former President Bill Clinton addressed the AIDS conference this week in his current incarnation as a planetary savior against the disease. Indeed, his two terms in office were marked by a significant increase in support for AIDS education and research. But his efforts were marred by his refusal to fight congressional Republicans to overturn grossly disparate drug sentencing laws that were far more harsh for crack cocaine than for powdered cocaine. Even though illegal drug use by racial groups roughly mirrors their actual percentage of the population, those laws and enforcement of those laws have resulted in the vastly disproportionate incarceration of black people. President George W. Bush made a splash by pledging $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa, more than any other president. But he undercut his promises by reducing general research in the sciences, while overstressing abstinence and understressing condoms.

Just as Fullilove warned 17 years ago, the world and black people in particular have a series of epidemics that work against dealing with AIDS. With all that we know now, Fullilove said, any inaction on the crisis ``is as close as you can get to being criminal." Given his latest concern, that pun is intended.

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

Posted by lois at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2006

Tara Andrews Candidate for MD Senate Focuses on African American Men Not Voting

At election time, many black men not on the scene
By C. Fraser Smith
Originally published August 20, 2006
The profile of a voter in Baltimore is roughly this: a black woman of about 40, a churchgoer with a decent job. Black men, whether professionals or "brothers on the corner," often aren't in the picture. Many don't see why they should vote - or they're disqualified by virtue of involvement with the criminal justice system.

These are rough approximations of reality, but they are close enough to the truth for political purposes. And the implications are troubling, to say the least. An important part of the black community offers political leaders no reason to care about or address its concerns. If you don't vote in this country, you don't count politically.

As a candidate for the state Senate in Baltimore's 40th District, Tara Andrews found her interest in this problem grow into a pragmatic concern. A survey of the electorate in her center-city senatorial district confirmed her worst fears. She knew young black men didn't vote. It's part of a pattern.

"If there's a negative indicator of status in this society, black men are always at the bottom: in education, employment, whatever," she says.

But the numbers she found were even more profoundly distressing.

Of approximately 47,000 registered black voters in her district, about 4,300 were between 18 and 35. Between 1994 and 2002, only 2,500 went to the polls, and that's a cumulative total for all the elections in this eight-year period.

Many of those who don't vote say they have no faith their participation makes a difference for them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having lobbied for various causes in Annapolis for the last five years, Ms. Andrews says, "I understand even more clearly how politics works, how the policymaking process works. These young black men are not a constituency the politicians have to respond to for anything."

Many of those who don't vote are among the estimated 150,000 Marylanders barred from the voting booth by their convictions, by bureaucratic requirements that make reinstatement of voting rights difficult, and by a political tug of war between the two major political parties.

Republicans get blamed often for blocking the return of ex-felons to the voting roles. Ms. Andrews doesn't buy it. If the problem were just the Republicans, she says, it could be solved by the General Assembly's majority, the Democrats. "It's not a priority for them," she says.

Black leaders must share the blame, Ms. Andrews says. They aren't necessarily interested in seeing a lot of new voters in their districts. "They know they will continue to get elected without fixing the problem." she says.

Ms. Andrews concedes that one of her opponents, Del. Salima S. Marriott, is a longtime advocate of restoring voter privileges to felons and to making it easier for those who want to vote to get to the ballot box. Ms. Marriott was one of the sponsors of legislation extending the voting period for five days this year. If she were in the Assembly, Ms. Andrews says, she would promote virtually instant voter rights for ex-felons.

"You should be eligible to vote as soon as your feet hit the street. You paid your debt," she says.

There are many issues black voters could and should be addressing. The black community has had a love-hate relationship with the police. While many young black men find their life prospects ruined by criminal activity, others in the community are typically the victims. It's a conflict that all the voters ought to be grappling with, she says.

She is not comforted by the dominant position of black women in the electorate.

"To the extent that I'm up here and black males are down there ... we're not whole as a community," she says.

C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst for WYPR-FM. His column appears Sundays. His e-mail address is fsmiht@WYPR.org.

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

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

CA: Mule Creek Prison Polluting Groundwater --residents oppose expansion

Ledger Dispatch

Supes: Mule Creek Prison polluting groundwater

Friday, August 18, 2006

By Judie Marks

The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation wants to add 400 more inmates to its prison at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, but the ones who are already there generate so much wastewater that the prison is contaminating the area's groundwater.

The Amador County Board of Supervisors Tuesday passed a resolution to oppose the proposed $48 million expansion, which is the subject of a special session of the legislature called by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger specifically to deal with prison overcrowding.

"The Department of Corrections is acting like the big monster coming in and rolling over the top of us," according to Supervisor Richard Forster. By pushing the governor's $6 billion prison expansion building plan through in a special session, Forster said, the state is trying to "just jam it down our throats."

"These communities are not being given much say in this," he said. "By the end of the month, it's probably going to be said and done."

Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Richard Vinson noted that the addition of 400 beds to the prison would bring the institution's population to 4,383. Originally it was designed for 1,700 beds, but overcrowding has meant the addition of 2,283 beds, for a total of 3,983 beds now.

Everyone who spoke at Tuesday's board of supervisors' meeting agreed that the prison is not a "good neighbor."

Vinson noted that the county provides numerous services to the prison, including services of the district attorney, pubic defender, coroner and public health departments. "Not only are these not paid when services are rendered," he said, "but sometimes they are not even paid in the same fiscal year, or maybe at all."

Ione City Councilman Jerry Sherman, noting the prison's present excess population of nearly 2,300, said, "We need to stop it now, before it goes any further."

Sherman said inadequate sewage treatment at the prison has resulted in the city's monitoring wells "coming up dirty."

"They are putting stuff in the groundwater," he said. "It's not from our sewer plant." He claimed that employees of the state's Regional Water Quality Control Board have been told not to check on water quality conditions at the prison. "If we tried to do anything like what they are doing now," Sherman said, "we would be shot down in a minute."

After the meeting, Julio Guerra, chief operator for the city of Ione's wastewater treatment plant, told the Ledger Dispatch that he had toured the prison's sewage treatment facility and characterized it as "hopelessly overloaded."

While it was built to treat 740,000 gallons of sewage a day, Guerra said, he was told by prison employees that it averages more than 900,000 gallons a day and at peak usage, hits surges that, if continued throughout the day, would amount to 2 million to 3 million gallons a day.

While praising the prison's sewage treatment operator as "very conscientious," Guerra said that "they need to fix what they have and bring what they have up to the level required to handle the current population." City monitoring wells between the prison and the nearby Castle Oaks Golf Course, he said, have seen higher concentrations of nitrates than are allowable.

He stressed that that contamination poses no risk to the public, because it is at least 10 to 20 feet beneath the ground, and also poses no risk to the city's drinking water, because that water is piped in by the Amador Water Agency from surface water sources in the mountains. But, Guerra said, "There may be some private wells that could be impacted by that kind of thing."

Although the issue was not slated for a public hearing, the board heard comments from various people who wanted to contribute to the discussion, including Undersheriff Karl Knobelauch, who said he is a neighbor of the prison.

"I live in the glare of Mule Creek State Prison," Knobelauch said, adding that traffic during the shift changes at the prison is a serious problem. "Employees have been arrested for (offenses) up to manslaughter for the way they drive," he said.

Another neighbor of the prison, Virginia Silva, who lives adjacent to Mule Creek, claimed that in the summertime, when the creek is mostly dried up, a few springs leave "potholes of water" that she described as "stinking black sewage in our creek." She claimed that the prison has been dumping sewage directly into the creek.

Guerra, the city's wastewater plant operator, later said he saw no evidence that the prison was allowing sewage to flow into the creek.

Brian Parriott, spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in Sacramento, also denied that that was occurring. The claim, he said, had been made a few days earlier. "Mule Creek Prison denies any raw sewage is going into the creek," Parriott said. "They said if there was sewage in the creek, it didn't come from the prison."

Jim Scully, who said he lives a mile due south of the prison, complained of noise, traffic and light pollution from the prison. "The noise," he said, "is unbelievable."

Scully also said that twice he had been personally "run off the road by men wearing prison guard uniforms."

As for the light pollution, Scully said that although only two towers are manned at the prison at night, all the towers are fully lit up. He claimed that the lights were left on primarily so guards could walk between the towers without tripping. "I recommend a $3 item," he said. "A flashlight."

Scully also complained that "a full 30 percent" of the inmates come from Los Angeles County. "To my knowledge," he said, "there's no prison in Los Angeles County."

After hearing the comments, the supervisors voted unanimously to pass a resolution in opposition to expansion of the prison. The resolution notes that the residents of Ione voted in 1994 to oppose prison expansion, that the Department of Corrections never fulfilled conditions of the original Environmental Impact Report and are proposing to expand the facilities without adequate environmental review.

The resolution also noted that excess sewage generated at the prison appears to be degrading the environment, that the $320,000 the state is proposing to pay for mitigating impacts to local agencies is "woefully inadequate" and that local jurisdictions do not have enough time to properly review the proposal.

Supervisors Forster and Louis Boitano were appointed to an ad hoc committee to lobby the legislature in an attempt to keep the expansion proposal from being approved.

Parriott said in a telephone interview that the expansion is just a proposal, and that the department is "not at the stage of building anything." The expansion, if approved, he said, would not be immediate, but would begin within a four-year period and only after an Environmental Impact Statement was completed, giving both governments and citizens an opportunity to participate.

County Administrative Officer Pat Blacklock, however, said after the meeting that current law exempts Mule Creek from the California Environmental Quality Act. Previous construction at the prison was exempted, he said, and "the rumors we are hearing is that it could all happen in the final days of the legislature's session, leaving the community very little time for analysis and comment."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.ledger-dispatch.com/news/newsview.asp?c=192653

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

TX: 3 new Prisons to be built and more treatment programs sought

3 new prisons, more treatment programs are sought
Biggest expansion in a decade proposed to keep pace with convict growth

By Mike Ward, Corrie MacLaggan
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, August 19, 2006

Prison officials said Friday that they want to build three prisons and boost drug- and alcohol-treatment programs in the biggest proposed expansion of Texas corrections programs in more than a decade.

Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the $520 million plan — part of a $5.6 billion, two-year budget being sought by the prisons agency — is designed to keep pace with steadily growing numbers of prisoners that will require more than 11,000 additional prison beds in five years, according to official estimates.

"This is a multipronged approach designed to allow us to keep up with the growth that is currently projected," he said. "In addition to hard beds (prisons), we're requesting additional funding for treatment and diversion programs."

The request comes as all state agencies begin crafting their requests for the 2008-09 budget, which begins in September 2007. State parks officials also submitted a budget request Friday that could lead to more cutbacks at parks.

Texas tripled the size of its prison system in the early 1990s to keep up with growing numbers of convicts that, at one point, required more than 30,000 prison-bound felons to be housed in county jails.

Since then, several thousand additional beds have been added in several small projects that increased the system to a capacity of about 152,000 beds.

Drug treatment and community programs were also expanded, though funding to some of those programs has been scaled back in recent years because of budget cuts made by the Legislature.

In recent weeks, as details of the new expansion plans leaked out, Senate and House leaders questioned whether building prisons is the answer.

Instead, they backed more treatment and community-based corrections programs that are much cheaper to operate. Citing a continuing shortage of guards, they also questioned whether enough workers can be found to properly staff new prisons.

Livingston said Friday that public safety remains the priority. He noted that the proposed budget, which must be approved next spring by the Legislature, seeks a 3-percent pay raise for prison employees that could help the hiring problems when coupled with a similar raise workers will get next month.

State agencies have been asked to submit budget requests that are 10 percent less than their current budget. In their budget proposal, prison officials warned, however, that cuts would result in varied problems.

If the 10 percent cuts are implemented, the Parks and Wildlife Department's budget would fall $14.21 million for each of the next two years.

Dozens of state parks would be forced to cut services and hours of operation and several parks could close, the department said. Law enforcement, the local parks grant program and wildlife research would also be affected. In addition to asking that the state not follow through on the proposed budget cuts, the department's wish list included more money for game wardens, repairs to the battleship Texas in La Porte and restoring the Texas State Railroad, a historic railroad slated to become a museum because of high maintenance costs.

Joseph B.C. Fitzsimons, chairman of the board of the Parks and Wildlife Commissioners, told budget officials that paying for state parks is essential to their future.

"Will the Texas school children of tomorrow only know about our open spaces by seeing pictures in a book or images on a screen?" he wrote. "Texas is supposed to be different, and one of the things that make us different is our relationship to the land. That relationship will be lost if we do not provide great parks for a great state."

The state has fallen behind in recent years in its ability to pay for park operations and upkeep. The condition of Texas parks and proposals to shift more money to them have become key issues in this year's governor's race.

More prisons

•2,750-bed prison

•1,330-bed prison

•1,000-bed privately run prison, with 500 beds for a DWI treatment center

More treatment programs

•250 additional beds in special drug-treatment prisons

•200 additional beds in substance-abuse treatment centers for parole-bound convicts

•150 additional beds in private halfway houses

•250 additional beds in community-based specialized-treatment programs designed to get low-level offenders the help they need without sending them to a state prison

More money for health care

• $122 million to avoid a deficit in prison health care operations

•$434 million a year to pay for operating expenses

Source: Texas Board of Criminal Justice,

Legislative Appropriations Request

mward@statesman.com; 445-1712; cmaclaggan@statesman.com; 445-3548

Posted by lois at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Construction Begins on New Federal Prison in Dartmouth

Construction begins on new federal prison in Dartmouth

DARTMOUTH, Mass. Construction has begun on a three-point-one (M)million dollar prison in Dartmouth.

The 25-thousand square foot prison will hold up to 128 federal detainees.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson says currently there are 60-to-80 federal detainees a month.

They are held at a gymnasium at another temporary prison unit.

Officials also say Portuguese detainees who face deportation will now be closer to their families and the Portuguese consulate in New Bedford.
http://www.eyewitnessnewstv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5303788&nav=F2DO

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

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

IL: Study-Possession Tops Sales As A Charge; Big Racial Disparity

llinois: State fills up prisons with drug criminals

Study: Possession tops sales as a charge; big racial disparity
By John Keilman and Liam Ford Tribune staff reporters

August 22, 2006, Chicago Tribune

After two decades of steadily toughening laws, Illinois now puts more people in prison for drug crimes than any state except California, according to a study released Tuesday by Roosevelt University.

The report also found that more people are being incarcerated for possessing narcotics than for selling them and that the state's prisons hold about five black inmates convicted of drug offenses for every white inmate--one of the largest racial disparities in the country.

The findings cast doubt on the fairness and effectiveness of Illinois' long campaign against illegal drugs, said Kathleen Kane-Willis, a researcher at Roosevelt's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs.

"Just locking folks up is not reducing our drug problems, but it's sure costing us a lot of money," she said. "I think we need to take a different tactic and start funding treatment at higher levels so people don't have to go to prison."

The raw numbers, experts say, underscore the scope of the issue. In 1983, 456 people convicted of possessing or selling drugs were behind bars in Illinois, making up 5 percent of the total prison population. By 2002--the latest year for which detailed federal statistics on imprisonment are available--the number had soared to 12,985, or 38 percent of all inmates.

The report counted people as incarcerated for drug crimes only if a drug charge was their most serious offense. But many had prior convictions as well.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Illinois locked up more people for selling drugs than for possessing them. But by 2002, the reverse was true, according to the Roosevelt study.

Walt Hehner, deputy chief of narcotics prosecutions for the Cook County state's attorney's office, said that it might be partly due to drug dealers agreeing to plead guilty to lesser possession charges.

Hehner added that inmates imprisoned for low-level drug crimes usually have a plethora of earlier arrests and convictions. Cook County has several programs to offer people drug treatment instead of prison time, but those efforts can fail, he said.

Sometimes defendants plead guilty rather than go into drug treatment because they can spend less time on parole than they would being tracked in a treatment program, said Cook County Public Defender Edwin A. Burnette.

Using a U.S. Department of Justice database to compare state prison populations, the report found that in 2002, Illinois incarcerated more drug criminals than some larger states, including Florida and New York. Even Texas, a state with 10 million more residents and a formidable reputation for being tough on crime, locked up fewer users and sellers.

Arthur Lurigio, a criminal justice professor at Loyola University Chicago, said Illinois' oversize population of drug offenders could be due to the dynamics of the Chicago narcotics market, where dealers and their customers do business in public.

As crack cocaine overran Chicago and other urban areas in the 1980s and 1990s, Kane-Willis said, the General Assembly changed laws to mandate stiffer penalties--including prison time--for people caught with even small amounts of narcotics.

"Legislators responded punitively," she said. "Instead of making treatment more available, they made prison more available." John Giles, 42, who has been incarcerated a number of times on drug charges since the mid-1980s, was released Aug. 11 after serving two years for possession.

Giles, who is staying at St. Leonard's House, a West Side recovery home, said a prison term can be beneficial for the addict.

"A lot of people need to see how it really is so they don't want to go back there again," he said. "But if people were getting treatment, I don't believe the prison system would be the way it is."

U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), who is active with prison issues, said harsher sentences only partly explain Illinois' exploding population of narcotics offenders. The state's drug problem--especially in the Chicago area--seems to be more severe than in other parts of the country, he said. "There is a level of tolerance [for using and dealing], which then allows the drug trade to flourish, and there is a lack of treatment, which then keeps a steady supply of would-be customers," he said.

The Roosevelt report also looked at Illinois' racial disparity for people incarcerated on drug charges. Its ratio of roughly five black prisoners for every white inmate is higher than any state's except Maryland's.

Kane-Willis said that because Chicago's drug markets operate in predominantly black communities, users and dealers who live in those neighborhoods are more apt to be arrested.

"The police have a smaller likelihood of picking [whites] up because they're in and out," she said.

Even some federal officials have admitted over the years that the drug war has tended to target "what was easier," by focusing on more visible drug crimes rather than going after white and black drug users equally, Burnette said.

Lurigio said one nuance in state law, which stiffens the penalty for drug possession or delivery near a house of worship, may also disproportionately affect blacks.

"In the African-American community, there are a lot of neighborhood storefront churches all over the West and South Sides," he said. "If you sell drugs just about anywhere in those communities, you're going to be in proximity to one of those areas."

The report recommends increasing drug court programs that send users to treatment instead of prison, creating better drug education courses for schools and improving social services for ex-cons.

One of those former prisoners is Ted Brown, 44, who has twice been incarcerated on drug charges.

After being busted with nearly a pound of cocaine, Brown, who was selling and using the drug, spent almost all of the 1990s behind bars. He served another three years on a separate cocaine charge and was paroled Aug. 11.

Also a resident of St. Leonard's, Brown said he sought out Narcotics Anonymous meetings during his last stint in prison and thought such programs should be mandatory for all inmates with drug problems. But it would be even more helpful, he said, if addicts were sent to treatment instead of the penitentiary.

"Honestly, I think the whole system is a joke," he said. "I don't think it's helpful at all in deterring people from doing it. You take a sick individual and lock them up with other sick individuals and tell them to change. Are you kidding me?"
----------
jkeilman@tribune.com
lford@tribune.com
- - -

Illinois ranks high for drug-crime imprisonment
Illinois is second-highest state in the U.S. for the number of drug-crime incarcerations, according to a Roosevelt University study. The state also had one of the largest disparities between black and white offenders and imprisoned more people for possessing drugs than selling them in 2002.

TOP 10 STATES INCARCERATING DRUG OFFENDERS
For 2002; by states with population more than 1 million

RANK/STATE TOTAL RATE
INCARCERATED PER 100,000
1. California 39,878 114.0
2. Illinois 12,986 103.2
3. New York 11,610 60.6
4. Texas 11,425 52.6
5. Ohio 9,077 79.6
6. Florida 7,942 47.6
7. New Jersey 6,836 79.7
8. Louisiana 6,130 137.0
9. Georgia 5,995 69.9
10. Missouri 5,955 104.8

NUMBER OF BLACK INMATES PER WHITE INMATE
For five states with largest disparities
1. Maryland 8.0
2. Illinois 4.9
3. S. Carolina 4.5
4. Virginia 3.7
5. N. Carolina 3.6

ILLINOIS BREAKDOWN
By drug offense
Sale / Possession
1983 264 180
1993 4,336 1,976
2002 5,761 6,999

Source: The Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0608220157aug22,1,6705088.story
?page=1&coll=chi-news-hed

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

August 19, 2006

The War on Drugs: Colombia’s Coca Survives U.S. Plan to Uproot It

August 19, 2006, NY Times
Colombia’s Coca Survives U.S. Plan to Uproot It
By JUAN FORERO

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The latest chapter in America’s long war on drugs — a six-year, $4.7 billion effort to slash Colombia’s coca crop — has left the price, quality and availability of cocaine on American streets virtually unchanged.

The effort, begun in 2000 and known as Plan Colombia, had a specific goal of halving this country’s coca crop in five years. That has not happened. Instead, drug policy experts say, coca, the essential ingredient for cocaine, has been redistributed to smaller and harder-to-reach plots, adding to the cost and difficulty of the drug war.

Bush administration officials say that coca farmers are on the run, and that the leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries who feed on drug profits are weaker than ever. That has made Colombia, Washington’s closest ally in a tumultuous region, more stable, they say. They argue that the plan has scored important successes, like a spike in the price of cocaine last year.

But that claim was disputed by a wide range of drug policy experts, and some politicians are questioning the drug war’s results as well as its assumptions.

The plan seemed simple enough. “The closer we can attack to the source, the greater the likelihood of halting the flow of drugs altogether,” a State Department report said soon after Plan Colombia began. “If we destroy crops or force them to remain unharvested, no drugs will enter the system.”

Yet recent data show the following results:

¶As much coca is cultivated today in Colombia as was grown at the start of the large-scale aerial fumigation effort in 2000, according to State Department figures.

¶Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the leading sources of coca and cocaine, produce more than enough cocaine to satisfy world demand, and possibly as much as in the mid-1990’s, the United Nations says.

¶In the United States, the government’s tracking over the past quarter century shows that the price of cocaine has tumbled and that purity remains high, signs that the drug is as available as ever.

Over all, demand in the United States has dipped in recent years, but experts say that may be a result of many factors, including changing social fads and better law enforcement techniques at home. Meanwhile, demand is rising in Brazil, Europe, Africa and elsewhere.

“If we were to evaluate Plan Colombia by its initial overriding criteria, the results of the drug war have been dubious at best,” said Russell Crandall, a former adviser to the White House and the author of “Driven by Drugs,” a book on the drug war in the Andes.

“We can switch metaphors — saying it is first and 10, second and 4, light at the end of the tunnel — but what’s left are often discouraging results on reducing the amount of drugs and cocaine in the United States,” he added.

A Wider War

Bush administration officials believe that verdict is too harsh. “Over the past five years, you see a compression on cultivation,” John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in an interview. “You see the remaining cultivation and trafficking in Colombia under pressure as you’ve never seen it before.”

The lingering question is whether America’s drug problem would be worse today had the drug war, nearly 40 years in the making, never been waged. That may be unanswerable.

What is clear is that the war on drugs, the original open-ended war against an elusive and ill-defined enemy, has moved inexorably onward, propelled by decades of mostly unflagging political support on both sides of the Congressional aisle.

Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, echoing other analysts, estimates that the drug war has cost American taxpayers upward of $40 billion annually in recent years, though there is no comprehensive government tally of all its state and federal spending.

Today that money goes for patrol boats, prisons, police departments and extradition flights to bring drug kingpins to trial in the United States — not to mention a dedicated federal bureaucracy.

Plan Colombia, initiated by the Clinton administration, has been embraced by the Bush White House, the seventh administration to take up a drug war begun under President Nixon.

Bush administration officials say this latest phase, the largest foreign assistance program outside the Middle East, will take still more time, but they insist that Plan Colombia is making inroads.

The seizure of cocaine in the Andes has more than tripled to nearly 400,000 pounds in 2005 from about 132,000 pounds in 2001, it says. The number of traffickers extradited to the United States in the last four years tops 350. The number of clandestine drug labs destroyed by the authorities in Colombia soared to nearly 2,000 last year from 317 in 1999.

Many drug policy analysts, including some who have advised the government, are less sanguine, however. Even the most optimistic see the drug war as just about holding the line.

“In Colombia and an area as difficult as the Andean range, it’s hard to say that there’s been tremendous success, but it’s also hard to say that there has been tremendous failure,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a drug policy expert at Florida International University in Miami who has consulted with both the American government and the United Nations.

Progress itself is difficult to measure, experts caution. Numbers of arrests, acres fumigated or tons seized may not provide the most accurate snapshot, simply because it is hard to say what portion of the total hidden trade they actually make up.

But by any estimate, the amount of cocaine produced vastly exceeds demand, so much so that even headline-grabbing seizures do not cut deeply enough into the supply to affect price or availability. That has been the case for years.

Guerrilla Farming

Indeed, a better measure of the war’s progress may be taken at the endpoint — the price, availability and purity of cocaine on American streets — and by those indicators, the results of the drug war are far from promising, experts say.

“Prices are still the same,” said Richard Curtis, chairman of the anthropology department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has studied drug patterns for 30 years.

“They go up and down seasonally,” he added, “but there has not been significant change in price, and there has not been any change in availability or purity.”

Domestic spending on drug war-related projects dwarfs foreign spending, which includes interdiction on the high seas, fumigation, border patrols and other programs that total about $4 billion a year. Yet that foreign spending has in many ways come to define American policy in the region.

Since 2000, crop dusters flown by American and other foreign pilots, accompanied by attack helicopters, have sprayed the equivalent of Central Park 2,600 times in Colombia. In Peru and Bolivia, where the governments oppose aerial fumigation, troops have entered coca-growing regions to pull up the plants by hand, often in the face of protests.

But coca farmers like Jhon Freddy Romero seem anything but worried. In the southern Colombian state of Guaviare, where coca first appeared in the 1970’s, he plays a persistent game of cat and mouse with American antidrug planners.

Time and again, American crop dusters have pounded Mr. Romero’s small farm with defoliants, leaving withered coca plants in their wake. Undaunted, he repeats the tried-and-true strategy of guerrilla farming, replanting his coca on the edge of a forest where it is harder to spray.

“All this was fumigated — all of it — and then replanted,” Mr. Romero, 28, said recently as he waved his hand at the five acres of coca.

All across the country, coca farmers use similar methods. They hide their coca under larger banana plants. If their crops are hit, they prune the stalks, hoping to save the roots. Some go so far as to lather their leaves with concoctions of all kinds, hoping to weaken the defoliants.

For local farmers, the incentive to plant and preserve their coca crop is enormous; few other crops pay as well or as consistently as coca. “We all have a hectare or so of coca,” said one farmer, Joel Rubio, 40, in Caldas, a western state better known for coffee. “You keep doing it.”

And America’s antidrug planes keep spraying. As the coca crop spreads out in Colombia, they must now fumigate three times as much land as they did in 2002 just to kill the same amount of coca, according to State Department data.

“The spray program has itself increased the difficulty of carrying out the spray program,” said John Walsh, who tracks American drug policy for the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit research and human rights group. “And as a result it becomes less efficient and it becomes more costly to accomplish the same thing.”

“The bang for the buck that people are expecting hasn’t materialized,” he added.

Not all the news is bad. The latest United Nations estimates, released in June, show a 28 percent decline in the coca crop for the three Andean countries since Plan Colombia began.

But while that may seem like a big bite, experts say the drop is not significant, because the amount of coca produced so vastly exceeds global demand. Year after year, in fact, the coca crop may be a third larger than is needed, they estimate.

A Regional Worry

State Department figures are far gloomier than those of the United Nations, a disparity attributed to different satellite measurements and a broader survey done last year by the United States that covered 81 percent more area in Colombia — and found still more coca.

After swift declines in the late 1990’s, the figures show, coca plantings in Peru and Bolivia are actually on the rise. Total acreage in the Andes is now higher than in 2000, and covers as much ground as it did in 1997, the equivalent of half of Delaware.

The United Nations sees the data as distressing, illustrating the need to add a state presence in lawless coca-growing regions while providing lasting alternatives to poor farmers, something Plan Colombia devotes far less money to.

“Colombia is the only country in the world where the problem of eradication has been resolved 10 times,” said Sandro Calvani, chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Bogotá, which monitors the size of coca fields. “The problem is the replanting.”

Bush administration officials say the emphasis on eradication and interdiction is right.

David Murray, a senior drug policy analyst at the White House, sees success in the move by coca farmers to smaller plots, which he says are less productive and farther from traditional drug trafficking routes. Coca farmers, he says, are barely keeping up with the spraying. “We are gradually constricting them,” he said. “This is a trade whose days are numbered.”

As proof, the drug czar’s office reported last November that in 2005 the price of a gram of cocaine on American streets had risen to $170 and that purity had fallen. The White House describes the uptick as a sharp and positive change of direction.

But some analysts, like Peter Reuter, a drug policy expert at the University of Maryland, questioned the new numbers because the White House did not reveal its methodology. If viewed over the long term, he said, the price remained low compared to the price of cocaine in the early 1990’s.

“Even if you take it at face value, it really is a minor change,” said Mr. Reuter, who is also co-director of the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corporation and was part of a research team that studied cocaine’s price and purity for the White House.

The White House says it was transparent about how it reached its conclusions, but the recent claims of success have sparked criticism even among some Republicans in Congress.

In an April letter to Mr. Walters of the White House drug policy office, Senator Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa who leads the caucus on International Narcotics Control, questioned whether data were being selectively used to “provide a rosier but not necessarily more accurate picture of the current situation.”

“You have to wonder, if there are more hectares being sprayed, why you get more cultivation,” Mr. Grassley said in an interview about the program. “I’m not willing to dump it at this point, but I think there are a lot of legitimate questions about it.”

Mr. Grassley said that while he continues to support fumigation, it is becoming clear that antidrug planners “have to find some way to adapt to the new way of cultivation.”

Then there is the drug war’s political impact on the region. Mr. Grassley agrees with administration officials who credit the fumigation plan with helping Colombia to sharply reduce violence by beefing up security in many towns, aiding the fight against leftist guerrillas.

But while the cartels of flamboyant kingpins like Pablo Escobar are gone, and the leftist insurgency is on its heels, today right-wing paramilitary commanders operate the drug trafficking routes instead. Drug-related corruption scandals have plagued even the upper reaches of Colombia’s intelligence service and its army.

Elsewhere, critics say, the drug war has helped sow instability, particularly in Bolivia, where a former leader of the coca growers union, Evo Morales, is now the president. He has resisted Washington’s hard-line efforts to eradicate coca.

Signs of Success

Still, authorities in the United States say they believe the drug war in Latin America, coupled with an emphasis on tougher law enforcement, has made American cities safer than at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.

“We have eliminated a lot of open-air markets, we have reclaimed a lot of neighborhoods,” said Bridget Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York City. “In many neighborhoods, it is still a problem, but it is not as big a problem as it was 15 years ago.”

Many drug users, even of cocaine, today shun crack. The National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health says cocaine use among high school students is 60 percent lower today than in 1985.

But that does not mean that America’s cocaine addiction is going away. Some government surveys show a rising number of teenagers using the drug for the first time. While the number of hard-core cocaine users — those who drive the trade — may be declining, they still number anywhere from two million to three million people, experts estimate.

No matter the statistics, in the South Bronx, addicts and drug counselors at CitiWide Harm Reduction, a needle-exchange and counseling center, said the drug war has made little difference to them.

Addicts say cocaine is as easy to get as ever, and that a gram can be had for $40 or less, down from $100 years ago. Walter Droz, 45, who has used cocaine for 30 years, just shakes his head when he hears claims of progress in Colombia.

“Cocaine availability has gone up, so how can they be so brazen to say it’s working?” he said. “If you know where to look, you can find what you want.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Maps and charts from this article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/world/americas/19coca.html?_r=1&oref=slogi
n

Posted by lois at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2006

MD: Youths "spewed out" by courts

Youths 'spewed out' by courts
Baltimore teen case shows shortcomings of juvenile justice
By Gus G. Sentementes
Sun reporter
Originally published August 14, 2006
No one doubted the severity of the criminal charges Rasheed Stevenson faced that day in court. The 17-year-old's public defender suggested sending him out of state for treatment. A prosecutor argued the boy had no conscience. A judge wanted him under "strict control."

A court-ordered evaluation recommended he remain charged as an adult for a case in which he was accused of choking a man until he was unconscious, and then robbing him of $6 and cigarettes.

But the judge ordered Stevenson sent back into the juvenile justice system, the same one that all three - judge, prosecutor and public defender - agreed had failed him in the past. Weeks later, Stevenson's case was dismissed because the victim didn't show up to testify.

Stevenson was back on the streets by early June, hanging with a gang in the city's Harwood neighborhood off Greenmount Avenue. A little more than a month later, he was dead. Someone had stabbed him.

The boy's journey through Baltimore's courts offers a troubling look into how juvenile offenders are treated by agencies responsible for their oversight and rehabilitation. About 10,000 juveniles are arrested each year, with more than two-thirds facing charges as minors in Baltimore, law enforcement statistics show.

Several hundred more are initially charged as adults for serious felonies, though about half are returned to juvenile court, according to prosecutors. Many end up back on the streets.

"It's a revolving door," said Stacey Gurian-Sherman of the advocacy group Juvenile Justice Family Advocacy Initiative and Resources. "All these youths are being chewed up and spewed out."

She said breakdowns between the juvenile and adult courts result in information not being shared and allow youths to slip through the cracks without getting help.

"What's wrong with the intake and case-management system that would allow us to ignore this kid until he's dead in the street?" Gurian-Sherman said of Stevenson. "He was worse than adrift. He was ignored. He was dismissed."

Because Stevenson was a minor, his criminal history - and how the juvenile system treated him - remains for the most part shrouded in secrecy. State laws shield criminal court records of juveniles from the public, even after death - a fact that some child welfare advocates say needs to change so the system can be better scrutinized.

But a telling one-hour public hearing in Baltimore Circuit Court, which was videotaped, opened a window into Stevenson's past, revealing the boy's interactions with the courts, juvenile services and police in the final months of his life.

It was public because at the time the youth faced adult charges in the assault and robbery case. The June 2 hearing was to determine whether the case should be returned to juvenile court.

Tracy Varda, the prosecutor, stood up in Judge Alfred Nance's courtroom and aggressively advocated for Stevenson to remain charged as an adult.

Varda said Stevenson had been arrested in early January, accused of choking a young man until he fell on a sidewalk, and then robbing him of money and cigarettes.

"This is an extremely serious offense," Varda argued. "He's physically overpowered a grown man. ... What kind of person is able to do this? The Department of Juvenile Services cannot give this defendant a conscience."

Varda said police officers caught Stevenson the day after the assault, after they saw him assaulting another man in the same block along Greenmount Avenue, and that he had been arrested seven times as a juvenile. Two of the incidents were adjudicated as "facts sustained" - the juvenile court's equivalent of a guilty finding.

Three of those arrests came after his January charges in the choking of the man, the prosecutor said. And his most recent arrest - on a charge of drug-dealing - occurred the night before, on June 1. He had been placed on probation twice.

But Stevenson had even more arrests on his juvenile rap sheet - a dozen total, according to information obtained by The Sun. It appears the judge never got a full picture of Stevenson's arrest history.

The boy's public defender, Mark Friedenthal, argued that Stevenson would be better served in the juvenile system, even as he criticized that same system for not providing sufficient services to the young suspect.

Stevenson couldn't read and write at a fifth-grade level, which made it difficult for him to be evaluated by a court medical investigator, Friedenthal noted. Having dropped out of school the previous year, Stevenson couldn't complete a written psychological examination.

Nance said Stevenson was at a "crossroads" in his life.

"The facts and circumstances before this court does not indicate that he has received ... real supervision within the juvenile system," Nance said. "It shows that there is no question that this case does suggest that there needs to be some strict control over him. This young man does not belong on the street."

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Citing what he thought were shortfalls in the court-ordered medical evaluation, Nance decided to send him back into the juvenile justice system.

Stevenson was detained the weekend after that Friday hearing, and had a juvenile hearing the following Monday. He was sent home with his father that day. When it later became time to try the assault and robbery case, the victim couldn't be found, and a juvenile court judge dismissed the charges July 5.

Thirteen days later, Stevenson and a 19-year-old man were stabbed. Stevenson died at Union Memorial Hospital. The other man survived.

Nance did not respond to written questions about the Stevenson case. Varda and Friedenthal both said they could not comment.

But speaking gener