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September 30, 2006

Rushing Off A Cliff--Congress votes to end habeas corpus and other protections

September 28, 2006
EDITORIAL, NY Times
Rushing Off a Cliff

Here's what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans' fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws - while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists - because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That's pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.
It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush's shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

These are some of the bill's biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of "illegal enemy combatant" in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret - there's no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable - already a contradiction in terms - and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

*There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

We don't blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they'll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won't remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They'll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2006

CO: Ault prison progress slow

Ault prison progress slow

Sharon Dunn, (Bio) sdunn@greeleytribune.com
September 9, 2006
Plans for the proposed Ault prison are apparently in a holding cell.

Two months ago, the state awarded the Geo Group the right to build a
1,500-bed medium security men's prison in Ault, but so far, progress has been slight.

A town meeting in July lured about 300 in protest of a prison in their backyard. Opponents worry about prison breaks, the caliber of employees, and the potential for a prison to attract criminals. Proponents of the prison say their dying town needs some development, and a prison is a clean industry that would bring commerce and jobs.
The prison would be located on roughly 40 acres in the southwest part of town, east of the railroad tracks parallel to U.S. 85.

Since the initial discussions, however, there are still no decisions. The Geo Group has not presented the town with a potential contract, and the town board has yet to decide if a contract with the private prison would have to be approved by the board or the residents.

Those involved, however, insist there is progress but won't elaborate.
The company is working with developers, contractors, financiers and the state Department of Corrections to come up with a plan, but theinitial hiccup comes with the state, which will not guarantee to Geo's satisfaction the number of beds that could be filled. Geo officials updated the town board in a work session last week.

"Basically, in a public meeting, it was stated that they'd want at least a 90 percent guarantee," said Sharon Sullivan, Ault's town clerk. "And that' s truly a matter of finances."

Apparently, the prison's financing interest rates are dependent upon the number of beds the prison can fill, said Tracey McCoy, Ault's police chief, who initiated discussions on getting the prison to come to town. He said the concern would be that if the Geo Group doesn't get the guarantee it wants, they may not be able to afford the project.

The state does not make a habit of giving private prisons guarantees on filling beds, said Brent Parker, director of communications for the Colorado Department of Corrections. He said the state is now researching the pros and cons of giving such guarantees, but as of yet, the state has no answers.

Geo officials would not comment on the progress of discussions with the state or the town of Ault.

But the company is talking about a number of issues, said Pablo Paez,
spokesman for Geo Group, a publicly traded company based in Florida that operates private prisons worldwide. "No decision has been made."

When the company first approached the town board, the Geo group had
suggested the prison would bring upward of 350 jobs to the area. Geo would manage the prison under a potential $28 million contract from the state (if the 1,500 beds were consistently full), while the town would own it. It would cost from $70 million to $100 million to build.

Geo officials suggested forwarding to the town an annual impact fee of up to $250,000, plus $30,000 a year in local scholarships. Geo also would pay for upgrading the town's water and sewer systems to accommodate the increased capacity.

http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20060909/NEWS/109090119

Posted by lois at 07:14 PM | Comments (0)

OK: Geo creates Oklahoma's largest prison

Geo creates Oklahoma's largest prison

South Florida Business Journal - 4:26 PM EDT Monday http://southflorida.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2006/09/25/daily2.
html
Geo Group said it has expanded a correctional facility in Oklahoma to
become the largest such facility in the state.
The Boca Raton-based correctional and detention management firm said its 600-bed expansion to the Lawton Correctional Facility brings capacity to 2, 518 beds.

Geo (NYSE: GEO) said it manages the facility, in Lawton, Okla., under a five-year contract with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections that
started July 1, 2003.

The company predicted the 600-bed expansion, which has already begun
taking medium security Oklahoma inmates, will reach full occupancy by the end of November.

At full occupancy, Geo predicted the expansion to generate about $9
million in additional revenue annually.

Shares closed down 75 cents to $42.99. The 52-week high was $46.43 on Aug. 31. The 52-week low was $20.10 on Nov. 2.

Posted by lois at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2006

MA: Report on Youth Unlawfully Heald Without Bail

Do you know where the children are?
A Report of Massachusetts Youth Unlawfully Held Without Bail
cover of the report
Executive Summary

by Barbara Fedders and Barbara Kaban

In 2004, over four thousand Massachusetts children and youth between the ages of seven and seventeen spent time behind bars -- in some cases up to four days -- after their arrest and prior to their first court appearance. While the law requires that young people must be at least fourteen years old to be detained, more than five hundred children under fourteen were so held that year.

Massachusetts law also provides that a party empowered by the judicial branch -- a judge, magistrate, or bail commissioner -- should review detention decisions about arrested youths, but many children and adolescents are unlawfully deprived of this opportunity. Routinely, decisions to detain young people are based solely on juvenile probation officers' recommendations, which are made pursuant to a cursory consideration of facts, and without benefit of written procedures or guidelines - all in violation of due process principles. Probation officers frequently recommend detention for youths accused of minor offenses, rather than reserving it for the most serious and dangerous offenders.

The impact of these practices is detrimental to the welfare of individuals in the juvenile justice system and communities at large. National studies have shown that arrested youths who are detained are more likely to re-offend than similarly situated youths who are not detained. Detention prior to the first court appearance is disproportionately ordered for youth of color, and the detained young people are held in facilities with poor conditions, often deprived of exercise and denied necessary medications. These practices undermine the mission of the Massachusetts juvenile court, which is to treat those who come before it not as criminals, but as children in need of aid and guidance.

Fortunately, this problem can be addressed relatively quickly and easily, without litigation. The Office of the Commissioner of Probation must establish explicit guidelines for the probation officers assigned responsibility for detention determinations. Police, sheriffs' departments and detention facility staff must ensure that youths have access to bail commissioners. These individuals must also cease the practice of detaining children under fourteen. Making these changes is essential to the integrity of the juvenile justice system. Nothing less than the well-being of our children is at stake.
Links to the complete report: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/kidsbail/

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

CA: Prop 36 violated if new bill passes

Posted on Wed, Jun. 28, 2006, San Jose Mercury News
Lawmakers back jail terms for drug offenders despite Prop. 36

DON THOMPSON
Associated Press

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will trigger a court battle if he signs a bill allowing judges to send nonviolent drug offenders to jail for brief periods if they violate conditions of their treatment programs, opponents pledged Wednesday.

Voters passed Proposition 36 in 2000, requiring treatment instead of jail for first- and second-time nonviolent drug offenders. But a measure sent to Schwarzenegger late Tuesday as part of the state budget package would permit jailing offenders up to five days to force their participation in treatment programs.

"If you can improve the number of people who complete the programs, you can reduce the number of people committing new crimes. That's the goal," Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Margita Thompson said Wednesday, indicating the governor will sign the bill.

She noted the measure had bipartisan support, passing the Senate, 27-2, and the Assembly, 64-8.

Assembly and Senate budget negotiators said they were told Schwarzenegger would veto $151 million for treatment programs unless lawmakers also sent him the bill permitting jailing of offenders.

Daniel Abrahamson, legal affairs director for the Drug Policy Alliance, said his group will immediately sue once Schwarzenegger signs the bill.

A provision in the legislation will automatically put the issue before voters in an upcoming election if a judge upholds the legal challenge.

"Prop. 36 clearly stated that courts could not jail people for relapsing during their treatment," Abrahamson said. "That is a direct contradiction of voters' will."

The $151 million included in the budget sent to Schwarzenegger is an increase from the $120 million that has been spent on Proposition 36 programs each of the five years since 61 percent of voters approved the measure.

Most of the increase would be distributed as incentives to counties with the best drug program completion rates.

But the accompanying measure would let judges order "flash incarcerations" of offenders who test positive for drugs or fail to attend treatment programs. A first offense could result in two days in jail, with up to five days for repeat offenders.

Bill supporters point to a study by the University of California, Los Angeles, that found about 30 percent of offenders sent to treatment under Proposition 36 never show up, and just 24 percent complete their treatment.

"The threat of a short period of time in jail may be enough to save someone's life by scaring them into taking treatment seriously," said John Ferrera, chief of staff to state Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, who carried the legislation.

Jail could be ordered "only for the purpose of compelling someone to take treatment seriously. It's a treatment tool. It's not meant to be punishment," he said.

A judge would first have to consider other ways to encourage the offender to get treatment, and would have to consider the impact of jail on the offender's treatment, job and family.

In addition, the bill would let a judge send a drug offender to a drug court or through the regular judicial process if he or she had five or more non-drug offenses in the previous two years, or if the judge found the offender was a threat to public safety or that treatment wouldn't work.

"I have never heard anybody say with a straight face that going to jail is not punishment," said Abrahamson. "To claim otherwise is disingenuous."

ON THE NET

Read SB1137 at http://www.sen.ca.gov

Posted by lois at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

CO: Crowded Jails, Growing Crisis

September 27, 2006
Crowded jails, growing crisis

“The train wreck is here, and El Paso County is right in the middle of it,” Sheriff Terry Maketa said Tuesday at a forum discussing the crowding problems facing jails and prisons.

Forum warns of state fiscal disaster

By R. SCOTT RAPPOLD THE GAZETTE
Colorado Springs

The prisons and jails are full, and the financial crisis it will cause in Colorado will be a “train wreck.”

Criminal-justice activists from around the state and nation, along with some local officials, met in Colorado Springs on Tuesday night to discuss the crowding problems facing the jails and prisons, and ways to avoid what even the conservatives on the panel predicted is a looming disaster.

“The train wreck is here, and El Paso County is right in the middle of it,” said El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa, one of the participants, who runs a jail so crowded it no longer accepts nonviolent misdemeanor offenders.

It’s a problem that has united fiscal conservatives, shocked by the growing percentage of the state’s budget going to prisons, and liberals, shocked by the high percentage of Colorado residents imprisoned.

And everyone in the panel discussion agreed it’s not a problem Colorado can get out of by building more prisons.

“Simply put, I think the whole system needs an enema,” said Promise Lee, pastor of Relevant Word Ministries.

The state prison system has dealt with the problem by increasing its reliance on private prisons. When three companies build authorized medium-security prisons for 3,776 inmates by the middle of 2008, one in three Colorado inmates will be housed in for-profit facilities. Another 1,000 will be moved to private prisons out of state.

Locally, the answers aren’t much better. Although El Paso County’s jail completed an 864-bed expansion in recent years, the new wing was open less than four months when county officials were drawing up plans for another jail expansion.

As of Tuesday, 1,434 inmates were in the 1,599-bed jail.

“I don’t have a lot of control over that,” Maketa said.

The panelists recommended a variety of measures, from cutting down on prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, to more reliance on mediation known as “restorative justice,” to a ban on private-prison construction to force the state to deal with the causes of a high incarceration rate. About 22,000 inmates are incarcerated in state prisons.

Jack Ruszczyk, chief probation officer in the 4th Judicial District, said the focus of activists needs to be on lawmakers, who are eager to prove how tough they can be on crime. In recent years, though, they have been less willing to fund new prisons.

“It has to do with political pandering to our fears. People getting elected have to be tough on crime and our jails and prisons fill up,” he said.

Maketa said it is not just lawmakers, though, but the public, which has an out-ofsight, out-of-mind approach to criminal justice. He noted that, though a couple of hundred people attended Tuesday’s forum, plenty of empty seats were in the Victory Outreach Center.

“There exists among a large portion of society an attitude that they don’t want to deal with the problem. They want to lock the door and throw away the key,” he said.

“I don’t think they’re really aware of it,” said Colorado Springs resident Berta Stanfield, who attended the forum out of curiosity about the issue. “I don’t think people really know how much of our tax dollars are going into it.”

The symposium, the first of its kind here, was organized by local nonprofits who work in alternatives to incarceration.
http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1322000&secid=1

Posted by lois at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2006

Rap's Captive Audience

Rap's Captive Audience
Ex-con musicians with a white power message are using a sales method pioneered by some black artists: promoting their album in prison.
By Chris Lee
Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

September 27, 2006

The three burly, skin-headed members of the hip-hop group Woodpile want a bigger audience, but they know the odds are long.

They have no hope of cracking mainstream radio or MTV with songs like "They Hate Us" or "I'm a Wood," in which they rap menacingly about blasting enemies with shotguns. Further limiting their commercial prospects, their August album, "The Streets Will Never Be the Same," boasts of the group's affiliation with the Woods, a white power prison gang.

So the Arizona-based group's label is using a viral marketing technique to create word of mouth. Its goal is to connect with an influential constituency of taste makers.

Namely, people behind bars.

Since June, executives at the marketing firm RBC Records have been sending out bundles of Woodpile promotional material twice a month to several dozen of the group's incarcerated friends, supporters and family members.

As the thinking goes, Woodpile gets buzz in the prison yard that translates into positive word of mouth, spreading beyond penitentiary walls as prison visitors and released prisoners carry the gospel of Woodpile to the streets.

For Brian Shafton, an RBC partner, jailhouse marketing makes obvious sense. "Prisons are great because you have an incredibly captive audience that has a lot of entertainment time on its hands," Shafton said.

"These people are definitely influential, and not just in the prisons," he said. "A lot of these guys are still calling shots in the outside world. You look in some of these urban communities and you see some of these pimps and gangsters as the governors of the ghetto."

Major labels have tried unusual brand-building techniques, but prison marketing isn't on their radar yet.

"Back in the day, what we considered grass-roots marketing was running in the club, buying every bottle of champagne and leaving them on tables," said entertainment mogul Damon Dash, who launched Roc-a-Fella Records with rap superstar Jay-Z in 1996. "That was us branding ourselves and our artists as guys that had money."

But he was appreciative of RBC's innovations. "It's a saturated market now, and how many times can you sell people the same stuff?" he said. "I think it's creative to go the jail route."

In the past, targeted hip-hop salesmanship has resulted in gangbusters business.

In the late 1980s, marketers for the incendiary rap quintet NWA began peddling the group's albums from the trunk of a car at Torrance's Roadium Swap Meet and giving away promotional "merch" to Huntington Beach skateboarders and surfers. Within five years, NWA's label, Ruthless Records, was one of the most successful in the world.

"Rebels are always opinion makers," said Ruthless co-founder Jerry Heller.

A respectable album run inside prison means selling as few as 1,000 cassettes. (Although rules vary from state to state, CDs are banned in most maximum-security facilities because of their potential as weapons.) In recent years, RBC's prison marketing has resulted in underground hits for Compton rapper-producer DJ Quik — now serving a five-month sentence for assault — and Memphis rapper 8 Ball. To hear it from the company's executives, a cellblock hit can lead to outside sales of up to 300,000 copies: major success for an independent record label like Woodpile's imprint, West Coast Mafia Records.

With 2.2 million people incarcerated in America — an estimated 548,000 of them African American and between the ages of 20 and 39 — the penitentiary has come to take on an almost mystical importance within hip-hop, with its African American roots.

Nelson George, author of "Hip Hop America," says prison is an indivisible part of the black experience. "In this country, black people have been getting incarcerated justly and unjustly since we got here," he said. "The prison system has impacted black culture. And its influence on hip-hop is a subset of that."

Of course, hip-hop artists who have never seen the inside of a cell, including Kanye West and the Black Eyed Peas, regularly top the pop charts. But in recent years, the number of rap stars being incarcerated has skyrocketed, and the notion of the clink as a kind of "finishing school of hard knocks" persists in gangsta rap.

Prison officials have so far not taken issue with efforts to popularize hip-hop in prisons — there is nothing illegal about what RBC is doing. But according to Lt. Brian Parriott, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, officials will be keeping their ears open for Woodpile's music.

"We don't support gangsta rap that would encourage a criminal mind-set," he said. "The department is definitely not going to be supportive of anything that is influencing individuals to break any law. If the type of music they're producing would influence gang activities, the Department of Corrections will take actions to block the music from coming in to the prison system."

It's ironic, perhaps, that a white-power group like Woodpile would turn to rap as the musical genre best suited to their expressions of their prison experiences. But the members of Woodpile — all ex-cons — say their music celebrates "white pride," not white supremacy. As the most forward face of the Woods gang (the name is a play on a slur for a white person: "peckerwood"), they characterize themselves as in opposition to such racist gangs as the Aryan Brotherhood and the Nazi Low Riders.

In the song "I'm a Wood," the group makes its unflinching attitude toward violence explicit. "Bloody bodies exploding, bullets reloading…. I'll never stop until your body stops convulsing," Woodpile member Critical raps. "I'm a Wood — the type right outta the pen. I'm a Wood — so let the beatings begin."

The song is also intended as a rallying cry for Woodpile's target audience. "They call 'I'm a Wood' the white-boy anthem," said Ben Grossi, RBC's vice president of marketing. "You don't think every white prisoner isn't going to want to own the white-boy anthem?"

The only way for prisoners to buy music is through direct-mail services, including Pack Central, whose most recent catalog offers cassettes from artists such as Kris Kristofferson and Queensryche alongside hip-hop titles from the Game and 50 Cent. But although RBC advertises its artists in the magazine Murder Dog — a publication with editorial content and tone specifically tailored to inmates' interests — a major part of the company's promotional push involves the use of "street teams" inside the slammer.

It's a prison version of viral marketing.

"It's real similar to the street teams that you use on the street," said Woodpile member Diesoul Ether Bunny, referring to urban guerrilla marketers many major record labels enlist to put up posters and stickers in exchange for music and merchandise.

"Here's a guy who loves your music," Ether Bunny said. "He hits you up to find out where he can buy it and you talk to him about doing promotion. He gets his friends involved, next thing you know, you send him a bigger box of fliers. We're doing the same thing in the penitentiary."

Consider the efforts of Richard "Cripper" Charles. Woodpile bandmates Ether Bunny, Crisis and Critical have been sending Charles copies of the group's magazine ads, lyric sheets, show fliers and CD inserts. Charles has been distributing them to fellow inmates at the maximum-security prison at Yuma, Ariz., where he is serving a 15-year sentence for aggravated assault.

Another incarcerated fan of the group, known to them only as "Junior," has taken a more direct promotional approach. He had the word "Woodpile" tattooed across his upper torso.

Sacramento rapper Shawn "C-Bo" Thomas, West Coast Mafia's founder and chief executive, knows how gangsta rap is trafficked inside. He's not in prison but has served time on numerous charges, including weapons and drug possession, promoting gang violence and making threats to law enforcement personnel. "The music is what everyone wants to hear behind the wall," Thomas said. "When a new tape comes out, it goes dorm to dorm. They listen to it and then another person says, 'I got next.' You gotta make a list to listen to this music. Then everybody's trying to order it."

In an era when pop culture consumers are faced with an overwhelming array of entertainment choices, RBC discovered that prison is also a place for fans to intimately connect with music without the distraction of television, the Internet or video games. And that can mean big business for RBC artists' back catalogs.

Like C-Bo's discography. The notoriously gang-affiliated West Coast Mafia CEO, 34, has 17 albums to his credit and promoted many of them while housed in the "super Crip" module at Tracy, Soledad and Folsom state prisons in California, selling more than 2 million copies over the last 12 years without the support of radio or music video channels.

"We rely on his loyal, rabid fan base to go out and buy all 17 albums," said Shafton, the RBC partner. "Serving these prisons, we sell 'em one record that's a current release, but we'll also sell 'em the back catalog and the future releases. So it's not one release, it's 16 or 17 records."

*

Posted by lois at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

In New York, a Report Details Abuse and Neglect at 2 State-Run Centers for Girls

September 25, 2006, NY Times
In New York, a Report Details Abuse and Neglect at 2 State-Run Centers for Girls
By LISA W. FODERARO

Lansing and Tryon. They are among the most secure facilities in New York State for girls who have crossed the law — remote state-run institutions located far from New York City, where most of their inmates are from. And to the girls who are sent there, the facilities are notorious.

“They restrain you for no reason,” Antoinette, a 17-year-old, said in an interview last week. She was confined at Tryon Girls Center, near Albany, after she was found to have committed a robbery. “They throw you down and mush your face into the floor,” she said. “It’s just like having rug burns on your face. They make girls cry and are always doing strip searches.”

Antoinette, whose last name was withheld to protect her privacy, was among 30 girls whose bleak accounts of life at Tryon and at Lansing Residential Center, near Ithaca, inform a harshly critical report about the centers released today by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Human Rights Watch has investigated conditions at juvenile centers for boys elsewhere in the United States and other countries. But this was its first look at incarceration of girls, and the report’s author, Mie Lewis, said she chose New York because of the size of its juvenile population and indications of problems at its institutions.

In New York State, girls represented 14 percent of the children taken into custody in 1994; 10 years later, the number had grown to more than 18 percent. A majority of the girls at Lansing and Tryon are 15 and 16, but some are as young as 12.

The 134-page report concludes that girls in the two centers, which together house about 150 girls, are being abused and neglected — violently restrained for minor infractions, subjected to sexual harassment and assault, cut off from families, and provided little rehabilitation.

Ms. Lewis, a lawyer and Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the A.C.L.U., said she was refused access to the facilities, which are operated by the State Office of Children and Family Services. But she combed through grievance reports and other documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Law and interviewed formerly and currently incarcerated girls.

“In other countries, we are always given access and we’ve been able to visit the facilities and talk to kids,” she said. “With O.C.F.S., it’s an incredibly closed and secretive agency. And then when kids are sent to these facilities, it’s like they are dropped into a black hole.”

The report calls on the state to curtail the use of a face-down restraint technique, in which girls are thrust to the floor and handcuffed. The report makes numerous other recommendations, from providing better education and assuring access to mental health services to limiting male staff members in girls’ living quarters.

A spokesman for the Office of Children and Family Services, Brian Marchetti, criticized Human Rights Watch and the A.C.L.U. for not providing a copy of the report to the agency before its release, as the two groups did for the news media. “We have to question their motives,” Mr. Marchetti said. “Is it to improve programs for children or is it to see their name in headlines and promote their agenda?”

Mr. Marchetti said the agency provided Ms. Lewis with 5,500 pages of material and granted her an interview in April with the agency’s commissioner, John A. Johnson, and senior staff members. He said that access to the facilities themselves is granted to researchers only after receipt of a research proposal and that Ms. Lewis never presented one.

As for criticisms of Lansing and Tryon, Mr. Marchetti said the agency had “zero tolerance” for any kind of “sexual misconduct” between employees and residents.

The report quotes girls who had worked as prostitutes who felt they were singled out by male staff members. A number of those girls complained of harassment, unwanted touching and sexual contact.

One girl, identified as Ebony V., who was 16 at the time of her confinement, recalled in the report an episode in which she was having sex in the office of a male staff member at Lansing when another male employee walked in on them. “He said: ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh I’m sorry’ and closed the door. It’s crazy, isn’t it?” the report quotes her as saying.

Mr. Marchetti also defended the educational offerings at the centers. Across the agency’s facilities in general, two-thirds of the young people score below grade level in reading and math upon entering. While at the institutions, he said, they improve on average by two grade levels.

One of the most stinging criticisms leveled by the report centers on the use of a face-down restraint. The report describes how girls are seized from behind and pushed to the floor, their arms held in place or put in handcuffs. The restraint is used for such infractions as not making a bed properly or not raising one’s hand before speaking, the report said.

The agency’s regulations say that such restraints are to be used to prevent children from harming themselves and others, but, Ms. Lewis said, the agency’s internal policy is decidedly more lax.

Mr. Marchetti said restraints were used to prevent harm and also to “de-escalate situations.” Asked whether they were used excessively, he said that “all staff in Office of Children and Family Services facilities are mandated reporters,” meaning they must report abuse to the authorities.

Juanita Crawford, 19, who spent a year and a half at Lansing after she was found guilty of reckless endangerment and conspiracy and is now an intern at the A.C.L.U., said in an interview that she was restrained after not moving quickly enough to dispose of her food tray and talking back to a staff member.

“He takes you and hooks your arms backwards with a lot of force, and it hurts, and you’re dropped face down,” she said. “It’s almost like getting tripped.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/nyregion/25juvenile.html

Posted by lois at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

NJ:The Last Holdout Reconsiders a Program to Curb H.I.V.

September 25, 2006, NY Times
The Last Holdout Reconsiders a Program to Curb H.I.V.
By RICHARD G. JONES

CAMDEN, N.J., Sept. 21 — On most days, the fringe workers in this city’s stunningly vibrant drug trade shout and gesticulate from street corners like hot dog vendors at a ballpark, hawking hypodermic needles they claim are clean.

“Works for sale! Works for sale!”

But the shouting stopped at one corner recently after one of those dealers died of a drug overdose. For his loyal customers, it was a disaster, however briefly.

“It was a drought of works,” said Maria Lugo, 26, who said that she injects heroin eight times a day. “People were picking up old needles off the street. They didn’t care. They just wanted to get off.”

That mix of apathy and addiction has led to what health officials say is a public health crisis in New Jersey, where state figures show that more than 4 in 10 cases of H.I.V. infection result from injecting illegal drugs with contaminated needles. Even so, New Jersey remains the one state that prohibits the distribution of hypodermic needles in government-sanctioned programs.

That may soon change. In a reversal that even supporters acknowledge would have been unexpected as recently as six months ago, lawmakers may well pass a bill soon to allow needle exchanges in New Jersey.

The legislation, to be considered this week, appears finally to have enough support to win passage, 14 years after it was first introduced, and Gov. Jon S. Corzine has said he would sign it.

To supporters, the bill is long overdue, and the Legislature’s refusal to approve it has contributed to the deaths of an untold number of drug users.

To opponents, including State Senator Thomas H. Kean Jr., the Republican nominee for the United States Senate, the measure would mean nothing less than a government endorsement of illegal drug use.

One of the bill’s most vocal critics, State Senator Ronald L. Rice, a former Newark police officer who represents a district in Essex County, has compared legal needle exchanges to the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an experiment in Alabama from 1932 until 1972 in which proper treatment was withheld from African-Americans infected with venereal disease.

Mr. Rice has argued that exchange programs contribute to a cycle of social and economic inertia for minorities and the poor.

A better use of state money, he says, would be to create more programs providing drug education and treatment.

“Those who want a syringe access program are saying that it’s O.K. for drug users to continue using drugs and kill themselves because it’s cheaper for the government,” he said.

It was Mr. Rice, a Democrat, who negotiated an alliance with the Republican minority in the Senate to prevent the needle exchange bill from getting out of committee as recently as last spring.

But last Monday, committee members reached a compromise that would allow pilot needle exchange programs in six cities. The program would be re-evaluated in five years under the bill, which would also provide $10 million for drug treatment programs.

State Senator Nia H. Gill, a Democrat from Essex County who sponsored the original legislation, cited statistics that show New Jersey is the state with the third-highest rate of H.I.V. infection among children, and the highest rate among women.

Nearly 33,000 residents of New Jersey have AIDS, according to state health officials, and, in a statement, Ms. Gill noted that almost as many — about 30,000 — have died of the disease.

“If there were any other cause of hundreds of deaths of children, thousands of deaths of women and the orphaning of tens of thousands of children — our Legislature would act on an emergency basis to reduce that cause,” she said.

To those who see the consequences of the drug trade in neighborhoods like South Camden, an exchange program cannot come too soon.

Several times a week, Jose Quann and Johnny Brown, workers with the Camden Area Health Education Center, drive a modified recreational vehicle through some of the bleakest parts of the city to do street-level prevention and education concerning H.I.V. and AIDS.

They hand out free condoms to prostitutes. They give intravenous-drug users bleach kits to sterilize syringes. And they offer health services like free blood pressure screenings and new oral H.I.V. tests that yield results in 20 minutes.

Bouncing over the uneven asphalt along Broadway in South Camden the other day, Mr. Brown, a burly 51-year-old, said that he did not believe free needles would encourage drug abuse.

“When they take part in needle exchange, it means they’re starting to take an interest in their health,” Mr. Brown said. “That’s the first step.”

Mr. Quann, 46, agreed. “It’s a win-win for everybody,” he said. “Right now, they’re disposing of these things in our back alleys, in our playground where our kids are getting pricked.”

Although the six cities in the proposed pilot program have not been chosen, both men hope that Camden, whose 75,000 residents, according to city figures, include an estimated 800 people with H.I.V. or AIDS, will be one of them.

So did a half-dozen visitors to their bus.

One of them, a 30-year-old prostitute who said her first name was Summer, sneered at the idea that providing free needles would promote drug use.

“Users are going to use anyway,” she said. “But you’d have less people infected with H.I.V., hepatitis.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/nyregion/25needles.html

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Gubenatorial Election:They're tough on crime but not smart on it

They're tough on crime but not smart on it
By James Alan Fox
Monday, September 25, 2006, Boston Herald

Within hours of her uncontested victory in the Republican primary, Kerry Healey stepped up her campaign for the corner office by launching a technologically glitzy e-book, "Smart, Tough Solutions to Change Massachusetts."
In the public safety arena, the plan is tough-minded indeed. Proposals to expand online postings of sex offenders, to increase sentences for meth dealers and to track domestic abusers with GPS devices all characterize Healey, a former criminologist, and running mate Reed Hillman, a former state trooper, as tough as nails on crime.

As for smart, the online e-book is definitely smart-looking, right down to the animated page-turns. But at a time when street-gun violence is on the rise, is yet another proposal for reinstating capital punishment a smart approach?
Recognizing the failures of previous administrations to secure support for capital punishment, Healey has proposed a narrower scope - death for those felons convicted of killing a police officer, prosecutor, judge or correctional officer. How smart is it to spend time and energy in pushing for a penalty so narrow that it would hardly matter at all?
If you're like most people - or at least like my class of over 100 students that I polled - you might think that the murder of law officers is a critical and pervasive problem. Well, think again.
Over the past decade, only three Massachusetts cops and not a single state correctional officer have been slain by an assailant. As for prosecutors, we recall with sadness the fatal shooting of Assistant Attorney General Paul McLaughlin in 1995. But don't struggle too hard to remember another; apparently this was the first and only such case in Bay State history. You will have a similarly difficult time identifying a significant number of homicides of judges.
Reportedly, Healey would prefer to have the death penalty for other heinous offenses as well, but chose to start with the narrowest set of crimes on which "we can all agree." It may be a bit of exaggeration to suggest consensus, as not all citizens support such an approach, especially when given a reasonable alternative like long-term incarceration.
Even the people this proposal is designed to protect don't necessarily see capital punishment as a capital idea. In a 1995 survey of police chiefs, taken at a time when crime levels were much higher than they are today, the nation's top cops prioritized capital punishment far behind smarter strategies for reducing crime, such as curtailing gun availability and expanding the ranks of law enforcement.
Still, Healey claims her proposal would deter those who might contemplate such a crime. But as a criminologist, she must know that evidence strongly suggests otherwise. She may also know that 84 percent of the past presidents of the three major criminological professional societies concur that the deterrent effect is mostly wishful thinking. It is not that criminals disregard sanctions, only that the prospect of execution is no more dissuasive than life in prison.
Ironically, cop killing is one area that exposes the flaw in the deterrence argument. What deters people is not the severity of punishment, but the perceived likelihood that the penalty will ever be applied. Typically, cop killers shoot in order to avoid arrest. Whether the potential penalty is life imprisonment or death makes little difference when expecting to escape the law.
Come November, Healey's campaign for capital punishment may prove to have been smart after all - smart politics to win votes by exploiting an emotional non-issue. But smart politics does not always translate into smart policy.


James Alan Fox is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University http://news.bostonherald.com/editorial/view.bg?articleid=159162&format=&page
=1

Posted by lois at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

"Custody and Control: Conditions of Confinement in New York's Juvenile Prisons for Girls,"

"Custody and Control: Conditions of Confinement in New York's Juvenile Prisons for Girls,"

Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union take the first in-depth look at New York's highest security juvenile prisons for girls. What the report uncovers is disturbing: Upon being found "delinquent," young girls from backgrounds of intergenerational poverty, many of whom have survived abuse and trauma, are locked up and again abused and neglected, this time at the hands of the state. This report documents the excessive use of a face-down "restraint" procedure in which girls are thrown to the floor, often causing injury, as well as incidents of sexual abuse, and inadequate educational and mental health services.

http://hrw.org/reports/2006/us0906/

This and other new research relating to girls and women and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org under New Research

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

September 24, 2006

MA:Scrutiny of Healy and Patrick's opinions focus on CORI reform in the gubernatorial race

The Boston Globe
Scrutiny of criminals heats up race
Healey presses Patrick on background checks

By Andrea Estes, Globe Staff | September 24, 2006

When criminals try to re enter society and remake their lives, they're often haunted by criminal background information that can prevent them from getting a job. For years, state lawmakers and social activists, many of them from minority neighborhoods, have tried to limit distribution of that information, saying they want to help people get another chance.

The fight to water down the Criminal Offender Records Information law, or CORI, has emerged as an issue in the governor's race. Democrat Deval L. Patrick, who supports restricting the release of some information, is drawing fire -- first from his defeated Democratic rival, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, and now from his Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey.

Healey last week launched a television ad quoting Reilly calling Patrick ``soft on crime."

``There is no benefit to hiding someone's criminal history," Healey said in an interview. ``It should be made more widely available, not restricted, as Deval Patrick has suggested. I think it's meaningful that the state's top law enforcement official called Patrick soft on crime."

A review of his public comments by the Globe found that Patrick has carefully avoided taking a stand on specific CORI legislation, including the most controversial proposals pending on Beacon Hill. The Public Safety Act of 2006, an omnibus bill that lawmakers did not act on this session, contained measures that would make it easier for offenders to have their records sealed or expunged and allow drug dealers to lop time off their sentences.

For five months, Patrick was listed as a supporter of that bill on the website of one of the groups pressing the legislation, the Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI. After Reilly criticized Patrick, a leader of that group removed Patrick's name from the website, saying it was a mistake to list him as a proponent.

Currently, more than 11,000 employers have access to criminal records under CORI, and nearly all of them serve vulnerable populations such as nursing home residents and schoolchildren.

In debates and in speeches, Patrick has said he supports the idea of giving people with criminal records ``a second chance."

``Moving from jail back into responsible society is a great idea," he said in a June speech, ``but only if CORI doesn't defeat your second chance." In an interview Friday, Patrick said he believes in ``tightening up" the current criminal background system, which he said is ``overbroad" and ``inaccurate," and may prevent convicted criminals from making a clean start.

``All I'm talking about is creating a way for those who need information that is relevant . . . to have that information," Patrick said in an interview Friday. ``But also make sure that CORI doesn't defeat their every second chance."

But he said in the interview he isn't sure which specific bills he would support. ``I don't pretend to know all the different legislation. I can't say there's any one proposal that is right," he said.

Patrick's statements on the hot button issue reignite questions that surfaced privately among strategists for his Democratic rivals during the primary campaign: that he is often vague and elusive on key public policy matters. He won the primary with 50 percent of the vote, but last week the general election campaign quickly turned heated over crime and immigration, and Healey renewed a familiar criticism in an interview last week.

``It's typical of Deval Patrick to speak in generalities and be unable to supply specific plans for making Massachusetts a better place to live," she said. ``I have very specific plans about what we need to do to make Massachusetts safer. Criminal justice is the most basic service that government provides. You can't have economic development without safe streets. Your kids can't learn in school if they're scared."

In the Democratic candidates' final debate Sept. 14, Reilly attacked Patrick for seeming to endorse the Public Safety Act of 2006, a compilation of a half dozen bills filed by different legislators during the year. Patrick denied supporting the act, and afterward , Patrick's name was removed from the website where he was listed as a backer. Horace Small, a leader of the Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI, said Patrick's name should not have been included.

``It was an honest mistake," Small said.

On Friday, Patrick said again that he does not support that legislation. He said he believes in protecting people by limiting access by employers to incorrect or irrelevant information.

``I don't think every employer ought to know about every trivial infraction," he said. ``For example, if you were a bank, you'd want to know that an applicant for teller had a history of financial fraud, but not necessarily about every speeding ticket."

He stressed that law enforcement authorities should have unfettered access to criminal records.

He said he cannot decide which measures to support without further study. ``The way to get CORI reform is to get people around the table who have to live with this, who need or don't need information, and try to forge a course that serves the best interests of everyone," he said.

Groups pressing for changes say they don't care if Patrick embraces their favorite CORI reform proposal, as long as he agrees with them in concept.

``Deval supports the idea of a second chance," said Small. ``He recognizes that the way the system was set up hurts people. What I loved about the guy is he took the time to meet with people with CORI's. He heard their stories. He studied the laws. He said the system was falling apart. Whether he embraced our piece, he's committed to making the system fair and efficient; giving access to public safety but making sure people don't pay for the rest of their lives."

They say that supporting Patrick is easy; his main opponent, Healey, opposes any form of CORI reform.

``As an advocate who has investigated the positions of the various candidates, I think [Patrick] believes the system needs to be worked on to allow appropriate employment," said Brandyn Keating, executive director of the non-profit Criminal Justice Policy Coalition. ``Ideologically the candidates [Patrick and Healey] are on opposite sides of the issue. It's not like they each support some form of CORI reform. They're on opposite poles," said Keating, whose group does not get involved in electoral politics because of its nonprofit status.

But some prosecutors say there is no middle ground in the CORI debate -- a politician is either for providing access to criminal record information or is siding with criminals and making it tougher for law enforcement officials to do their job. The Massachusetts District Attorneys Association has gone on record opposing any efforts to weaken the existing law.

``There are different versions that people have proposed," said Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, a Republican. ``My opinion is they raise public safety issues. I believe an employer should be able to make an informed decision whether to hire or not hire someone. People have the right to be safe."

To Cruz, the best CORI law would be no CORI law. He believes the Legislature should eliminate the law altogether and give the public complete access to criminal records over the Internet.

``That would be the reform safest for everyone," he said. ``We don't start life at 35 with a clean slate. People make choices and actions have consequences. I don't think that because people allegedly can't get a job that we should try to change history."

As the campaign progresses, Patrick said, he may take a more specific stand on CORI reform, but for now isn't afraid to take the ``reasoned" middle ground -- even if he risks being labeled ``soft on crime.

``Kerry Healey will be using every label, every shorthand, doing everything short of engaging thoughtfully on the issue," he said. ``We owe the people of Massachusetts thoughtful, engaged discussion of the issues, not just government by sound bite."
© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company http://www.boston.com/news/local/politics/candidates/articles/2006/09/24/scrutiny_of_criminals_heats_up_race/?page=1

Posted by lois at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2006

Is adult prison best for juveniles?

Is adult prison best for juveniles?
Posted 9/20/2006 8:33 PM ET
By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY
Get-tough laws that have put more teenagers in adult prisons since the early '90s conflict with a wave of new research suggesting how children can be set straight and society protected at the same time.
At a two-day summit starting Thursday in Washington, leading researchers will meet with juvenile justice decision-makers — directors of state juvenile justice systems, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys — to discuss how the new evidence should affect treatment of teen offenders.

"We know so much more about the adolescent brain and behavior than we used to, and we want to get these facts into the hands of people who can make a difference," psychologist Laurence Steinberg says. He heads a network of researchers and juvenile-justice workers financed by the MacArthur Foundation, which sponsored the meeting.
Since 1992, every state but Nebraska has made it easier to try juveniles as adults, and most states have legalized harsher sentences. Many states limit judges' discretion, sending all teens who commit serious offenses to adult courts, or allowing prosecutors to opt for adult prosecution.
That sounds reasonable, but it can be unfair, says Kimberly O'Donnell, chief judge of the Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court in Richmond, Va. She points to 14-year-olds tried as adults for "assault by a mob" — in effect, ganging up on and hurting a child at school.
"And once you're tried as an adult, you're always an adult, which can have awful consequences," she says.
For example, if these teens are arrested again, prosecutors can use the threat of lengthy prison sentences as leverage to gain a plea bargain agreement that might not be in a child's interest, O'Donnell says.
There's firm evidence that teens prosecuted as adults are much more likely to commit crimes when they get out than comparable young people tried as juveniles, says Shay Bilchik, president and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America.
Juvenile facilities tend to offer better education, job training, and drug abuse and mental health treatment, Steinberg says. Plus, teens aren't learning from adults how to be career criminals, he adds.
That's not to say kids don't commit serious crimes before landing in adult jails. Some even score in the psychopathic range on written tests that predict which adults are likely to commit future crimes. These tests are sometimes used in deciding whether young people should get severe punishments or be tried as adults, says psychologist Elizabeth Cauffman of the University of California-Irvine.
She says it's a dubious practice. Her studies show that adolescents tend to move away from this psychopath profile when they're tracked for a couple of years, while adult scores are usually stable.
Some hallmarks of psychopathy — thrill-seeking, impulsivity, failure to accept responsibility — are all too familiar to parents of teenagers, Cauffman says. In effect, youths grow out of this behavior.
Many younger children aren't even competent to stand trial because they don't understand the trial process or can't make decisions about pleas, says Thomas Grisso, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. He has developed guidelines to determine juvenile competence and is training U.S. juvenile court workers in using them.
New findings of other MacArthur network scientists challenge common assumptions about teenage criminals. For example, a study that has tracked 1,355 serious offenders for three years finds that less than 10% of those involved in a lot of criminal activities at the outset continued to be heavily involved over the years. "A lot of policy is driven by the view that if a kid does a felony assault, he must be a bad actor from here on forward," says study leader Edward Mulvey of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School.
Still, 57% had at least one more arrest within two years. "Plus, we know arrests represent only the tip of the iceberg. Who really knows how much else they did that they weren't caught for?" asks Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Southern California who studies criminal behavior.
Long-term studies of highly aggressive children suggest that some are headed for a life of violent crime and should be locked up early because they're dangerous, he says. Brain damage or family qualities may cause their behavior, Raine says.
"But it's naive to think many of these very violent kids are going to stop, and we don't need to be protected from them."
In Mulvey's study, better parenting and long-term treatment for drug or alcohol abuse correlated with less criminal behavior.
Bilchik, a former prosecutor of juvenile cases in Miami for 16 years and former head of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, can understand why research has been slow to translate into action.
"When you've got a kid in front of you who's done a vicious armed robbery with a beating, it's different than an intellectual argument about what works," Bilchik says. "Prosecutors think, 'Can I really make myself try him as a juvenile? Can I even get permission from my boss?' "
Sometimes prosecutors know a juvenile system has scant mental health treatment or rehabilitation, and they'd rather lock up a dangerous teen with adults than risk a slap on the wrist, Bilchik says. And often there's little follow-up monitoring by youth workers when troubled young people are let out. Still, he says adult prisons, despite their short-term appeal, aren't usually the long-term answer. "We have the research that tells us what to do. The tragedy is, we're not capitalizing on it."


Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-09-20-teen-crime_x.htm

Posted by lois at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2006

TN: Meetings to Explain New Voting Rights Law for People With Felony Convictions

Meetings explain new felon voting rights law
The Jackson Sun, Sept 5, 2006
NASHVILLE - Two civil rights organizations are canvassing the state with town hall meetings - including one Thursday in Jackson - to explain a new election law intended to make it easier for felons to restore their voting rights.

But even advocates of the bill passed in May say Tennessee still has one of the most restrictive and confusing procedures for allowing former felons to regain the right to vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee and the state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have meetings scheduled this week in Jackson, Clarksville and Murfreesboro. The Jackson meeting will be from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday in the Madison County Agricultural Complex Auditorium, at 309 North Parkway.
The meetings consist of representatives from local bar associations and county election officials, along with former felons and members of the National Right to Vote campaign.

The League of Women Voters in Tennessee also will be at the meetings to help former felons begin the process to restore their voting rights.

"For many of these people, if they start before Oct. 7, they'll be ready to vote in the Nov. 7 election," said Terry McMoore, spokesman for the Tennessee NAACP.

Denver Schimming, 48, of Goodlettsville, is a former felon convicted of bank robbery who campaigned at the Capitol to get the new bill passed. He is one of the planned speakers at the meeting in Jackson.

Schimming said voting allows ex-felons to take control of and responsibility for their lives after they've completed their sentences.

"You don't have to let your felony conviction define your life," said Schimming, who had his rights restored after completing his sentence in 1996. "You don't have to be a failure the rest of your life. You can get back into the mainstream and make your voice heard."

The bill was a compromise that permanently denied voting rights for more types of felons and placed financial obstacles in the process to register, said Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the ACLU in Tennessee.

"What I continue to emphasize is that this is a first step," Weinberg said. "We had to be practical. There was lots of debate and dialogue about what we were willing give up in order to get a streamlined process."

In the past, some former felons had to go to court and often had to pay attorney fees to restore their voting rights. Under the new rules, all former felons can bypass the court and complete a certificate of restoration at county election commission offices.

But the bill also expanded the felonies that permanently prohibit a person from ever voting. Starting July 1, anyone convicted of a sexual offense will not be eligible to restore voting rights. Previously only felons convicted of rape were excluded.

Also added late in the legislative process were two provisions of the bill that require former felons to be current on child support payments and to pay any financial restitution that is part of their sentences.

"When the bill was first introduced, it only required completion of sentences, probation and parole," Weinberg said. "The child support provision is unfair and penalizes poor mothers and fathers, who may never have the money to buy back their franchise."

Under the new requirements, the county circuit court where the felon was convicted verifies the restitution has been paid and the Department of Human Services verifies the child support payments.

"We are in the process of identifying individuals who were adversely affected by the child support provision," Weinberg said. "We are committed to righting this wrong, either by seeing it repealed, or going into court and challenging it."

The NAACP and the ACLU estimate there are 98,000 convicted felons in the state of Tennessee. The state Division of Elections does not have a count of how many felons have had their voting rights restored.

The changes to the felony voting law only apply to convictions after May 18, 1981. Felons who were convicted between Jan. 15, 1973, and May 17, 1981, are allowed to register to vote, regardless of the type of conviction. Felons convicted prior to Jan. 15, 1973, have a different set of rules regarding felony voting rights.

On the Net:

www.aclu-tn.org

tennessee.gov/sos/election/

http://www.jacksonsun.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060905/NEWS01/609050306/1002

Posted by lois at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2006

The Hidden Costs of a Cruel and Unusual Prison Health Care System

Bioethics Forumis a service of the Hastings Center Report
Bioethics and the Law

Monday, September 18, 2006
The Hidden Costs of a Cruel and Unusual Prison Health Care System
BY BRIETTA CLARK

Last year, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons (the “Commission”) was formed to investigate and report on prisoners’ conditions of confinement and the abuse and violence suffered by inmates in U.S. jails and prisons. In June of this year, the Commission produced a report, Confronting Confinement, describing its findings and making recommendations for reform of correctional facilities in several areas. Tragically, one of the critical problem areas causing the preventable death and injury of prisoners is the health care delivery system that is supposed to care for them.

Nationwide, inmates are routinely denied access to physicians and nurses, even when the need becomes undeniable and critical. When prisoners do get to see a doctor or nurse, it’s often tantamount to receiving no care because the person provides grossly negligent care, or in some cases, is deliberately cruel to the prisoner. California’s prison system provides some of the worst examples of this kind of treatment. In one case, a prisoner suffered a neck injury in a fight and could not move his legs. Although the standard of care required immobilization of the neck, the treating physician insisted that the prisoner was faking and deliberately moved his head from side to side. The prisoner became paralyzed.

Such occurrences are not isolated or even unusual. According to recent statistics, deficiencies in the California prison health care system are so severe that one inmate dies needlessly every six or seven days as a result. California’s system is so dysfunctional that last year, in Plata v. Schwarzenegger, a federal court stripped the state of control of the prison health care system, temporarily establishing a Receivership to take control of medical service delivery for all California state prisoners. The plaintiffsalleged, and the court agreed, that the deficiencies in the prison health care system were so severe they violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Specifically, the court described the system as “broken beyond repair” and causing an “unconscionable degree of suffering and death.”

The problems of poor quality care and barriers to health care access in prison are not new, nor are they simply the result of random acts of cruelty or negligence by incompetent health care workers. Rather, the prison health care crisis is the product of numerous longstanding and widespread systemic defects in the prison health care system, including inadequate numbers of health care workers to screen prisoners for infectious disease and provide treatment; cost sharing that discourages prisoners from seeking preventive care; lack of fair and adequate compensation necessary to attract qualified personnel; a hierarchical structure that subordinates health care workers’ medical judgment to that of non-health correctional workers; institutional barriers to removing incompetent providers; inefficiency and waste in equipment management and service delivery; lack of adequate oversight and involvement by local public health agencies; and overcrowding.

Legislators have either been indifferent to the problem or unwilling to advocate for resources to improve the prison health care system. In California, for example, the Plata court and Receiver attributed California’s crisis to decades of medical neglect as well as legal and institutional barriers to reform created by the executive and legislative branches of government. The Commission also found that some states have actively encouraged poor quality care by allowing doctors whose licenses have been restricted by the state medical board for reasons of competence to continue practicing under a special license that restricts their work to prisons and jails. In fact, much correctional health care is provided by health care workers who could not find other employment because of problems with their licenses.

Society has enabled this systemic neglect through a culture of dehumanizing prisoners, which allows us to ignore or even tout the constant threats of violence and abuse that prisoners face. How often do we hear people joke about the prospect of a newly convicted criminal becoming someone’s “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” in prison or take pleasure in the fact that certain criminals, like child molesters and rapists, may be special targets for prison violence and rape? If this dehumanization of prisoners makes such extreme sexual violence and abuse of prisoners morally acceptable to us, then it makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to feel empathy for prisoners who are deprived of quality health care.

Despite this bleak picture, we appear to be on the verge of creating a more honest and thoughtful discussion about prisoner health and safety. The problem has become much more visible, in part because of the Commission’s information gathering, exposing the inhumane conditions under which health care is delivered and its tragic consequences. Courts seem increasingly willing to hold government officials accountable for such deficiencies, as evidenced by Plata and other successful class action prisoner suits. Even politicians have begun addressing these issues publicly. In California, it’s become a campaign issue in the governor’s race. At the federal level, President Bush signed into law the Prisoner Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the first federal law to address the issue of sexual assault in prison and to acknowledge its devastating mental and physical health consequences.

While these developments represent some progress, they are meaningless without the public and political will to expend the resources necessary to ensure adequate health care in prisons. Indeed, some problems can be fixed through simple organizational changes and by eliminating waste in the current prison administration. Nonetheless, many of the problems listed above cannot be remedied without additional state and federal funding. Increasing the number of health care personnel requires a significant commitment of financial resources. Qualified personnel can be recruited only if competitive compensation is offered. Proposals to reduce prisoners’ cost-sharing to encourage early preventive care suggest extending Medicaid coverage to prisoners. Even the Receiver in his latest report about the California prison health care system admits that his power to fix the system is limited without the political will and requisite commitment of state resources.

So why have we failed to commit the financial resources necessary to ensure prisoners’ health and safety in light of the profound moral and legal obligation to prevent such cruelty to prisoners? The most likely reason: fear of the perceived sacrifice that allocating resources to prison health care would require of the rest of society. With growing numbers of uninsured and underinsured among different economic classes, cutbacks in federal and state funding for the poor, and hospital closures and decreasing access to other health care providers, health care access is a problem for the rest of society too. Any proposal to pour more resources into prison health care while the rest of society faces problems in health care quality and access degenerates into an “us versus them” debate about who is more deserving of scarce health care resources. Such debates inevitably end in policy-makers deciding to sacrifice the needs of those without a voice (prisoners) in favor of more vocal and powerful or sympathetic constituencies. Under a paradigm where prisoners’ interests are viewed in competition with, and as requiring sacrifice by, the rest of society, prisoners’ health care needs will always be sacrificed for the “greater good” of increasing health care access for “law-abiding” and “deserving” members of society.

One of the biggest problems with this paradigm, however, is that it fails to account for the significant societal cost of not adequately funding prisoner health care. One of the most important findings coming out of the Commission’s work is that “[h]igh rates of disease and illness among prisoners, coupled with inadequate funding for correctional health care, endanger [the] public.” Indeed, one of the most serious failures identified in prison systems nationwide is the lack of proper screening, prevention, and treatment of infectious diseases. This means that prisoners are constantly being released with infectious diseases that they take back to their communities. According to Confronting Confinement, more than 1.5 million people are released every year from jail and prison carrying a life-threatening infectious disease, such as HIV/AIDS. As most prisoners eventually return to their communities, this creates a public health risk, especially for underserved communities to where prisoners disproportionately return.

The failure to adequately treat prisoners also means that when they do return to their communities, they will be sicker, less able to work and get insurance, and thus further strain the already scarce resources in areas with high health care demand. For example, the Commission noted that approximately 350,000 prisoners are released with serious mental illness that have gone untreated, and that “prisoners on average require significantly more health care than most Americans because of poverty, substance abuse, and because they most often come from underserved communities.” As long as this link between prisoners’ health and the public’s is ignored, our concerns about dwindling health care resources, health disparities, and the spread of diseases like HIV, especially in minority and economically disadvantaged communities, are not being honestly addressed.

Although decisions about how to allocate scarce health care resources are difficult ones and hard choices must be made, it is critical that we really understand what’s at stake before we make them. Imagine the following scenario: States are forced either to find the resources necessary to ensure prisoners’ access to quality health care or to release all of the prisoners. How would the public and legislators respond? Is there any doubt that the public’s fear for its physical safety and the threat of increased property crimes would make fixing the prison health care system everyone’s priority? Then why would we ignore the imminent and serious threat to public health and dwindling health care resources that exists now because of inadequate health care access in prison?

As the Commission notes at the beginning of Confronting Confinement: “What happens inside jails and prisons does not stay inside jails and prisons…. We must create safe and productive conditions of confinement not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it influences the safety, health, and prosperity of us all.” Fixing the prison health care system is a critical first step toward this goal.

This commentary appears by arrangement with the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Ethics.
http://www.bioethicsforum.org/prison-health-care.asp

Posted by lois at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)

MI & CA: Michigan Govenor Signs Bill Allowing Geo to take CA prisoners

Ludington Daily News
Ludington, Michigan
9-20-2006
A new tune? Prison for lease or rent
GEO seeks inmates for facility in Lake County
By JOE BOOMGAARD

Just less than one year ago, Gov. Jennifer Granholm used her line-item veto power to cut funding for a contract with The GEO Group, the owner of the private prison facility in Lake County.

Granholm cut the funding to save the state money. She said the prisoners could be housed in state prisons at a savings to the state of roughly $18 million dollars. The prison, the county¹s largest employer, closed in October. The prisoners and nearly all of the corrections officers went to other state-run prisons.

Meanwhile, the county has been left wondering what would happen. Refusing to believe GEO would walk away from the multi-million-dollar facility, officials think of the closure as a temporary situation. Granholm¹s office and GEO officials want the facility to reopen to house inmates from entities other than the state of Michigan. Doing that required a change in state law, which had mandated the facility be filled with only violent youthful offenders.

On Friday, Granholm signed into law a bill, sponsored by Rep. Goeff Hansen, R-Hart, allowing GEO to fill the beds with inmates from out-of-state or from federal agencies. The move was a way to create jobs for the area and make it easier for the company to reopen the prison.

³We appreciate the governor¹s support of the bill, and we appreciate the legislation becoming law,² said Pablo Paez, director of corporate communications for GEO. ³It is an important step in this process, and we are continuing to market the facility.²

Paez gave no specific timeline as to when the prison could reopen, but said the company continues to ³work with the community and the state to find an alternative use for the facility.²

³That¹s our ultimate goal.²

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation visited the facility as it looked to house inmates in out-of-state prisons to ease prison overcrowding in the state. The Lake County facility had been mentioned as a possible recipient of the California inmates, a possibility which hinged on Michigan passing HB 5800 and California determining what was required to send inmates out of state.

To transport an inmate out of state, California would have to secure the inmate¹s permission. Currently, the CDCR is surveying inmates to determine how many inmates would be interested in serving their time out of state ‹ possibly in Lake County.

³We believe the state of California remains interested in available beds throughout the country,² Paez said, noting GEO has heard nothing specific from the CDCR about the Baldwin facility. ³We¹ve continued to market the facility and we remain hopeful the facility will be reactivated.²

Webber Township Supervisor Tony Gagliardo is optimistic the prison will reopen as well. The township is stuck with a water and sewer system that has too few users to support itself now that the prison, the largest user of the infrastructure, has closed. To keep water cycling through the township¹s water tower, officials have to open fire hydrants. To date, they¹ve drained millions of gallons of water.

³I¹m glad, obviously,² Gagliardo said. ³(Granholm signing the bill) is what we¹re waiting for. Now we¹ll see what GEO does. The ball¹s in their court. We¹ve got a tank full of water. We¹ve been waiting to get this behind us and get back to normal.

³It¹s been about a year now, and we¹d like to get the water moving and get some jobs back in town.²

Lake County Clerk and CFO Shelly Myers said the year without the prison and without the jobs has been difficult.

³It¹s been tough, but it would get a lot tougher if this bill wasn¹t signed and we didn¹t have hope in the future,² Myers said. ³Our budget is not doom and gloom, but it¹s not pretty.²

Myers said she trusted Granholm¹s assurances the bill would pass. Now, she hopes GEO will do everything it can to get the prison reopened.

³From here on out, I hope it runs smoothly and we get inmates back in the prison,² Myers said. ³We want to get bodies in there, hopefully by spring.

³Then we¹ll see people moving back and get the jobs back in full force and businesses looking back up. We¹ll keep on moving forward.²

She would like to see the prison open as soon as possible so Webber Township doesn¹t have to worry about its water tower freezing this winter.

³I think the weather is going to be colder than people expect,² Myers said. ³We need to get the water flowing. Webber Township is really going to be strapped if they don¹t get the water flowing. I¹m really concerned.²

Still, Myers remains optimistic good things are in store for the county. She said the best case scenario would be for GEO to sign a contract for the bed space by the end of the month and for prisoners to be moved into the facility before November.

³Hopefully we¹ll have a Christmas party up there,² Myers said.

http://www.ludingtondailynews.com/news.php?story_id=33011

Posted by lois at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

Geo to acquire CentraCore

Geo to acquire CentraCore

By Stephen Pounds
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Thursday, September 21, 2006

The Geo Group Inc. will buy CentraCore Properties Trust, a correctional real estate investment trust, for $356 million and assume CentraCore's $40 million in debt, the companies said Wednesday.

The Boca Raton-based private prison and mental-health center operator will get 13 prisons from CentraCore totaling 8,071 beds, of which 11 facilities with 6,945 beds are now leased to Geo under sale-lease back agreements. The deal is expected to close in late 2006 or early 2007 and is subject to the approval of CentraCore's shareholders and federal regulatory agencies.

CentraCore shareholders will receive $32 a share, a 13 percent premium over CentraCore's (NYSE: CPV) opening price Wednesday. Shares in Palm Beach Gardens-based CentraCore rose during the day at 10 times normal trading volume, closing up $3.32 at $31.70 a share.

Geo (NYSE: GEO) fell initially on the announcement but closed at $45.05, up 8 cents a share.

CentraCore Chief Executive Chuck Jones said he expects shareholders to approve the deal.

"Our responsibility was to maximize shareholder value ... and the preliminary feedback from shareholders is positive," Jones said.

While the offer is at a premium to Geo's stock price, it falls short of what it would cost to replace those prison and hospital beds if Geo had to do that for all of CentraCore's properties, said analyst Stephanie Krewson of Richmond, Va.-based BB&T Equity Research. Even so, she recommends shareholder approval.

"We would not expect one of Geo's competitors to launch a competing bid," Krewson said in a report.

As it announced the CentraCore deal, Geo issued its forecast for 2007, projecting post-acquisition earnings in a range from $2.40 to $2.60 - well short of Wall Street's expectation of $2.82 a share.

"The initial reaction of shareholders was to the lower guidance compared to the Street's expectations," said analyst Patrick Swindle of Nashville-based Avondale Partners. "But the positive is the strategic benefit from owning CPV."

In today's market, it is cheaper for Geo, which has 62 facilities worldwide under management or development, to build and own the prisons it operates than to sell them to CentraCore and lease them back. But under its arrangement with Geo, CentraCore has an option to buy Geo-financed property and negotiate a higher lease-back, or rental, rate.

Geo CEOGeorge Zoley said the merger is about dumping a deal made in the 1990s when Geo and CentraCore were spinoffs of security giant Wackenhut Corp.

"This is about regaining ownership of our facilities. They were sold at a time when we were a subsidiary of Wackenhut and we needed capital, and this was the only way to get it," Zoley said. "Now we can obtain capital from the equity markets or bank financing."

The buyout will be financed with $57 million in cash and $360 million in debt, Geo said.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/content/business/epaper/2006/09/21/a1d
_geo_0921.html

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Laws Tighten Rules for People Convicted of Sex Offenses & Editorial Against Prop 83

"Analysts say the legislation will cost the state more than $200 million annually, largely by expanding the prison population and requiring more parole agents to monitor ex-offenders for longer periods of time."
Los Angeles Times
Laws Tighten Rules for Sex Offenders
The governor signs bills that extend prison time and bar loitering near parks and schools. A ballot initiative offers additional provisions.
By Jenifer Warren, Times Staff Writer
September 21, 2006

SACRAMENTO ‹ Calling public safety government's most important job, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday signed a package of bills increasing prison terms for many sex offenders and barring them from loitering near schools and parks once they are released.

The measures, signed seven weeks before voters will decide on a ballot initiative offering similar provisions, also require that sex offenders deemed high-risk by authorities wear electronic tracking devices while on parole.

Backers said the new laws give California the nation's toughest restrictions on sex offenders, a category of felons facing an expanding national crackdown spawned by several high-profile crimes.

of their own molestations and the need for tougher punishment.

The Alquist bill, which cleared the Legislature without a single "no" vote, was put forth by Democrats after Republicans failed to win passage of their version. Frustrated, two GOP legislators launched a bid to qualify their version for the November ballot, resulting in Proposition 83, dubbed "Jessica's Law" by proponents.

The initiative differs from the bills in two major respects, involving electronic tracking of ex-offenders and limits on where they may live. Under Proposition 83, all registered sex offenders would be required to undergo electronic monitoring for life, regardless of their offense or the likelihood that they will offend again. Under SB 1178 by state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), signed by the governor, high-risk felons would be tracked with electronic devices while on parole.

The ballot measure also imposes a residency restriction, prohibiting ex-offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools, parks, or additional locations identified by local governments. The legislation bans loitering around schools, parks or other locations where vulnerable populations congregate, but does not limit where ex-offenders may live.

Some experts say the new laws make Proposition 83 unnecessary, because it mirrors many of the tougher sentencing aspects of the legislation. Critics also contend that the loitering ban contained in legislation would be more effective than simply limiting where ex-offenders may live.

"The bills the governor is signing give California virtually every positive thing that could come out of Jessica's Law," said Robert Coombs of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, a statewide network of rape crisis centers. "These bills do not take sex crime lightly, but they do the job in a more thoughtful way than Jessica's Law."

Schwarzenegger, however, said the state still needs Proposition 83, and state Sen. Chuck Poochigian (R-Fresno), a coauthor of one bill signed by the governor, agreed. Poochigian said the ballot measure is tougher in one respect, allowing designation of an offender as a sexually violent predator after one victim, instead of two.

Among those on hand for the ceremony outside the Capitol were the parents of Courtney Sconce, a 12-year-old Rancho Cordova girl abducted, raped and killed in 2000. Mark and Cindy Sconce wore buttons showing their daughter's face and held hands throughout the event.

Afterward, Mark Sconce called the bill-signing "one brick in the wall needed to keep our children safe." Cindy Sconce said it was unclear whether the new laws might have saved her daughter's life had they been on the books six years ago. But she hoped they would save other children.

"You can't go back and say, 'What if,' " Cindy Sconce said. "But the person who took Courtney was involved in child pornography, so this law [the Alquist bill] might have taken care of him before he got to the point of harming someone."

Cracking down on sex offenders has become a national trend. A federal study showed a 79% decline in sexual assaults against children ages 12 to 17 between 1993 and 2003.

The number of arrests for sex crimes against children in California also has declined somewhat during this decade, despite population growth of 6%, state statistics show.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-offender21sep21,1,1294703.story?coll
=la-headlines-california

=========================================================
Sacramento Bee

"Moreover, the proposition requires not just the monitoring of child molesters, but of all felony sex offenders released from prison. Opponents note correctly that this would mean monitoring at a high cost tens of thousands of ex-prisoners who don't pose any serious risk, leaving fewer resources available for high risk offenders who need to be watched. The Legislative Analyst's Office pegs the cost of such monitoring at "about $100 million annually after 10 years" and growing substantially after that. The initiative is not clear about who would pay the extra hundreds of millions of dollars -- the state, which has a deficit, or the financially strapped local governments."

Editorial: No on Proposition 83

It provides a false sense of security
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Sex offenders who prey on children are every parent's nightmare, and understandably so. Unfortunately, the fear they evoke makes them the bogeyman of choice for pandering politicians. What better targets for candidates in search of an easy issue to demagogue?

Proposition 83 is a case in point. Despite Proposition 83's title -- the Sex Offenders, Sexually Violent Predators, Punishment, Residence Restrictions and Monitoring Initiative Statute -- it would do nothing to protect children.

Among other things, the proposition would increase sentences, require lifelong monitoring for some offenders and further restrict where registered sex offenders could live.

If approved, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars -- money that would be better spent on child care programs, expanding health care for poor families or improving educational opportunities.

Extremely dangerous sexual predators, including repeat rapists and criminals who sexually assault children 14 years and younger, already face sentences of 15 or 25 years to life in prison. Longer sentences for less dangerous offenders -- possessors of child pornography, for example -- will only further crowd already overcrowded prisons and drive up out-of-control prison costs.

The initiative imposes lifelong monitoring for registered felony sex offenders by requiring the use of global positioning systems, or GPS. In the Proposition 83 campaign, supporters invoke the name of Jessica Lunsford, the 9-year-old Florida girl who was kidnapped, assaulted and buried alive by a registered sex offender. But nothing in this initiative would prevent those intent upon harming children from removing their GPS devices and committing crimes.

Moreover, the proposition requires not just the monitoring of child molesters, but of all felony sex offenders released from prison. Opponents note correctly that this would mean monitoring at a high cost tens of thousands of ex-prisoners who don't pose any serious risk, leaving fewer resources available for high risk offenders who need to be watched. The Legislative Analyst's Office pegs the cost of such monitoring at "about $100 million annually after 10 years" and growing substantially after that. The initiative is not clear about who would pay the extra hundreds of millions of dollars -- the state, which has a deficit, or the financially strapped local governments.

Finally, the measure mandates tougher restrictions on where all registered sex offenders may live. Currently, a small percentage, mostly those who have committed crimes against children, cannot reside within 1,320 feet of a school. This initiative would expand it to all registered sex offenders, add parks to the restriction and expand the radius to 2,000 feet.

In other states, such laws have backfired, pushing sex offenders into sparsely populated rural and suburban neighborhoods where law enforcement is thin and where counseling, psychiatric and other social services that many mentally disordered offenders need are in short supply or nonexistent. The same is likely to happen in California.

Proposition 83 is, in short, costly and counterproductive. Sadly, politicians who know better are afraid to tell voters the truth. Voters should see through this deception and vote No on Proposition 83.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/25347.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by lois at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

Study Cites Slow Progress in Maryland's Move from Prisons to Treatment

September 19, 2006
Maryland has made slow progress is shifting resources away from prisons and into addiction treatment as it alters its philosophy on how to deal with low-level drug offenders, the Washington Post reported Sept. 19.

A new study from the Justice Policy Institute found that for each dollar Maryland spends on jails and prisons, it still only spends 26 cents on treating adults referred from the criminal-justice system.

Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has vowed to shift more resources into treatment, and the number of people referred by the courts into treatment rose 28 percent between 2000 and 2004. At the same time, the state's incarceration rate fell 7 percent.

Study author Kevin Pranis said that progress on changing the state's "War on Drugs" mentality varies by jurisdiction. "We need to look at what some counties are doing well and what others need help on," he said. "We are looking at what they do with state money."

Some advocates say that a poor local economy has slowed progress on the initiative by cutting state spending. The budget of the state's alcohol and drug agency rose $7 million, to $137.5 million, this year, but experts say at least another $4 million in annual treatment funding is needed. The new report recommends that Maryland lawmakers add $30 million to the 2008 budget to catch up with rising costs and fill service gaps.

Ehrlich's treatment-oriented Project RESTART was launched in 2003, but only received $5.2 million for two pilot prison-based treatment programs in 2006. Most treatment funding has gone to in-prison programs rather than community-based programs to help offenders once they are released.

"RESTART is a great idea, but compared to the scale of the problem, it's a small piece. It's something that needs to happen behind the walls, but when people get out, I think the Department of Public Safety would agree they need to continue to get support on the outside," said Pranis. "Treatment in the community is critical."
http://www.jointogether.org/news/research/summaries/2006/study-cites-slow-progress-in.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=30376044&print=t

Posted by lois at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2006

Conference: NY: Punishment: The U.S. Record Nov. 30 & Dec. 1, 2006

SOCIAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE AT THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

PUNISHMENT: THE U.S. RECORD

NOVEMBER 30 and DECEMBER 1, 2006

A conference on who, what, why and how we punish.

Our nation's prison population has soared by more than 600% since the 1970s, despite a drop in crime rates. As of 2005, over two million people were imprisoned in this country: almost one in every 136 U.S. residents. Black men, who make up 6% of the U.S. population, comprise over 40% of our prison population. A black male born today has a 32% chance of spending time in prison. Eleven states do not allow formerly incarcerated people to vote. Nearly 2,800,000 American children have at least one parent in prison or jail.

What does this mean for our democracy? Where do our concepts of punishment come from? What is the effect on our families, communities and the economy of our staggeringly high incarceration rate?

Join us as we examine the foundations of our ideas of punishment, explore the social effects of current practices and search for viable alternatives to our carceral state.

For more information and to register, please visit www.socres.org/punishment

This conference is supported by The Open Society Institute's U.S. Justice Fund, Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation and The J.M. Kaplan Fund and is also Cosponsored by the ACLU.

Posted by lois at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

Study: Prisons Breed Islamic Extremists

Study: Prisons Breed Islamic Extremists
- By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, September 19, 2006

(09-19) 08:22 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --

Jailed Islamic extremists with violent interpretations of the Quran are taking advantage of scarce religious monitoring programs to breed terrorists in U.S. prisons, a study released Tuesday shows.

State and local prison officials struggle to track radicalized behavior by inmates or religious counselors, the joint study by George Washington University and the University of Virginia found.

Many prisons can't afford preventive programs; in California, for example, officials reported "that every investigation into radical groups in their prisons uncovers new leads, but they simply do not have enough investigators to follow every case of radicalization."

"Radicalized prisoners are a potential pool of recruits by terrorist groups," concluded the study, released at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on "homegrown" terrorists. "The U.S., with its large prison population, is at risk of facing the sort of homegrown terrorism currently plaguing other countries."

An estimated 2 million people are imprisoned in the United States; 6 percent of them are Muslim, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism consultant, told senators that "chilling" interpretations of the Quran were given to prison inmates when he worked for the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, an international charity that served as a major al-Qaida financier.

The readings urged Muslims "to wage war against non-Muslims who have not submitted to Islamic rule," Gartenstein-Ross said in prepared testimony to the Senate panel.

"I know of only a few instances in which prisons rejected the literature we attempted to distribute ‹ and it was never because of the literature's radicalism," said Gartenstein-Ross, who has since left the charity and converted to Christianity.

Prisons have long been considered recruiting stations for gangs and, more recently, terrorists, but little has been done throughout government to combat them. The Senate hearing came as law enforcement and intelligence officials focus on finding out how and why extremist homegrown sympathizers cross a line to become operational terrorists.

The panel's chair, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called the matter "an emerging threat to our national security." Added Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., "While homegrown Islamic terrorism might not be as much of a threat as in say, Europe or some other places, we ignore the threat that does exist at our peril."

The report cited several high-profile cases of terrorists who became radicalized while incarcerated, including British shoe bomber Richard Reid. It also noted what authorities call a foiled plot of a potential shooting rampage against California military facilities, synagogues and the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles by followers of Kevin James, who founded the radical group Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS, as an inmate at California State Prison in Sacramento.

Researchers interviewed federal, state and local prison officials, religious counselors and counterterror authorities in four states ‹ California, New York, South Carolina and Ohio ‹ and the District of Columbia. They concluded that federal prison authorities have made significant strides in collecting and sharing information to help monitor whether inmates are becoming radicalized.

But state and local prison officials have largely relied on contractors and volunteers to lead Islamic services because of a lack of well-trained Muslim chaplains, the report found. In New York, that led to several cases of "imams espousing violent views," it said.

The report noted a 2004 study that found that about half of 193 prisons surveyed supervised religious services or monitored them with video or audio recorders. "In the absence of monitoring by authoritative Islamic chaplains, materials that advocate violence have infiltrated the prison system undetected," it found.

___

On the Net:

The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute:

University of Virginia's Critical Incident Analysis Group:

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee:

homelandsecurity.gwu.edu/

www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/ciag/

hsgac.senate.gov/

URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/09/19/national/w080327D
52.DTL

©2006 Associated Press

Posted by lois at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

The First Annual Central New York Locks Conference

FIRST ANNUAL
CENTRAL NEW YORK
LOCKS CONFERENCE

Saturday, October 21, 2006
Tompkins County Public Library
101 East Green Street
Ithaca, New York
11 AM - 4 PM
FREE

The First Annual Central New York Locks Conference will
embrace the beauty of natural hair throughout the African diaspora,
while also focusing on the history and contemporary
impact of "dreadlocks" or locked hair.

The theme of the this year's conference is the
effect of mass incarceration on communities given that
certain appearances within communities of color
are often negatively stereotyped and criminalized.

The First Annual Central New York Locks Conference will feature...

Harold Wilson
122nd innocent person released from death row

Pam & Ramona Africa
MOVE Organization/Int'l Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

New York Campaign for Telephone Justice
Coalition working across NYS to STOP THE CONTRACT between DOCS and
Verizon/MCI

Euware Osayande
activist, poet, author

Vanessa Johnson
presenting HAIR TALES...

films, exhibits, vendors, and much more....
(vendor inquiries welcome)

plus....
THE AFTER PARTY....
roots | culture | spoken word | rebel music

Saturday, October 21, 2006
Lost Dog Lounge
106-112 South Cayuga Street
Ithaca, New York
8 PM
$5

featuring...
Taina Asili
Vanessa Johnson
Euware Osayande
cypher:dissdent
BROADCAST LIVE

please help spread the word!

for more info...
607-277-2121 or info@stamp-cny.org

Southern Tier Advocacy & Mitigation Project, Incorporated
focusing on the "under-developed strengths" of at-risk communities
__________________
S.T.A.M.P.’s Administrative Office
119 East Buffalo Street
Ithaca, New York 14850
P. 607.277.2121
F. 607.277.2120
info@stamp-cny.org

S.T.A.M.P.’s Guerrilla Griots Human Rights Media Arts Center
Henry Saint John Building - Suite 106
301 South Geneva Street
Ithaca, New York 14850
P/F 607.277.2122
info@guerrilla-griots.org

S.T.A.M.P. was established in 2005 in response to the frequency with
which young people are referred to juvenile and adult court systems.
S.T.A.M.P. seeks to empower community control over delinquency
and crime, reduce over-reliance on incarceration, and assist those
incarcerated and leaving state prison with transitional services.

Posted by lois at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2006

GA: Fighting fires a 2nd chance for men who are incarcerated

"In the rural parts of the state, these local volunteer fire departments depend heavily on the inmate fire department coming out and helping in the community," said Lyn Pardue, executive director of the Georgia Firefighting Standards and Training Council. "They are very well-trained. They are professional-acting individuals, and they do exactly what they're instructed to do." In some areas, inmate fire teams supplement local fire departments; in others, they are the sole responders."

Atlanta Journal Constitution

Fighting fires a 2nd chance for inmates

By CARLOS CAMPOS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/17/06

Meet the women of the Lee Arrendale State Prison Fire Station No. 1, a band of sisters who make up the only all-female inmate firefighting crew in Georgia. They are a supplemental firefighting team for Banks and Habersham counties and the city of Baldwin.

Big-city dwellers accustomed to professional, full-time firefighters might be surprised to learn that prison inmate crews often respond to fires, car crashes and medical emergencies in many parts of rural Georgia.

The Georgia Department of Corrections operates 18 firefighting stations staffed by inmates, from Walker County near the Tennessee border to Wayne County near the Georgia coast. Four more stations operate out of county prisons.

The work gives inmates the feeling they are making up for their wrongs. "When I go in at the end of the day, it gives me a sense that I was useful ‹ that I was purposeful," said Arrendale firefighter Whitney Beauford, 21, serving a seven-year sentence for robbery by intimidation. "I'm helping the community. I'm doing something to better myself."

As of Thursday, about 220 inmates in Georgia ‹ from murderers to car thieves ‹ had responded to 2,715 calls for assistance this year. Since 2000, they have handled more than 21,000 calls, according to a prison system report issued in August.

Inmates convicted of arson or sex offenses are the only ones prohibited from fire teams, though murderers are carefully screened, said Department of Corrections Fire Services Director Rick Huggins.

"In the rural parts of the state, these local volunteer fire departments depend heavily on the inmate fire department coming out and helping in the community," said Lyn Pardue, executive director of the Georgia Firefighting Standards and Training Council. "They are very well-trained. They are professional-acting individuals, and they do exactly what they're instructed to do."

In some areas, inmate fire teams supplement local fire departments; in others, they are the sole responders.

The fire station just outside Arrendale's ominous razor wire is making history for a second time. Georgia's first inmate fire team, formed in 1962, operated out of Arrendale. Forty-four years later, it is the first to feature all women. Arrendale used to be a men's prison, but converted to a women's prison ‹ one of three in the state ‹ in 2004. For a short time, the supplemental firefighters weren't available while the team made the transition to women and the women were trained and certified.

For prison inmates, firefighting offers major opportunities: It allows them to do most of their daytime hours outside of prison walls, in the far more relaxed atmosphere of a fire station. It also allows them to learn a profession they can take with them once they leave prison. Huggins said 26 former inmates have landed after-prison jobs as firefighters during his 12 years as director.

The nine prison firefighters at Arrendale spend their days at the fire station Monday through Friday. At night and on weekends, they go back to the prison, where they stay together in a dorm separate from the rest of the inmate population. In case of fire on nights and weekends, they can be shuttled to the station within a few minutes, said Arrendale Fire Chief Jessica Maher, who works for the prison system and leads the inmate team.

Firefighter Juanita Vega, serving a 10-year sentence for trafficking methamphetamine, first worked in the prison's pig farming operation to prove she could be trusted in an outside detail.

"I'm a vegetarian, so it was hard," Vega said. "It was a humbling experience, and I learned a lot."

Now, Vega, 35, says, "I have a passion in my heart for firefighting." Many of the women hope to pursue a career in firefighting. Georgia law requires felons to wait 10 years after conviction before working as a firefighter. But the law exempts inmate firefighters certified through the Department of Corrections, who must wait only five years after a conviction to work in the field.

Inmate Mary Long, 41, serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery, said she is determined to work as a firefighter upon release. She's up for parole in two years.

"It's become a reality that, 'Hey, I can do this,' " she said. "It is my way of giving back to society."

Cobb County Fire Chief Rebecca Denlinger, one of a handful of women in the nation leading a large fire department, said she believes firefighting will be a "life-changing experience" for the women of Arrendale.

"It's like finding ‹ especially for people who have sort of a daredevil tendency or like to take risks ‹ some really useful, downright noble purpose for that kind of scary exhilaration," she said.

The Arrendale firefighters are trained to respond only to structure fires, not medical emergencies. So far, they've responded to about four fires, including a blaze at a steakhouse in Baldwin.

Chief Maher is confident her team is trained well enough to handle any situation. "If I was in a fire and I needed to get out, I have no doubt they would be able to get me out," she said.

While Beauford demonstrated to visitors how to dress quickly for a fire, she stuck her hand into a boot. "I broke a nail."

As the other inmates chuckled, a horrified chief barked, "Don't put that in there!" to a reporter standing nearby with a notebook.
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2006/09/16/0917metfire.html

Posted by lois at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)

Opposition to prisons' factories growing

"Douglas Hasty, president and CEO of Unique Performance, the car company seeking PIE approval, contributed $1,000 in April to Texans for Rick Perry, the governor's re-election campaign, state records reveal. Hasty didn't immediately return calls for comment Wednesday. The Texas AFL-CIO is warning "a new era of disregard for free-world workers may be about to unfold."

Opposition to prisons' factories growing
09/13/2006, San Antonio Express

Lisa Sandberg
Express-News Austin Bureau

LOCKHART ‹ Penny Rayfield's 35 assembly workers get neither vacation nor sick pay. Their salaries barely are above minimum wage. But they show up on time and don't hunt for work elsewhere.

They seem happy to have a job, even one that pays about $4 less per hour than what assembly workers make, on average, elsewhere in Texas.

Rayfield's company, Onshore Resources, has a sweetheart deal. It pays Texas exactly a dollar a year for the sprawling building where it makes electronic circuit boards. It has no need to foot health insurance for the employees because the state provides their medical care.

The for-profit business is tucked inside a private prison in this rural community 30 miles south of Austin. It's one of a handful of operations in which an estimated 500 state inmates in three prisons make everything from windows to air conditioning parts for the private sector.

The program, in both public and private detention facilities, is part of the federal Prison Industry Enhancement initiative. It long has rankled labor leaders, who've complained quietly it could slowly but surely displace better-paid workers outside prison.

That opposition is getting noisier as the state appears ready to add two new Prison Industry Enhancement operations to the four it now has.

One would use prison inmates at the Boyd Unit in Central Texas to assemble muscle cars from kits.

The second would have inmates at the Telford Unit in East Texas manufacture uniforms for U.S. postal workers, most of whom are unionized.

Today, a committee that oversees PIE is expected to consider both expansions.

Jeff LaBroski, a labor representative with the PIE program, said he expects both to sail through. Federal officials must approve it, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice governing board then gets the final say.

Douglas Hasty, president and CEO of Unique Performance, the car company seeking PIE approval, contributed $1,000 in April to Texans for Rick Perry, the governor's re-election campaign, state records reveal.

Hasty didn't immediately return calls for comment Wednesday.

The Texas AFL-CIO is warning "a new era of disregard for free-world workers may be about to unfold."

Ron Spurlock, community action representative with the United Auto Workers, which represents some 5,000 members in Texas, likewise was unequivocal.

"We're exporting jobs from all over the country, and now we're going to take the jobs that are left here and turn them over to prison labor at half ‹ or less ‹ the wages you'd expect to pay someone on the open market," Spurlock charged.

"It's wrong to take good paying auto jobs in this state and turn them over to someone who's in jail. It's like saying, 'We'll penalize you and we'll send you to jail and then we'll give you a job.' It's a damn shame as far as I'm concerned."

The issue pits those anguished by the erosion of middle class jobs, many of which have gone overseas, against those trying to rehabilitate inmates and enhance prison security.

"This is not meant to displace workers in the free world, it is meant to reduce recidivism," said Randa Taylor, spokeswoman for the Geo Group, which operates the minimum-security Lockhart Unit, site of the largest PIE operations in the state.

The PIE certification program, enacted by Congress in 1979, allows states to give prisoners private sector work experience ‹ and a few employers some nice breaks. Today, some 5,800 inmates participate in more than 40 jurisdictions around the country.

While the program touches a tiny fraction of the overall prison population, the numbers have grown over the years, said Sahra Nadiir, project coordinator for the National Correctional Industries Association.

Offenders like it because they make money, although they only keep about 20 percent of it.

The states pocket as much as 80 percent, for room and board. Texas collects between 30 percent and 60 percent, depending on how much gets divvied up among the courts, crime victims and offenders' dependents, spouses or disabled parents.

Businesses applying to operate inside prison must have an outside-prison operation. They can't reduce the number of their free-world jobs while expanding their prison jobs and the wages they pay must be commensurate with those paid for "similar work in the same locality's private sector."

Labor leaders say it's nonsense to consider wages only in a localized area.

"We think the consequences are national," said Ed Sills, spokesman for the Texas AFL-CIO.

Pete Arciniega has supervised workers at big-name manufacturing plants but prefers the obscure operation at the Lockhart Unit, where he oversees 250 prisoners.

His employees had to apply and give a clear reason for wanting to join Chatleff Controls, a Buda-based company that manufactures air conditioning and heating parts. If they're hired, they will earn between $6 and $8 an hour before deductions.

"They do a hell of a job. They're the best work force I've ever had," Arciniega said as workers around him labored under fluorescent lights amid the hum of heavy machinery.

A visitor easily can forget the bustling plant is behind bars.

Across the state, similar work fetches an average of $12.85 an hour, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Arciniega said such comparisons are unfair because free-world employees tend to work for years, giving them the seniority to earn more money.

Rayfield said her 35 assembly workers just down the hall from Arciniega's shop make about $6 an hour, which is, according to state data, about $4.11 less than assembly workers statewide make.

"They don't have vacations, they don't call in sick," she acknowledged, but said the program's rehabilitation goals are the underlying reason for hiring inmates and putting up with the red tape.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA091406.01A.prison.30ed6e8
.html>

Posted by lois at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2006

NATIONAL ACADEMIES REPORT CALLS FOR CENSUS BUREAU TO COLLECT ALTERNATIVE ADDRESSES FOR PEOPLE IN PRISON

[URL: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-14-9-2006.shtml ]

September 14 -- The National Research Council of the National Academies today released a report calling for the Census Bureau to begin collecting the home addresses of people in prison and to study whether this alternative address should be used in the Census. The report, authored by leading demographers, statisticians and sociologists, was commissioned by the Census Bureau to reexamine where people should be counted in the Census.

With the exception of counting people in prison, the panel generally agreed with the Census Bureau's method of counting people as residents of the place where they sleep most of the time, although it suggested that the residence "rules" should be structured as "principles" as a more flexible and easily understood method of identifying residence. To this end, the report recommended that the Bureau start collecting a secondary "any residence elsewhere", for the entire population, including people in prison.

The panel expressed deep concern about where people in prison were counted, stating that "the evidence of political inequities in redistricting that can arise due to the counting of prisoners at the prison location is compelling". The panel cited an article by Eric Lotke and Peter Wagner that "nearly 9% of all African-American men in