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October 31, 2006

Prisons Back Down on Religious Programs

Prisons back down on religious programs
Madison foundation had filed suit

By Anita Weier
October 30, 2006, Capital Times, Madison, WI

The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation has won a partial victory in its attempt to halt religious programs in federal prisons.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons canceled its plan to add "single-faith residential re-entry" programs to its existing multi-faith programs in prisons, said Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the bureau.

The foundation filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Western Wisconsin in May challenging the constitutionality of single-faith and multi-faith programs in the prisons. Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, said today that the bureau had backed down on its "most egregious constitutional violation" - denominational programs for inmates.

However, although the solicitation for proposals for the single-faith program was canceled in its entirety on Oct. 26, it will be revised and re-announced, according to Billingsley. "I don't know when it will be re-announced," she said. "It is undergoing major revisions."

A statement on the bureau's Web site said: "Due to potential significant changes in the requirements of the bureau, and the programs, it is determined to be in the best interest of the government to cancel" solicitation for the plan.

Supporters of such programs say they give prisoners a solid moral foundation when they return to society. Previous solicitations for the single-faith pilot program say that its purpose is to "reduce recidivism through promoting the virtues of productive work, respect for others, self-worth, responsibility and accountability."

The lawsuit contends that the programs exist to encourage and promote faith. Such activities "violate the fundamental principle of the separation of church and state by using congressional taxpayer appropriations to intentionally support activities that endorse religion," the foundation suit stated.

Gaylor, who had been celebrating the halt to the single-faith program, said today she was surprised by the statement that the program would be redeveloped in some way.

"They are slow learners," she said. "Setting up single-faith programs is certainly not in the best interests of our secular government or of prisoners. They were taking solicitations from vendors to go into five or six federal prisons with taxpayer funding. They said one might be a Roman Catholic and one a Southern Baptist, for instance."

The foundation will have to wait and see if and when a revised program is re-announced, she said, though "whatever they do will be encompassed within the lawsuit."

"We apparently averted the denominational kind of thing, but we know what is going on will be Christian to the hilt," she said. "Secular, practical education is the answer in our prisons, not proselytizing a captive audience of prisoners."

The Bureau of Prisoners' Life Connections Program, instigated by the Department of Justice Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives, has been operating since at least 2003, Gaylor said. The multi-faith program operates in at least five federal prisons, she added.

The lawsuit also alleges that the Office of Management and Budget created an atmosphere intended to cause federal agencies to increase contracting with faith-based organizations merely because they are faith-based. The foundation contends that OMB gives a "report card" to each major federal agency based on the extent to which they have disbursed or increased appropriations to faith-based organizations.

The lawsuit seeks an order stopping appropriations for the Life Connections Program, and an order requiring the bureau to establish regulations and oversight to ensure future funded activities do not include religion as a substantive component.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national association of freethinkers, atheists and agnostics that has worked since 1978 to keep church and state separate.
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=105288&ntpid=0

Posted by lois at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2006

New Journal: Corrections and Sentencing Law and Policy

A New Journal: Corrections and Sentencing Law and Policy

UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich and Washington University law professor Margo Schlanger are co-editors of a new Social Science Research Network journal, Corrections and Sentencing Law and Policy.

Corrections and Sentencing Law and Policy Abstracts will provide a forum for works-in-progress, abstracts, and completed articles dealing with the broad range of doctrinal, theoretical, and policy issues relating to the punishment, sentencing, and re-entry of convicted criminal offenders. Topics include (but are not limited to) prison and jail conditions and life; prisoners' rights; probation, parole, and re-entry; prison and jail administration; imprisonment and diversionary sentencing, and the death penalty. The journal also invites submissions dealing with the implications of incarceration and other criminal punishments for families, communities, and society as a whole.

Contributions from all disciplines are welcome, and scholars working in this area are encouraged to submit their work.
To view papers, http://www.ssrn.com/link/corrections-sentencing-law-policy.html

The journal’s advisory board includes Douglas Berman (Ohio State Moritz College of Law); Lynn Branham (Thomas Cooley Law School); Brett Dignam (Yale Law School); Malcolm Feeley (Boalt Hall); David Garland (NYU Law School); James Jacobs (NYU Law School); Dan Kahan (Yale Law School); Pam Karlan (Stanford Law School); Ira Robbins (American University Law School); Carol Steiker (Harvard Law School); Robert Weisberg (Stanford Law School); and Larry Yackle (Boston University School of Law).

SSRN’s on-line research network disseminates abstracts and working papers of researchers internationally in a variety of subject areas. SSRN UserHeadQuarters: http://hq.ssrn.com

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

By The Numbers: The Public Costs of Teen Childbrearing

By the Numbers: The Public Costs of Teen Childbearing documents the public costs of teen childbearing at both the national and state level. Teen childbearing in the United States costs taxpayers (federal, state, and local) at least $9.1 billion, according to a new report by Saul Hoffman, Ph.D. and published by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Most of the costs of teen childbearing are associated with negative consequences for the children of teen mothers, including increased costs for health care, foster care, and incarceration. The study includes state by state fact sheets on cost of teen childbearing.

http://www.teenpregnancy.org/costs/default.asp

Teen Births Cost U.S. Government $9.1B in 2004 Despite Drop in Teen Birth, Pregnancy Rates, Report Says

The U.S. government in 2004 incurred at least $9.1 billion in costs related to teen births, despite significant decreases in teen pregnancy and birth rates since the early 1990s, according to a report released on Monday by the National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, USA Today reports (Koch [1], USA Today, 10/30). The teen birth rate and teen pregnancy rate from 1991 through 2002 decreased by 30% and 36%, respectively, according to figures from the government and the Guttmacher Institute (Koch [2], USA Today, 10/30). The report -- titled "By the Numbers: The Public Costs of Teen Childbearing" and written by Saul Hoffman, an economics professor at the University of Delaware -- found that $8.6 billion of the $9.1 billion the government paid in 2004 birth-related care was for girls age 17 and younger. According to the report, the costs included $1.9 billion for health care, $2.3 billion for child welfare, $2.1 billion for incarceration and $2.9 billion in lower tax revenue. Children born to teenagers have higher health care, foster care and incarceration costs than children born to older women. In addition, children born to teen mothers on average earn a lower income as adults and pay less in taxes, the report found. In addition, girls who gave birth at ages younger than age 17 are more than twice as likely as women who had their first child at ages 20 or 21 to have a child placed in foster care, to be reported for child abuse or neglect and to have a son incarcerated, the report found. NCPTP Director Sarah Brown said, "It's important to remind people the problems [related to teen pregnancy] are very serious and expensive" (Koch [1], USA Today, 10/30). Brown also said that the drop in the teen pregnancy rate is a "combination of many factors," including welfare reform, reduced benefits, and more schools, churches and community groups offering abstinence and sex education programs. HIV and sex education programs nationwide also are contributing factors, Douglas Kirby of the health education organization ETR Associates said, adding that the most significant drop generally is in states with comprehensive sex education programs (Koch [2], USA Today, 10/30).

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

October 28, 2006

Private jail comes under scrutiny after woman's death

Posted on Fri, Oct. 27, 2006
Private jail comes under scrutiny after woman's death

MARIA SUDEKUM FISHER
Associated Press
HOLDEN, Mo. - For those who knew and cared about Angela Lockridge, this much was clear: she could be difficult. At 42, she was mentally retarded, epileptic and dependent on medication to treat her borderline personality disorder.

But nothing prepared her family and friends for the way Lockridge died: alone in a segregated cell in one of Missouri's private jails, which are run without state oversight or standards.

Operators of the Integrity Correctional Centers in rural Johnson County were told the cause of death was epilepsy, a neurological condition that causes seizures.

But Johnson County Sheriff Charles Heiss, who led the investigation into Lockridge's death and has found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, nevertheless has been angered by the prison's "guarded" response to his probe and obstacles blocking his way to potential witnesses.

Heiss, an outspoken critic of private jails and prisons, blames those obstacles on the manner in which private jails are operated and at least in part on the lack of state standards and oversight.

"Am I surprised she died? No," Heiss said. "Am I upset and concerned about her death? Yes."

Bernie Zarda, president of ICC, defends his "Christian-owned and operated" prison. He says although there is no state or federal oversight of his facility, oversight of ICC rests with the cities and counties that send their inmates there. He also questioned the motives for the investigation.

"I am not really sure why there has been an ongoing investigation," Zarda said. "The sheriff is giving information that makes us look not so great. We run a very top-notch, first-class facility with some 20 jurisdictions in Kansas and Missouri, and we have never had a death before."

Lockridge's death comes at a time when the number of private prisons and jails in the United States has grown significantly, as the country seeks alternative housing for its swelling inmate population.

Critics of private prisons include prisoner rights groups and corrections officer organizations, who complain about the lack of accountability and inadequate staffing. Prison companies say they provide a sound alternative to government-run operations and that they save taxpayer dollars.

But private prisons have a checkered past in Missouri. About a decade ago, the state had to bring back inmates who were videotaped being beaten at a private prison in Texas. Since then, the Missouri Department of Corrections has stopped sending its inmates to private prisons.

But that rule doesn't extend to cities and counties, which can use private jails for their inmates, most of whom have shorter stays than prison inmates. Jail inmates are often awaiting trial and haven't made bond, as was the case for Lockridge.

In Missouri and elsewhere in the country, it's difficult to track the number of private jails that are operating, at least in part because of the lack of state control. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics tries to identify private prisons and jails, but the last time the BLS published a count of private jails nationwide was in 1999.

Then there were 47 private jails in the country; one in Missouri. Since the 1999 study, however, two private prisons in the state have gone up and then been taken over by counties. Another, Bridewell Detention Facility in Bethany, opened recently and houses about 200 inmates from Iowa, which does not allow private prisons in its borders.

Sharon Dolovich, a law professor at UCLA who has written extensively about private prisons, said while there are several concerns about private prisons just as there are about government-run prisons, a major problem in private facilities is staffing.

The median annual earnings for prison guards in 2004 was $33,750 at state prisons, $33,080 at local jails and $21,490 at private prisons, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"The one meaningful difference is the dramatic under-investment in labor (in private prisons)," Dolovich said. "The way private prisons make their money is by spending less on their labor; they pay them less, they train them less and they give them fewer benefits.

"There are predictable effects of doing that."

She pointed to a study from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance that compared inmate assaults in public prisons over a year with that of private facilities over the same period. The survey found 25.4 incidents for every 1,000 inmates in public prisons, compared with 35.1 incidents in private facilities.

"I would put what we know about the profit incentives together with what we know about the failures of monitoring and other forms of oversight," Dolovich said in an e-mail. "When we do that, it seems to me, we have both an explanation for the greater levels of violence in private prisons suggested by the older studies, and reason to continue to expect greater levels of violence in private prisons going forward."

But Paul Doucette, spokesman for the Association of Private Corrections and Treatment Organizations, says private facilities are a necessary alternative to overcrowding in the public prisons and have become more popular with the federal government, largely because of the influx of immigrants and refugees.

"Research would indicate a quality of operations in private prisons every bit as good or better than the government-run facilities," Doucette said. "There's no cutting of corners and diminishing of services."

---

Lockridge was sent to ICC on July 27, a day after being arrested at her Independence home, where she was charged with misdemeanor assault because of a fight with her mother over whether Lockridge could have her checkbook.

That type of dispute was common for Lockridge, who was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck - leading to her mental retardation, said her brother, Edward Neer of Kansas City. Lockridge was unemployed and got by on disability payments.

"My mother didn't want her spending money she didn't have," said Neer, 39, of Kansas City. "Her problems made it difficult for her to have a relationship with anyone.

"Rage was a normal part of her illness," Neer said.

But Lockridge could also be engaging. She would just as soon tell someone they were pretty as say "hello," Neer said. Her family called her Angel.

"The tragedy of it is this," he said. "She assaulted my mother and then in a fit of rage wanting my mother out of her apartment, it was Angel who called 911."

Lockridge was confined to a segregated cell in a male dorm at ICC on Aug. 1 because she had been making herself throw up.

"She was sticking her finger down her throat, and they asked her to stop and help clean it up and some other things," Zarda said. She was found dead in the cell the next morning.

Neer had never known his sister to make herself vomit. If Lockridge was throwing up, he said, it was because she was sick. Neer also wondered if Lockridge had received any of her medications while incarcerated.

The prison did not respond to requests for Lockridge's medical records.

Most inmate death investigations involving county jails last about a week, Heiss said. This one took him more than a month to wrap up. He said ICC policies and procedures slowed him down. When he tried to interview inmates who were witnesses, ICC told him he needed the approval of the county or city that sent those inmates to ICC. Some jurisdictions complied immediately. Wyandotte County, Kan., did not respond to his calls.

"We should have been able to get to these inmates in a matter of days," Heiss said. "And some of the inmates I wouldn't even begin to know where they are now."

Heiss found other problems as well, including prison logs that showed Lockridge had not been checked on hourly as ordered after she was put in segregation.

Zarda called it a clerical error.

"We have an officer who failed to log her checks every time," Zarda said. "But she was checked every hour."

© 2006 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.belleville.com

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

October 25, 2006

Breaking the pattern of recidivism

Breaking the pattern of recidivism
By NEAL PEIRCE, syndicated columnist

[ Originally published on Monday, October 23, 2006 in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA]

CHICAGO - America's most effective crime-fighting tool may not be more police. Or efficient DNA labs. Or tougher laws. The big breakthrough, instead, might be in making one-timers of potential repeat offenders.

Think about it, and the idea's a slam-dunk. More than 95 percent of the 2-million-plus people we now hold behind bars will eventually be freed. Indeed, 650,000 a year, many convicted under the ''get tough'' laws of the 1970s to 1990s, are now returning to U.S. towns and cities. And recidivism is high. Across the U.S., roughly 60 percent of released prisoners commit another crime, and over 50 percent return to prison within three years.

Breaking that pattern is a challenge. Most released prisoners have meager educations. Majorities are likely to have been on drugs while in prison. They walk back on the street with practically no money, no driver's license, oftentimes an alienated, angry family. Many have mental problems. And a job? Imagine telling an employer you're a just-released felon.

Even worse, the power of law may be a felon's biggest job barrier. In Illinois, state laws historically provided long lists of jobs that ex-felons couldn't hold - from speech specialist to horsemeat dealer, roofer to athletic trainer, embalmer to acupuncturist. The law even forbade ex-felons from working as barbers - although some state prisons teach barbering so that prisoners can cut each other's hair.

Surveying the Chicago area, where tens of thousands of ex-prisoners return yearly, the business-led civic action group Chicago Metropolis 2020 decided the issue of prisoner re-entry had to be taken public in a big way. Criminal justice issues usually aren't on the agendas of either regional leadership or business groups, but Metropolis senior executive Paula Wolff had a convincing case.

First, she argued, an economically viable region has to be safe - no one wants to live or build a business where crime dangers are high. Second, a region can't be strong for economic development if a big chunk of potential workers is excluded from the labor pool. And third, the convict-imprison-reimprison treadmill is a bad use of scarce tax dollars. One of every $20 of Illinois' general revenue fund, she noted, goes for corrections. Add together the imprisoned and the paroled and those on probation and the total is 245,000 persons - enough to be Illinois' second largest city.

In an early step, Barack Obama, then a state representative, introduced successful legislation to let ex-prisoners who were guilty of just one felony get a certificate of rehabilitation and gain easier access to occupational licensing. For the first time in decades, the ''lock-'em-up''-prone Legislature embraced the word ''rehabilitation.'' Now some 27 previously forbidden occupations are open to ex-felons and the law's been shifted around to put the burden of proof on state agencies to show why a felon's license application shouldn't be granted.

Mayor Richard Daley, with Metropolis and the business community urging him on, created a caucus on prisoner re-entry. The group resembled a town hall of Chicagoans - department heads, police, jail and probation officers, health experts, leaders from business and nonprofits, and even some formerly incarcerated persons and their families. The imperative of a new approach to ex-prisoners became clear - learning, for example, that 50 percent of those returning went to six distressed communities, all predominantly African-American, settings already plagued by crime and poverty.

The group also learned how many tough barriers ex-prisoners often face -substance abuse, lack of housing, depression and the fact they may never have held a job in their lives.

A broad range of ideas for helping released prisoners emerged, from drug and mental health treatment to family support groups. Daley endorsed those ideas last winter and the city also opened itself to hiring released prisoners except where there's clear reason not to (a convicted sex offender as a school bus driver, for example). Now there's a parallel statewide program to assist returnees, led by Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

But increasingly, experts believe early assistance for prisoners - quickly after their release - can be critical. Now the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has announced a multimillion-dollar, large-scale test at sites in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Groups of freshly released inmates will be given subsidized, wage-paying jobs for periods of up to three months, combined with an array of support services and help at finding regular employment.

If the test site results prove dramatically more successful in curbing parole violations and rearrest than regular state and local employment services, there will be a powerful argument for state and local governments to change their ways and focus major funds into recycling inmates back into employment and normal lives.

And that's where the big payoff could come, not only for hundreds of thousands of released prisoners annually, but for public treasuries and all of us, as the vicious cycle - crime, imprisonment, release and new crime and incarceration - moves from norm to rare exception.

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

Posted by lois at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

NY: South Bronx Residents Oppose Planned Jail

*South Bronx Residents Oppose Planned Prison*

10/24 | The town hall meeting opened with community leaders pledging opposition to the planned construction of a new correctional facility in the South Bronx.
By David Ferris

In a town hall meeting that opened with community leaders pledging opposition to the planned construction of a new correctional facility in the South Bronx and ended with boisterous, passionate chants of "No more jails!," local residents and activists unequivocally expressed their opposition to the planned prison to New York City Department of Correction Commissioner Martin Short, who insisted that a new jail in the Bronx was needed to replace aging facilities on Rikers Island. The meeting, organized by Community in Unity, a coalition of fifteen Bronx community organizations, was called to demand transparency and accountability in the planning process and to offer alternatives to the proposed 2,000-bed facility, which has raised the ire of some members of the Hunts Point community, who have criticized the city for excluding them from the planning and question the value of building yet another jail.

The city has preliminarily selected the 28-acre Oak Point site in the Hunts Point neighborhood, and has already budgeted $375 million for the new facility. However, local residents are organizing against its construction. "This city has a history of making decisions in the Bronx without the community. This jail is an example of that," said Lisa Ortega of Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities, one the groups in the coalition. "Jails have become new mental health hospitals. We can not stand by while the city makes decisions that hurt the community," she continued, calling for improved treatment for mentally ill inmates.

A member of Critical Resistance, which organizes against the prison industrial complex, questioned the motives behind the planned construction. "We believe it is being constructed for the profit of the rich. Rather than building a jail to lock up more people, we need to lesson the number of people in jail." She criticized the rampant incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, the behind-closed-doors nature of the planning process which, she said, has shut out the community's voice, and pushed for education, affordable housing, job training, and drug rehabilitation programs as alternatives to incarceration.

Commissioner Horn argued that the Rikers Island facilities are severely outdated and, due to their two levels of security checkpoints and inconvenient location, make prisoners less accessible to friends, family members, attorneys and community support providers,. Rikers Island inmates, many of whom are from the Bronx, would fare better both while incarcerated and upon release if they were relocated to their own community, explained Horn. He added that the Department of Correction's plan would ultimately reduce city jail capacity by 2,000 beds, though as Maggie Williams of the Bronx Defenders pointed out, that statistic is misleading, as many of the existing beds in city jails have already been decommissioned and are unused, a fact Horn was forced to admit after she confronted him with a document publicly released by his own department.

One point of contention was the alleged lack of transparency on the part of city officials, who residents said had kept them uninformed and uninvolved in the matter. "From day one, the city has not been forthcoming," claimed Leah Gitter of RIPPD. "The city wants to spend taxpayer money to build a jail in our own backyard, but they haven't told us a thing about it."

Horn insisted that the city and the department have remained committed to public openness. "We have tried to be respectful of the protocol . . . We have tried to be transparent," adding that he has met with elected officials and Bronx organizations, a statement that prompted murmurs of skepticism from some of those in attendance. In response to recurring criticism of the prison system itself, the Commissioner cited the Department's stepped-up re-entry programs, some conducted in conjunction with community organizations such as the Osborne Association, that serve inmates upon release from prison.

The Commissioner at times appeared to be irked at the persistent and vocal opposition of the audience, some of whom at one point held up signs opposing the plan, to which Horn complained, "I can't see the people behind you and I think that's impolite." Later in the meeting, he became involved in a heated back-and-forth dialogue with one of the organizers, who insisted that Horn commit to five such town hall meetings in Hunts Point before construction went ahead. Horn, in turn, expressed frustration at the apparent intransigence of community members toward the city's proposal. When he asked if there was any way they would accept a new prison in their community, the response was an almost unanimous, emphatic refusal, to which he said, "If that's your position, then there is no room for dialogue." In a follow-up interview, he stated, "If people are willing to have an open mind, then I'll meet. If people's minds are made up then I'm wasting my time," but also promised to "meet with anyone, anywhere, anytime."

It is an offer that Community in Unity is likely to pursue, given the solid opposition to the construction plan and the passion of the meeting's attendees. And whether or not Horn attends another town hall meeting, the coalition will continue to organize. Williams explained that the activists will be drafting letters of opposition to the Speaker and the City Council, try to schedule a hearing with the Committee on Fire and Criminal Justice, and engage in more community outreach and education in an effort to catalyze local resistance to a new jail.

Despite the antagonism surrounding the issue, there are shades of promise. "This is a real opportunity. They are going to bulldoze the facilities [on Rikers Island] and that's great," says Williams, who, despite her opposition to the Oak Point prison, notes the progressive potential behind improving conditions for inmates. "This is the moment, this is the opportunity. I want to say to him, 'Step up to the plate and we will work with you.'"

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/10/77606.shtml

Posted by lois at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2006

TX: League of Women Voters: Voting Residence Change Would Restore Equal Access

Opinion: Viewpoints- Dallas Morning News
Dallas, Texas
League of Women Voters: Voting strength troubles
Prisoner data fix would restore equal access
Saturday, October 21, 2006

Equal representation in Congress and the Legislature is fundamental to democracy. Yet a little known quirk in the Census rules is being allowed to undermine that doctrine.

Like most states, Texas relies on Census Bureau data to draw its legislative boundaries so that each will contain the same number of people. Equally sized districts ensure that each resident has an equal access to a representative to advocate for his or her needs. The Census counts everyone ­ including people who can't vote, such as prisoners and children.

Since children have a stake in their communities, no distortion of representation arises from counting them. The same, however, cannot be said for prisoners.

The Texas Election Code recognizes that prisoners are residents of the communities where their homes and families are, not where they are incarcerated. Section 1.015 defines residence as "One's home ... to which one intends to return after any temporary absence."

It specifically states, "A person who is an inmate in a penal institution ... does not ... acquire residence at the place where the institution is located." Nevertheless, the Census Bureau counts prisoners as residents of the community in which they are incarcerated.

In 1970, when Texas imprisoned only 14,293 people ­ 128 per 100,000 population ­ ignoring the residence of inmates had little consequence. In the last 40 years, since the drug war began, Texas has imprisoned its citizens at an unprecedented rate.

On Aug. 31, 2005, 152,213 people were residing in Texas prisons and state jails. Per 100,000 population there were 2,300 blacks, 600 Hispanics, 400 whites and 100 of other ethnicities.

The Legislative Budget Board estimates that Texas will have 11,200 more prisoners by 2011.

The place of residence used to count this many people has a significant effect on representation.

Voters in the largely rural communities where prisons are located have increased legislative power. In fact, last year, inmates made up more than 20 percent of the populations of six Texas counties ­ Anderson, Bee, Hartley, Jones, Mitchell and Walker. So, for example, the counted but disenfranchised inmates give each legitimate resident of Anderson County the voting strength of 1.31 constituents.

Conversely this voting strength is lost to the inmates' home communities. Forty-five percent of Texas inmates came from six other Texas counties ­ Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis and El Paso. After adjusting for the inmates held in Harris and Dallas counties, more than 28,000 constituents of Harris County and 16,000 constituents of Dallas County are counted as residents in other counties.

Texas cannot change the Census Bureau's methodology to count the incarcerated at their homes.

The state is highly unlikely to give inmates the right to vote as do Vermont, Maine, 18 European states and Iraq.

However, Texas could and should remedy the distortion between urban and rural counties by adjusting the Census Bureau data to meet the Texas Election Code.

The League of Women Voters of Texas strongly supports the right of each citizen to equal access to congressional or legislative representatives. For many years, it advocated for passage of the Texas Election Code. That code became law in 1986, recognizing prisoners as residents of the communities where their homes and families are.

This principal should not be undermined for bureaucratic convenience, blurring and distorting representation ratios so that one person equals 1.31 constituents and another person loses access to his or her representative.

League of Women Voters of Dallas President Katherine Homan and board member Suzanne Wills may be reached through lwvdallas.org.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN
-homan_21edi.ART.State.Edition1.3e604bb.html

Posted by lois at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)

Parents complain about cost of calls from juvenile prisons

Posted on Sun, Oct. 22, 2006
Parents complain about cost of calls from juvenile prisons
Associated Press, Akron Beacon Journal

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Some parents of juvenile inmates are complaining about racking up hefty phone bills as they try to keep in touch with their children in prison.

Surcharges for collect calls from the state's eight juvenile prisons range from $1.75 to $2.50, with additional per-minute charges as high as 36 cents. Juvenile inmates must make their collect calls through the Department of Youth Services' telephone carrier, Verizon Business. Prepaid phone cards sold commercially aren't allowed.

Parents and advocates say the charges are too much to pay for inmates to talk to their families, especially when the prisons are far from home and families can't afford to visit regularly. In the first four months of this year, the state received 59 phone-related complaints, according to a report issued by the state Legislature's Correctional Institution Inspection Committee.

"These aren't adults, these are kids and they are going to get out someday and go back to their families," said Kim Brooks Tandy, director of the Children's Law Center, an advocacy group in Covington, Ky. "We're essentially cutting them off from that contact."

The state - which gets a 49.5 percent commission on the calls - defends the policy, noting that prepaid rates are offered at a 20 percent discount.

"The department works very hard to make sure that the rates of those phone calls are something that isn't too harsh on the family," spokeswoman Andrea Kruse said. "We work very hard to get the lowest rate possible."

The state has collected nearly $377,000 so far this year in commissions, she said. The money is used to buy stamps and school supplies, and to pay for college entrance exams and rent for children when they are released, she said.

Parent Maria Santiago of Cleveland said it's less expensive to accept collect calls from family in Puerto Rico than from her 16-year-old son in the Scioto Juvenile Correctional Facility. She refused to sign up for a prepaid plan, which made her son angry, she said.

"It puts parents in a tough position," Santiago said.

Ralph and Dorothy Sharpe of Stark County in northeast Ohio said they were hit with a $6,000 bill after accepting twice-a-day calls from their son, Burt.

"It was something that I needed, to be able to talk to my family, to be able to get through my day-to-day life there," said Burt, who was released last month.

Some families stop communicating with the inmates because it's too expensive, said Jill Beeler of the Ohio Public Defender's office.

"What ends up happening is these parents get these large phone bills and they can't pay them, so the phone company will put a block on their phone," she said. "It's very hard to maintain contact when it should be something that's promoted, something that's a piece of rehabilitation."
Information from: The Columbus Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.com
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/15823876.htm

Posted by lois at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2006

CA: DOC to transfer 2,260 prisoners to private out of state prisons

State to move first inmates
Department of Corrections to transfer 2,260 prisoners to private out-of-state facilities. By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, October 21, 2006

The first transfers of California inmates to private, out-of-state prisons are scheduled to take place next month under two no-bid contracts the overstuffed Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation signed Friday.

Under the deals worked out with the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America, the state will move 2,260 inmates out of its jampacked prisons over the next 120 days to private institutions in Indiana, Arizona, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Corrections officials say the separate deals will help stem its emergency overcrowding crisis, but union officials opposed to the transfers contend they will undermine public accountability and shift responsibility for the tough business of prison administration to profit-driven corporate boardrooms.

Scott Kernan, deputy director of the prison agency's division of adult institutions, said officials eventually hope to transfer as many as 5,000 California inmates on a voluntary basis to private facilities in other states. He said the state will force inmates onto planes for the out-of-state trips if it has to, but that he expects more than enough prisoners to volunteer for the transfers and forestall the likelihood of a lawsuit designed to stop the mandatory movements.

"I'm firmly set in my belief that it's going to catch fire, and we're going to have more inmates wanting to go than we're going to select," Kernan said.

At the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Sacramento on Friday, Charles Thomas, who had just paroled out of the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, said most of the inmates he's spoken to are not keen on the idea of transferring out of state.

"The state needs to explain to people thoroughly what they're getting into before they sign their life away," said Thomas, 60, who was in on a 90-day parole violation stemming from an underlying petty theft-with-a-prior conviction. "They think it's going to be a piece of cake."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in the prison system earlier this month as a result of an overcrowding crisis in which 173,000 inmates are packed into prison space designed for half that number. The emergency declaration followed a failure by the Legislature to take any action during a special session called over the summer by Schwarzenegger to ease the overcrowding situation.

More than 16,000 California prisoners are now sleeping in gyms and day rooms, some of them in triple-tiered bunks. Corrections Secretary Jim Tilton has warned that the state will have to stop accepting inmates next summer if it can't find more bed space in the interim.

Friday's contracts will send 1,260 medium-security inmates to the GEO Group's New Castle Correctional Facility in Indiana and 1,000 more to four CCA prisons -- the Florence Detention Center in Arizona, the North Fork and Diamondback correctional facilities in Oklahoma and the West Tennessee Detention Facility.

GEO, based in Boca Raton, Fla., will be paid $28.7 million a year under the three-year contract. CCA, with headquarters in Nashville, Tenn., will receive $22.9 million a year. The contracts average out to $63 a day per inmate -- not counting the transportation cost -- compared with the $90 average to house a prisoner every day in California.

"They've been in the business a long time, and they're successfully operating prisons throughout the country," Kernan said of GEO and CCA. "We sent staff to do a security inspection and evaluation of all of these facilities, and the response is almost uniformly that they're very well-run prisons.

"They're clean, they're not overcrowded, there are programming activities at all of the prisons, and their cultures are very safe and very positive," Kernan added.

Newspaper reports compiled on a Web site run by the Private Corrections Institute in Florida paint a different picture of the CCA prisons, however. The stories cited riots and inmate drug dealing at Diamondback, more violence and drug issues at Florence, inmate complaints over phone rates at North Fork and the unexplained death of a prisoner at West Tennessee.

Similar reports could also be found every month in California's prisons, said CCA spokeswoman Louise Gilchrist, adding that no state has ever terminated a contract with the company as a result of any of the problems.

"We know that incidents occur at any facility, but we believe that the mark of a strong correctional provider is how you respond to them," Gilchrist said. "We certainly have an excellent record of experience in meeting our customers' needs."

California Correctional Peace Officers Association spokesman Lance Corcoran said all prisons "have their share of calamity," but that the issue comes down to who should ultimately shoulder responsibility for it.

"Do you want the Legislature and the taxpayers standing behind the individuals who are charged with the deprivation of liberty of their fellow citizens, or do you want individuals who represent a corporate board of directors?" Corcoran asked.

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

October 20, 2006

OK: More than 38 percent of black adult men have been convicted of a felony

October 20, 2006
Study shows high rate of black felony convictions
SEAN MURPHY
Associated Press Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY ‹ More than 38 percent of black adult men in Oklahoma have been convicted of a felony, according to a study released Thursday by the Oklahoma Sentencing Commission.

The study by the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Resource Center analyzed data from Oklahoma's prison system dating to before statehood, combined with census data and mortality rates, said commission analyst Bill Chown, who compiled the study.

The study also shows in Oklahoma in 2006, the percentage of black men in Oklahoma who had been incarcerated in a state prison was 26.9 percent, an estimated 62 percent higher than the national estimate.

Chown said there are no national studies to compare to his analysis showing 38.4 percent of black men in Oklahoma have been convicted of a felony.

K.C. Moon, director of the commission, said Oklahoma's stiff penalties for drug and property crimes compared to other states is why Oklahoma's incarceration rate is higher than the national average.

He also said poverty contributes to the high conviction percentage.

"Most of the research in this area has shown it not to be racial, but more socio-economic," Moon said. "When you take poor white people and compare their conviction rate to poor black people, the rate is much more similar. It's just that more blacks are poor."

More than 8 percent of all adults in Oklahoma have been convicted.

http://ap.ardmoreite.com/pstories/state/ok/20061019/112263437.shtml

Posted by lois at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2006

UNICOR: Report: Texas prisoners working in unsafe conditions

Oct. 18, 2006, 11:44AM, Houston Chronicle
Report: Texas prisoners working in unsafe conditions

Associated Press

AUSTIN ‹ Inmates working for a federal government program recycling electronics are subjected to hazardous working conditions, a report by prisoner advocates and environmental activists alleges.

The inmates work for Federal Prison Industries Inc., a government-owned company employing prisoners to do everything from building office furniture to making clothes. One of the facilities cited is in Texarkana, according to "Toxic Sweatshops," a report released Wednesday to coincide with the opening of E-Scrap, a national electronic waste conference in Austin.

"It's true they're prisoners, but they're also humans," said Barbara Kyle of Computer TakeBack Campaign, which promotes electronic material recycling. "There's no reason their workplace shouldn't be as safe as anyone on the outside. It's a complete double standard to say it's OK to run this operation just like it might run in the Third World."

Recycling electronic waste improperly can leave workers exposed to lead, a neurotoxin, and cadmium, which has been linked to kidney damage, said Robin Schneider, director of the Texas Campaign for the Environment.

Federal Prison Industries, known as UNICOR, said it follows federal and state health and safety rules. Environmental tests for air quality are conducted regularly and inmates have access to full-face respirators, coveralls and Kevlar sleeves, said company spokesman Todd Baldau.

"Staff and inmates who disassemble computers are equipped with personal protective equipment, including safety glasses, leather work gloves, safety shoes and ear protection," Baldau said.

The federal Bureau of Prisons said last year that prisoners and staff in at least three UNICOR facilities, including the Texarkana site, were exposed to toxins beyond federal limits. It added the problems had been fixed.

But the federal Office of the Special Counsel, an independent investigative agency, called the report inadequate and wants further investigation.

"Federal employees and prisoners (are) inhaling poisons due to the neglect of their superiors, and federal agencies (are) whitewashing the investigation," U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch said in a statement last month.

Inmates working for UNICOR earn 23 cents to $1.15 an hour.

UNICOR's net profit last year was $64.5 million.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/4268332.html

Posted by lois at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Jailbait: Prison Companies Profit and Public Debt Grows

October 20, 2006 — The Texas Observer

Jailbait: Prison companies profit as Raymondville's public debt grows
by Forrest Wilder

Goddamn!” How else could Simon Salinas, Willacy County judge for 12 years, react to the promise that his county’s meager and battered budget could more than triple to $15 million within a couple of years? His employees don’t have health insurance, government buildings are falling apart, unemployment is over 10 percent, the county has run through four auditors in as many years, and there’s not even enough money to hire a dogcatcher for this sparse agricultural area in South Texas tucked between the giant Anglo ranches to the north and the booming border region. “I’ve turned over rocks to get industry here,” Salinas says. “Once they see the place, they say, we’ll go to the [Rio Grande].” With industry taking a pass on Willacy County, one of the poorest in the nation, local officials have turned to more outlandish, or bold, if you prefer, economic gambits. One long-standing idea is to build a spaceport to launch commercial rockets from an offshore barge. Another ill-advised venture involves using eminent domain to seize 1,500 acres on Padre Island owned by the Nature Conservancy with the goal of ferrying tourists to the island on a rickety, 40-year-old amphibious vehicle. Both proposals have stalled, but in the past decade Willacy County has found itself courted by one industry that has practically knocked down doors to come into the area.

“We’re at the point where we’ll grab anything,” says Salinas, an amiable former farmworker with a full head of white hair. “If it’s Prisonville, fine.” Prisonville is what the residents of Raymondville, seat of Willacy County, have taken to calling their community. Their town is home to a privately run, 1,000-bed state prison; a county-run, 96-bed jail with space for federal inmates; a private, 500-bed federal jail; and a recently opened private, 2,000-bed detention center for undocumented immigrants that is a crown jewel in the Bush administration’s border-enforcement policy. The four facilities are clustered on reclaimed grazing land, a bustling village of razor wire and guard towers across the highway from downtown Raymondville. The 3,600 prisoners—one-third of Raymondville’s population—who reside in this penal colony represent the heart of the area’s economy. Aside from employing hundreds of locals to guard the prisoners, the jails are supposed to stimulate economic development and provide revenue for the county. But Prisonville seems to have benefited a small group of private, for-profit prison businessmen far more than the town on whose humble aspirations they preyed.

Juan “Johnny” Guerra, a slim Raymondville native who doubles as the county attorney and district attorney, can remember the first time someone wanted to build a prison in his town.

The year was 1984, and state officials thought Raymondville ought to have a jail for low-level felons. “It’s just amazing what happened. You had the whole community against it. All the politicians were against it. I think the banker and I were for it,” he recalls. But in the ’90s, amidst a boom in prison-building, the state came up with a different approach: Jails were not, as previously thought, dangerous and unwanted eyesores that no sane community would want. Instead, they were engines of economic growth and a source of steady jobs for which communities should have to compete. “Their PR was amazing,” says Guerra, who was by then the district attorney. “You had everyone fighting for the prison.” Willacy County wanted the jail so desperately it offered the state free land, utilities, roads, and a new water tower. In 1996, a 1,000-bed facility opened, and Florida-based Wackenhut Corp. assumed management. (This past September, a jury awarded a $47.5 million judgment against Wackenhut to the family of a man beaten to death by other prisoners at the jail.)

“Once you have one jail, it’s like a magnet,” Guerra says. In the ’90s, Willacy County, like other impoverished backwaters willing to take an economic gamble, became the target for prison companies seeking homes for their penal businesses. One polished salesman for this new industry in South Texas is James Parkey, the president of Argyle, Texas-based Corplan Corrections Inc. “[Parkey] was the point man on each and every project [that came to Willacy],” Guerra says. (Parkey did not return two calls to his office seeking comment for this story.)

Parkey first appeared in 1999, remembers Guerra, pitching the idea for a privately run, 500-bed federal detention center. “Parkey came in here and said, let’s sell bonds, put this prison here, and the feds will send you lots of prisoners, and you’ll make lots of money.” He presented the jail venture as a single, “take-it-or-leave-it” package that included the companies that would finance, design, build, and operate the facility. “They make it seem like you have to accept the whole thing,” Guerra says. The county has never taken bids or appointed an independent supervisor to monitor expenses on any of its prison projects.

Rather than finance the construction themselves, the prison consortium used the county’s power as a government body to issue debt. More critical, however, were the type of bonds floated: project revenue bonds, which can be issued by counties with almost no state oversight. It’s up to local government officials to judge the wisdom of the undertaking. But those officials do not issue the bonds directly. Instead, a “public facility corporation” (a five-member board appointed by the commissioner’s court) signs off on what can be an almost-limitless amount of debt. Revenue bonds for jail projects tend to be highly risky because they are paid back from the profit generated from housing prisoners. Without a continuously large number of inmates, the county cannot make the payments.

In the case of Willacy’s first federal project, the public facility corporation in 2002 issued $24 million in high-interest “project revenue” bonds, to be paid back with the revenue the U.S. Marshals Service would dispense for housing its detainees. By the time the bonds mature in 2024, the county will have returned about as much in interest—$25 million—to investors as the principal amount, according to the Texas Bond Review Board, a tiny state agency that collects data on local government debt. Dallas-based Municipal Capital Markets Group Inc. structured and underwrote the bonds. Municipal, a niche investment-banking firm, has been involved in 11 of 23 revenue-financed jail projects in Texas in the last 10 years, according to the Bond Review Board. In Willacy County alone, Municipal has financed a mountain of debt, over $92 million in project revenue bonds, on three jails. While doing so, the company has earned $5.4 million.

In 2003, when the federal slammer finally opened for business, County Judge Salinas was ecstatic. “We scratched the walls jumping up and down, jubilation all over the place,” he said at the time. The jail was bringing 200 jobs to the area. But perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the project were the cadre of private prison-related companies that gained a foothold in Willacy County: Houston-based contractor Hale-Mills Construction Ltd.; Municipal Capital; operator Management & Training Corp. of Utah; and of course Corplan. For its part, the county receives $2 a day per prisoner, about $300,000 to $400,000 in a good year.

The county’s modest income would come at a steep price for some of its elected officials. In January 2005, two Willacy County commissioners, Israel Tamez and Jose Jimenez, pleaded guilty to accepting cash bribes in exchange for their votes to award the contract for the Marshals Service jail. A few months later, a former Webb County commissioner, David Cortez, was convicted of funneling the bribes to “several” county commissioners. Although no corporation has been identified by investigators as the source of the bribes, Guerra has his theories. At his office, he digs up minutes from a 1999 county meeting when Willacy commissioners were considering the facility; the minutes list Cortez being present as a Corplan representative. Corplan was awarded the contract. In May 2005, Willacy County, on Guerra’s instructions, filed a civil suit against Corplan and Hale-Mills alleging that the two companies were parties to the bribery and that the contract for the jail was therefore void. (The suit was later dropped, but Guerra said it would likely be refiled once the criminal proceedings conclude and more documentation is available. The sentencing for Tamez and Cortez, pushed back several times, is now set for November. Jimenez died in April.)

The same month the county filed suit, the members of the public facility corporation—despite the bribery scandal—hired Corplan to develop a 500-bed addition to the Marshals Service jail. Guerra was dumfounded. The public facility corporation had just selected the very company the county was suing. At a minimum, Guerra wanted commissioners to order the public facility corporation to stop doing business with Corplan. On May 23, the commissioners’ court, on a 4-1 vote, instructed the facility corporation to terminate its relationship with Corplan. It would seem that Willacy County was washing its hands of James Parkey.

The federal jail wasn’t the only instance of Parkey’s promise of tidy profits ensnaring the county. In 2002, faced with pressure from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to alleviate overcrowding in the county jail, Parkey was ready with a solution that involved the same prison consortium. “With the county jail, it was the same idea,” says Guerra. The commissioners would use the public facility corporation to issue $7.5 million in 20-year project revenue bonds, which theoretically would be paid off by renting 50 extra beds to federal agencies. Once again, Municipal Capital handled the financing, pocketing $453,900 in the transaction; Hale-Mills built the facility; Corplan stewarded the deal. Unlike the state and federal jails, the county’s sheriff department would run the facility. The new jail opened in October 2004, but when the first payment to the investors came due on May 1 of this year, the entity the commissioner’s court set up to oversee the bonds couldn’t come up with the $140,000 owed. (In April the Marshals Service had removed all their female prisoners from the new jail after a sheriff’s investigation discovered female guards had promised special favors to prisoners and a male guard had sex with a female inmate.) Rather than default, the county paid the money out of its own budget. In November it will owe a second payment of about $700,000, according to the county auditor. Salinas says the county will probably privatize the county jail rather than default on the loans. Management & Training Corp. has generously undertaken a free “feasibility study” to evaluate that option. Michael Harling, vice president of Municipal Capital, defends the prison projects his company has financed and insists that, on balance, the county has made money off of them.

In November 2005, Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff promised to end the federal policy of “catch-and-release,” whereby the United States apprehended illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico and released them for lack of detention space. Instead, detainees would be held in detention centers funded by millions in new congressional appropriations until they could be flown back to their home countries. But where could space be found for all these people? Prisonville seemed a natural fit. “James Parkey shows up in town again, and this time it was supposed to be a secret, hush-hush project and that it was coming all the way from the president,” Guerra says. “If it leaked, all bets were off.”

To meet an October 2006 deadline set by Chertoff, the companies intent on building the 2,000-bed, $60.7 million “temporary” facility would have to scramble. That meant pushing the deal through without raising the hackles of any local naysayers. Only after the detention center was well under way did citizens and most county officials begin to unravel the mystery of how the project became a reality. Billie Pickard, a local gadfly, has been conducting her own personal investigation. One document in her fat file, “leaked” to her by an anonymous source, is a letter from Commissioner Noe Loya to Timothy L. Perry, acting chief of the detention acquisition and support branch of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. In the June 1 letter, Loya, the most fervent prison booster on the commissioners’ court, mentions a May 31 meeting in Willacy County with a Homeland Security official and “available team members” from an “existing project team that built two of the three [Raymondville jails].” This team is described in the letter as including “architects, contractors, facility managers, and financial advisers,” likely Corplan, Hale-Mills, Management & Training Corp., and Municipal Capital. Of this consortium, Loya writes, “The experience and knowledge will surpass any other group. This will allow for the ultimate success of the project and do so in the shortest amount of time.... Our team would need to present the conditions, terms, and recommendations.” (Loya did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.)

Reacting to concern from some county officials about Parkey’s involvement, Capital Markets’ Harling led the negotiations instead, telling Salinas, “This thing was designed by Homeland Security. They want it in Raymondville. George Bush wants it.”

On June 19, the commissioners’ court held the first public meeting on the federal detention center. As soon as the agenda items were read, the court went into executive session for three hours with Harling. When they came out, the commissioners unanimously approved an agreement with the feds and created a local government corporation, similar in form and function to the public facility corporation, to float the bonds. When several members of the audience asked for details, the commissioners said “they couldn’t say anymore” about their decision, Pickard recalls. As it turns out, the agreement between Homeland Security and the county was only for two years, establishing a fixed rate of $79 per prisoner per day for the first year and $78 for the second. Under the terms of the deal, 500 beds would have to be ready by August 2. It would be up to the county to sign contracts with prison companies to design, build, finance, and run the detention center.

The same day the commissioners were ostensibly approving the project, the consortium’s construction firm Hale-Mills already had equipment on the proposed site, despite the fact that the prison companies did not own the land. The day after the meeting, Hales-Mills began work on the detention center, even as Parkey and Harling worked to secure an option on the land from the Development Corp. of the City of Raymondville. As the two negotiated with the city, a new problem arose when County Attorney Guerra began talking with Corrections Corp. of America, the operator of the state jail in Raymondville. Tennessee-based Corrections Corp. proposed an alternative to the Management & Training offer: It would pay for the facility itself, put the building on the tax rolls, and help bail out the floundering county jail. The plan would eliminate the need for county-issued bonds–and, incidentally, the need for Municipal Capital, Management & Training, Corplan, and perhaps Hale-Mills. Guerra began working on Salinas and another commissioner, Emilio Vera, to reconsider. (Vera did not return numerous phone calls seeking comment.)

Hale-Mills had taken a big gamble; it was working on a project with no guarantee, and local officials were waffling on their commitment to the Management & Training consortium. The county nonprofit corporation in charge even temporarily tabled the bond offer while it reviewed the competing offer.

The consortium needed a deal closer and found one in state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. The Brownsville Democrat had worked as a “consultant” for Corplan and Management & Training in 2003 and 2004, according to records filed with the Texas Ethics Commission. He had suspended his consulting work in 2005 in the aftermath of the bribery scandal, but Hale-Mills hired him this year for the federal detention center project. Lucio says Hale-Mills paid him “to figure out what kind of impact this will have on the community, to talk to the general public to see what their feel is.”

Guerra alleges that Lucio made multiple appearances in Raymondville pressuring the commissioners to select Management & Training over Corrections Corp. “As far as I’m concerned, had it not been for Eddie Lucio the commissioners would not have gone and put the county in a $60 million debt,” Guerra says. “In my opinion, in his position as a senator he let our commissioners, including me, know where he stood... Once your senator lets you know what he wants, it’s hard to go against [him].” Lucio, calling Guerra “a political enemy,” denies that he leaned on county officials: “I have never, ever approached anyone and any board down here that I try to do business with or where I represent a client in any manner that would send the wrong message in terms of my approach.” Lucio concedes that he met with Guerra in Harlingen in late June, but only “as a businessman, not as a state senator.”

Nonetheless, he acknowledges that he put in a good word for his friends. “I thought it was going to be another company that was being considered,” Lucio said, “that was when I told [Guerra] that I felt MTC [Management & Training Corp.] would do a good job.”

By July 17, the consortium prevailed, and county officials approved $60.7 million in bonds that must be paid off in the unusually short period of two-and-a-half years at 6 percent interest. Harling won the wavering county officials with the promise of future millions. He whipped up spreadsheets showing the detention facility generating up to $10.6 million in the first two years and $13.6 million in the third. The impressive figures primarily rest on the assumption that in addition to $2.25 per prisoner per day, the county will receive $48 for each detainee once an occupancy level of 1,800 is achieved. The official bond statement does not guarantee this. In fact, it lists an “amount up to $48” after the investors are paid, Management & Training gets its cut of $28.75 a prisoner per day, and all other possible expenditures have been exhausted.

On July 24, the county signed an option to purchase the land for the new detention facility, after Harling provided a personal check for $15,000 as a down payment.

County Judge Salinas says he believes the facility will provide the revenue the other jails failed to generate. “It’s on paper—they can’t back out,” he says. But even Harling admits those revenue amounts are not written in stone. “I don’t think there’s anything written that guarantees that,” he told the Observer. “It’s just a ‘what if.’”

Actually, there are lots of “what ifs.” The monthly debt service the county must maintain is $2.7 million, which, according to the official bond documents, can only be achieved with the detention center 90 percent filled each month. In addition, Homeland Security has only signed its contract with the county for two years. After that, the county will have to negotiate with a new administration.

On August 3, President Bush arrived in the Valley, the day after the first batch of detainees moved into their temporary home. Only 45 days earlier, the Raymondville site had been a cotton field. Almost overnight, several tentlike, Kevlar-covered, beige modular pods, each holding 200 detainees, had sprung up. Bush discussed the importance of the new detention beds and marveled at the “new prosperity” in the region.

“Gosh, it wasn’t all that long ago that... the economy was tough down here. It was kind of farming, and that was all,” he said.

Guerra notes the timing of the detention center’s opening and the president’s visit. “It’s a political project,” he says. “This George Bush appearance in the Valley cost us $60 million.

“They kind of paint a pretty picture,” continues Guerra. “Once they line their pockets, they saddle their horses and go their own way.” Still, Salinas, who is retiring as county judge, is dreaming of the great things Willacy County can do with what he sees as a financial windfall. “You can’t imagine what relief taxpayers will have,” he says. “Maybe someday, someday we’ll have enough revenue from [the federal jail and the detention center] to not have taxes.”

For One Politician, Prison’s a Good Thing (sidebar)
In the past three years, state Senator Eddie Lucio Jr., a Brownsville Democrat, has reported income of at least $115,000 from three companies involved in private prison deals in South Texas: Argyle-based Corplan Corrections Inc., Utah’s Management and Training Corp., and Aguirre Inc. of Dallas.

Lucio has also lobbied unsuccessfully for a proposed federal detention center in Wilson County, southeast of San Antonio, according to Wilson County Commissioner Albert Gamez Jr. Gamez says Lucio joined Richard Reyes, a private prison salesman from Boerne, in an August meeting with him. “Reyes and Lucio are talking to me, trying to convince me so that they can get another vote and push [the detention center] through,” he recalls. Lucio says he attended the meeting but that he was only present as a longtime friend of Reyes, not as a consultant or senator. Lucio did acknowledge that Reyes plans to hire him in the future.

“I never asked him to vote for nobody,” Lucio says. “I accompanied [Reyes], and I concurred with what Mr. Reyes was saying because I know the people he’s talking about who could possibly do a good project in that county.”

Lucio says he realizes the difficulty in balancing his role as an elected official with that of a businessman, but carefully abides by state rules and regulations. “[E]verything we have done, we have done based on the parameters given to me by attorneys general and chairmen of the Ethics Commission.”

Lucio last wrote to Attorney General Greg Abbott in 2003 seeking an opinion on his private business dealings. Abbott responded to the senator that he could not make a definitive legal ruling because “Your letter does not elaborate on the nature of your clients’ businesses or your ‘dealings and communications’ on their behalf...” For specific legal concerns, Abbott suggested Lucio consult private counsel.

Tom Smith, director of the Texas office of the government watchdog group Public Citizen, affirms that state law allows legislators to lobby county officials on behalf of private clients. Nonetheless, Lucio’s actions, while legal, are ethically questionable, Smith says. “[Lucio] has extraordinary power over the affairs of the county. His actions in Austin can not only affect their revenues, but their rights to take certain types of action, so county officials are going to bend over backwards to please the senator or to take action to benefit his clients.”—F.W.

Printed from http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2320

Posted by lois at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2006

TX: South Texas town rejects plans for detention prison

"A petition bearing more than 2,000 signatures from people living in and around La Vernia was handed to the council after Thursday's vote. Beck said he was surprised at the amount of opposition the council received after word spread that the city was looking into building the facility. Wilson County commissioners failed to pass a resolution Aug. 14 seeking developers to build it in Floresville."

La Vernia rejects plans for detention facility

Web Posted: 10/13/2006 11:23 PM CDT
Jeorge Zarazua
Express-News Staff La Vernia became the second city in Wilson County to balk at plans to build a 500-bed detention facility after a groundswell of opposition from residents.

City Council members unanimously voted Thursday night not to continue studying the proposal, which would have established a privately run detention center to house undocumented immigrants from countries other than Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security.

"We did our research on it and found out it wasn't a good fit for our community," La Vernia Mayor Brad Beck said Friday.

Developer Richard Reyes, who tried to interest both La Vernia and Floresville in the project, couldn't be reached for comment Friday. Reyes operates Innovative Government Strategies, a consulting firm in Boerne.

The La Vernia City Council voted on the issue immediately after convening for its meeting Thursday, pre-empting several planned speeches critical of the project, said Kathy Crisp, a local real estate agent.

Crisp was one of two residents who spoke after the vote, thanking the council for its support.

Crisp said the town of about 1,000 rallied against the proposal because residents didn't want La Vernia's image to be that of a prison town.

"This was something we were just adamant about," she said. "We did not want it close to our schools. We did not want it in our community."

A petition bearing more than 2,000 signatures from people living in and around La Vernia was handed to the council after Thursday's vote.

Beck said he was surprised at the amount of opposition the council received after word spread that the city was looking into building the facility. Wilson County commissioners failed to pass a resolution Aug. 14 seeking developers to build it in Floresville.

"We were simply in the research phase on this," he said.

Initially, Beck said, the proposal seemed appealing because it would have generated about $300,000 annually in additional revenue for the city from fees the federal government pays to house detainees.

In the end, he said, the council agreed a prison was not the best tool for economic development.

"I think there's cleaner ways of doing it with less risk," Beck said.

Posted by lois at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)

Alameda County CA: Questions about criminal history won't be asked until later in hiring process

County will give ex-cons a chance
Questions about criminal history won't be asked until later in hiring process
By Michele R. Marcucci, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated:10/15/2006 02:35:32 AM PDT
Halfway down the first page of Alameda County's job application, before questions about an applicant's skills are even asked, is this:

"HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF VIOLATION OF ANY LAW?"

For people who would answer "yes" to that question, it's a huge deterrent and a huge barrier to their efforts to reintegrate into society after doing time.

But here in Alameda County, it may soon be a thing of the past.

County supervisors decided this month to change their application process. The county will embark on an 18-month pilot project that removes the question from most of its applications, waiting until later in the hiring process to ask.

The question will remain on applications for law enforcement and also social services jobs that people with a record won't qualify for. For other jobs, the person's convictions will be reviewed by human resources specialists to see if they are relevant to the job.

County officials hope to have the pilot program in place by January.

"You still do the background check. But it's not the first question," said board President Keith Carson, who sponsored the resolution to make the change.

The action makes the county part of a nascent movement to "ban the box" from job applications and is part of wider efforts to help ex-cons become productive members of society, instead of repeat offenders.

Those efforts include a proposal by state Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, to curb violence in some Oakland
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and Richmond neighborhoods that includes re-entry and internship programs for probationers and parolees; a bill carried by state Assemblywoman Wilma Chan, D-Oakland, which Carson's office worked on, that sets up pre-release assessments for people leaving prison; and efforts to spread the word about criminal-record expungements.

A number of cities and counties, including Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, have taken the question off applications. And ex-offenders' advocates are hoping that private businesses follow suit.

It's seen by some as a particularly important move in California, which releases one out of every five prisoners in the United States, federal statistics from 2003 show.

Some 3,300 parolees have returned to Alameda County in the first six months of this year alone, Carson said. And by the end of their first year out of prison, nearly half will get in trouble again, he said.

Last year, 12 percent of people applying for county jobs listed convictions on their applications, human resources director Denise Eaton-May told the Civil Service Commission last week. Close to 5 percent of people with convictions were hired for county jobs last year, about the same percentage as people without convictions, numbers from Eaton-May's department showed.

Dorsey Nunn of All of Us Or None, which fights discrimination against ex-cons, spearheaded the "ban the box" campaign in San Francisco and also brought the issue to Carson. He said the question scares away many ex-offenders who are seeking to straighten out their lives.

Many think the purpose of asking the question is simply to weed them out of the process, he said.

But in doing so, municipalities and businesses may be tossing out good workers, said Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project in Oakland. And they are making it infinitely harder for people who desperately need jobs to get them, Emsellem said.

"One of the major barriers to people successfully re-entering the community is an inability to get a job," Emsellem said.

Linda Walker has worked as a child support specialist for five years in Contra Costa County. But the Pittsburg woman believes a 14-year-old petty theft conviction prevented her from getting the same job in another county where she applied.

She wrote on her application that she would prefer to discuss the conviction question at an interview, but was told she wouldn't be considered if she didn't check the box.

"I've proven I'm capable of doing this job," Walker said. "I said I would discuss it during the interview. I feel that should be good enough."

Walker said she is a homeowner, a taxpayer and a mother, as well as someone with many years' experience in her field. But she said being forced to check the conviction box puts other incorrect pictures into employers' minds.

"Having to answer that question puts all kinds of ideas in the average person's head — a bank robber, a murderer. I ain't done none of that," she said.

Contact Michele R. Marcucci at mmarcucci@angnewspapers.com.

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

Leaving Prison Doors Behind, Some Find New Doors Open

October 18, 2006, NY Times
Leaving Prison Doors Behind, Some Find New Doors Open
By JOSEPH P. FRIED

Paroled after 11 years in prison for manslaughter, Sharon White was determined to earn the bachelor’s degree she had begun working toward while serving her term. Her goal was to become a social worker; she wanted to counsel former prisoners as well as young people “at risk of going astray,” just as she had, she said, when she became a drug-selling high school dropout who ended up stabbing a man to death.

When Marcelino Guillen was released on parole after serving five years for selling cocaine, he was bent on restarting his pursuit of a college education. The first time around, he had dropped out after failing all the courses in his first semester. “I realized that if I had gotten a degree, I probably wouldn’t have sold drugs,” he said recently.

Mr. Guillen, 39, and Ms. White, 38, are students at Lehman College in the Bronx, part of the City University of New York, pursuing bachelor’s degrees in social work with the aid of a program devoted to giving people with criminal histories “the know-how and support” they usually need to apply for and succeed in college, said the initiative’s founder and director, Benay Rubenstein.

Ms. Rubenstein started the program, the College Initiative, in 2002 at Episcopal Social Services, an arm of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. This past May, she moved it to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, another branch of the City University. Jeremy Travis, the college’s president, is a specialist in the problems released prisoners face in returning to society.

At the college, Mr. Travis formed the Prisoner Re-entry Institute, which fosters research and programs on this issue. The College Initiative program is part of the institute.

The initiative not only helps former prisoners with academic, financial-aid and admissions counseling, but also assists with job and housing problems. In addition, it offers a course in computer skills and in preparing for the math and English sections of the City University entrance exams, said Debbie A. Mukamal, the institute’s director.

Post-prison programs like the College Initiative — and like College and Community Fellowship, a similar effort that is part of CUNY’s Graduate Center — were developed in response to a drastic reduction a decade ago in college programs in the nation’s federal and state prisons, specialists in prisoner rehabilitation say. At that time, with crime rates having climbed, many elected officials worked to make sentences and prison conditions tougher.

In 1994, Congress removed prison inmates from eligibility for Pell Grants, a major federal program of aid to low-income students that was the financial backbone of most in-prison college programs. Many states, including New York, followed the federal lead and removed prison inmates from their own college aid programs.

As a result, about 25,000 inmates taking part in such programs with Pell Grants had their “education abruptly ended,” according to a study by Kenneth Mentor, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. By 1997, only 8 college prison programs remained active nationwide, compared with as many as 350 in previous years, Mr. Mentor said.

In New York State, the number fell to 4 programs from nearly 70, according to the Bard Prison Initiative, one of the state’s 9 current programs, involving 13 prisons. Most are financed by the schools involved or by churches and other nonprofit groups.

Mr. Guillen and Ms. White are among 327 people whom the College Initiative program has helped to enroll in senior or community colleges since 2002, mostly at CUNY. Twenty have received associate or bachelor degrees, and 144 continue to pursue degrees, including nine on the master’s or doctoral level.

Even though half the 327 who began the program did not enroll for a second semester, Ms. Rubenstein said the effort’s record was one of accomplishment.

“This is a population that faces many difficult issues,” she said. “Many have had a lot of time in prison, sometimes 15 to 20 years,” and often find after starting college that they have to refocus on getting “other pieces of their lives in place, like employment or dealing with family issues.” She said she expected many of the dropouts to resume college.

Most program participants at CUNY colleges attend the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, the Borough of Manhattan Community College and La Guardia Community College in Queens, as well as Lehman.

Nearly half of the people attending colleges this semester are majoring in studies related to social work; nearly half who were enrolled last spring were, typically, older than 35. About 20 percent of all those who have begun college with the program’s help have been women.

Ms. White fatally stabbed the man when she was 24, saying in a recent interview, as she had at her trial, that he had been choking her in a struggle after she refused to have sex with him. The jury rejected her justification defense, convicting her of first-degree manslaughter.

At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a women’s prison in Westchester County whose college program was restarted in the late 90’s with private money, Ms. White earned an associate’s degree from Marymount Manhattan College. She had 24 more credits toward a bachelor’s degree when she was paroled two years ago. Despite her college experience, she was in the dark about how to continue college outside prison, she said.

“I didn’t know my options,” she said. “In Bedford Hills, they gave me a list, I picked out the classes and I showed up. I didn’t have to fill out anything. I didn’t have to know the requirements for financial aid.”

The College Initiative program guided her through the process, and now she attends evening classes at Lehman while working days for Exodus Transitional Community, a group that helps former prisoners reintegrate into society. She hopes to have her bachelor’s degree within two years

There were no college programs in the various prisons where Mr. Guillen served his term. Attending Lehman in the evening, he works during the day for Episcopal Social Services, and his job includes returning to prisons — this time to run inmate peer-support groups. Like Ms. White, he sees his future not only in helping prisoners rejoin society, but in deterring young people from crime to begin with. With 96 completed credits, he expects to have his bachelor’s degree in May.

When he was paroled in 2002, Mr. Guillen recalled, he had no doubt that he would make a second try at a college education. The College Initiative program, he said, “helped me put my foot in the door.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/education/18convict.html?pagewanted=2

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2006

Expunged Criminal Records Live to Tell Tales

October 17, 2006
Expunged Criminal Records Live to Tell Tales
By ADAM LIPTAK- NY Times, Page 1

In 41 states, people accused or convicted of crimes have the legal right to rewrite history. They can have their criminal records expunged, and in theory that means that all traces of their encounters with the justice system will disappear.

But enormous commercial databases are fast undoing the societal bargain of expungement, one that used to give people who had committed minor crimes a clean slate and a fresh start.

Most states seal at least some records of juvenile offenses. Many states also allow adults arrested for or convicted of minor crimes like possessing marijuana, shoplifting or disorderly conduct to ask a judge, sometimes after a certain amount of time has passed without further trouble, to expunge their records. If the judge agrees, the records are destroyed or sealed.

But real expungement is becoming significantly harder to accomplish in the electronic age. Records once held only in paper form by law enforcement agencies, courts and corrections departments are now routinely digitized and sold in bulk to the private sector. Some commercial databases now contain more than 100 million criminal records. They are updated only fitfully, and expunged records now often turn up in criminal background checks ordered by employers and landlords.

Thomas A. Wilder, the district clerk for Tarrant County in Fort Worth, said he had received harsh criticism for refusing, on principle, to sell criminal history records in bulk.

“How the hell do I expunge anything,” Mr. Wilder asked, “if I sell tapes and disks all over the country?”

Private database companies say they are diligent in updating their records to reflect the later expungement of criminal records. But lawyers, judges and experts in criminal justice say it is common for people to lose jobs and housing over information in databases that courts have ordered expunged.

These critics say that even the biggest vendors do not always update their records promptly and thoroughly and that many smaller ones use outdated, incomplete and sometimes inaccurate data.

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer in Miami, tells her clients that expungement is a waste of time. “To tell someone their record is gone is essentially to lie to them,” Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff said. “In an electronic age, people should understand that once they have been convicted or arrested that will never go away.”

Judge Stanford Blake, whose court often enters expungement orders, said his inability to make them effective had left him feeling frustrated and helpless.

“It’s a horrible situation,” said Judge Blake, the administrative judge of the criminal division of the Eleventh Circuit Court in Miami. “It’s the ultimate Big Brother, always watching you.”

The rise in the availability of criminal histories has been accompanied by a surge in demand for them. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, criminal background checks have become routine in many employment applications.

“Something like 80 percent of large- or medium-sized employers now do background checks,” said Debbie A. Mukamal, the director of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Employers need to know about job-related convictions to make a nuanced, responsible decision so that they can protect themselves and the public and give people a fair shot at employment.”

But the current system, Ms. Mukamal added, is not working. “It’s unfettered,” she said. “It’s not regulated. There’s misinformation.”

ChoicePoint, one of the larger database companies, performed nine million background checks last year, said Matt Furman, a spokesman. The company’s error rate is very small, Mr. Furman said. “One out of every thousand background checks has led to a consumer contact” disputing or complaining about the information provided, he said, “and one of a thousand contacts results in a change.”

There have been only a few lawsuits taking issue with the information provided to employers in background checks.

In one, filed in June in federal court in Brooklyn, Victor Guevares sued a company that had offered him a job and a database company that he says caused the offer to be withdrawn.

Mr. Guevares, now 33, was convicted of disorderly conduct more than a decade ago. New York considers that a violation like a traffic infraction rather than a crime and bars database companies from reporting such offenses to employers.

But Acxiom, a database company, reported the disorderly conduct charges to the Tyco Healthcare Group, which had offered Mr. Guevares a job in 2004. Tyco promptly withdrew the offer, one that would have doubled Mr. Guevares’s salary, to $46,000. It based its decision, his lawsuit says, on its mistaken understanding that he had committed a misdemeanor and had lied on his application about whether he had ever been “convicted of any crime which was not expunged or sealed by a court.”

Mr. Guevares, a gregarious man with a shaved head and big brown eyes, said that losing the job, which would have propelled his family into the middle class, devastated him. “I’ve never been arrested,” he said. “I’ve never been locked up. I’ve never done jail time.”

In court papers, both companies denied wrongdoing, and Tyco has sued Acxiom for breach of contract.

Catherine H. O’Neill, a lawyer with the Legal Action Center, which represents Mr. Guevares, said Acxiom deserved much of the blame.

“They should not have been vacuuming up this information in the first place,” Ms. O’Neill said.

A lawyer for Acxiom and a spokesman for Tyco declined to comment.

There is often plenty of fault to go around. Even within the government, various agencies often fail to coordinate their records.

“The problem often arises,” said Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff, the Miami lawyer, “because so many agencies have access to criminal records — the department of corrections, the police, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the courts. Even though you have an expunged record, oftentimes a policing agency or a corrections facility allows private entities to gain access to it.”

Some state laws place the burden on employers, on the apparent theory that the problem is not the availability of information but the use to which it is put. Illinois, for instance, prohibits prospective employers from asking about or making decisions based on expunged or sealed criminal histories.

A Minnesota man who agreed to talk about his experiences in exchange for anonymity said an expunged 1992 felony conviction — he declined to say for what — and erroneous information about a crime he did not commit have kept him from obtaining work for six months.

He said the database companies he contacted had been responsive if not especially fast in clearing up the problem. Some told him they updated their records annually. “I don’t think the consumer reporting agencies mean to be” reporting inaccurate or sealed information, he said. “They just need to get new CD’s.”

In November 2005, a Florida woman obtained a court order expunging records concerning her arrest in a domestic dispute the previous spring. The judge ordered the state and local police, the county sheriff and the court clerk to “expunge all information concerning indicia of arrest or criminal history.”

But when the woman tried to buy a condominium this summer, the arrest nonetheless popped up in a routine background check. The deal fell through.

“It’s going to haunt her for the rest of her life,” said a relative of the woman, who shared court and Internet search records in exchange for a promise not to identify her or her family. “They’re using public records at a given point in time and they’re not updating them, and they’re ruining people’s lives.”

Margaret Colgate Love, the nation’s pardon attorney for most of the 1990’s and the author of a new book called “Relief from the Collateral Consequences of a Criminal Conviction,” said problems like these were rooted in the nature of expungement.

“It does reveal,” Ms. Love said, “how perilous it is to build a public policy on a lie.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/us/17expunge.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

If you break the law, make sure you have a college degree.

BA -- the New Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card
Looking at the paltry sentences of Enron crooks, the message is clear: If you break the law, make sure you have a college degree.
By Tom Lutz
October 17, 2006

A JOURNALIST recently asked my one and only son how it felt being described, in the first chapter of my latest book, as a slacker. Now, to be fair, I didn't really say he was a slacker. I just explained how, when I saw him lying on the couch in the middle of the day when he was 18, I felt the need to write a book about slackers and their lackadaisical history over the last couple of hundred years.

Cody, who is a good sport, said he didn't really mind. And then he speculated that perhaps I had spent all those years researching and writing the book in an elaborate ploy to get him to go to college.

I didn't, but I'd gladly write the book that would, because there can be no more firm believer in the value of a good liberal arts education than myself. In the almost 20 years I've been teaching at universities, I've argued for it in various ways: in Enlightenment terms; in life-preparation terms; in ethical, financial and social terms; in terms of the basic pleasures learning provides.

But I hit upon the best argument yet in the news recently: Andrew S. Fastow. Fastow, college graduate and former chief financial officer of Enron, was sentenced to six years in prison for his part in the high thievery at the company that ended with the loss of thousands of jobs and millions of investor dollars and pensions. Last month, former Enron executives (and college graduates) Timothy Despain and David W. Delainey were sentenced - Despain to four years of probation and a $10,000 fine, Delainey to 30 months in prison.

I know this doesn't sound, offhand, like a great advertisement. But consider this. In a nearby courtroom, Dale Stuart Sisson, who had never been to college, was convicted of robbing $400 from Spicy N Hot Liquor in Sealy, Texas. He was sentenced to 40 years in jail.

We've long known, of course, that a college degree increases earnings. But I was glad to be reminded of these further benefits. If, by chance, your income involves some lawbreaking, and you get caught, your prison time will be chopped way down if you have a bachelor's degree.

Fastow, who graduated in 1983 from Tufts University with a bachelor's degree in economics and Chinese, by some counts was looking at as much as $45 million in ill-gotten gains. Divide that by his six-year sentence, and he is serving one day in jail for each $20,458 he stole. If only Sisson had gone to college, he might have spent 28 minutes in jail instead of 40 years. Based on Sisson's sentence, Fastow, without a college degree, should be spending the next 4 1/2 million years in jail, give or take a couple hundred thousand years for good behavior.

Yes, Sisson had a gun. It was a pellet pistol; it was not fired; nobody was hurt. The 2001 California energy crisis precipitated by Enron shenanigans resulted in several deaths. Why were there no manslaughter charges brought? Surely because the Enron co-conspirators were loaded with diplomas. There were no allegations of drug use in the Sisson case; Fastow's lawyers requested a specific prison where he could get treatment for his addiction to anxiety drugs. Why were there no prescription abuse charges? Clearly, the educational attainments of the criminal.

Sisson's accomplice, Monica Marie Bennet (no college degree), received eight years for driving Sisson and his ill-gotten $400 from the liquor store. Fastow's college-educated accomplice, Delainey, was sentenced to roughly 12 minutes for every $400 he helped steal. The college-educated Despain received no jail time, and he was fined roughly 2/100 of a cent for every dollar he stole. At that rate Bennet should pay a 9-cent fine.

So there you have it. Not only do college graduates steal 112, 500 times as much money, they pay one-kerbillionth of the fines and do one-gazillionth of the prison time per dollar if they get caught. I'm not sure about these last two figures, actually, since I get a little lost with all the zeros. I tested out of the math requirement for my college degree.

But Cody: Don't break the law until you get that sheepskin, son.

TOM LUTZ teaches at UC Riverside's Palm Desert Graduate Center. He's the author of "Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America."

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2006

Death by Good Intentions

Death by Good Intentions

By David R. Dow
Sunday, October 15, 2006; B07, Washington Post

In two weeks the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the nation's premier abolitionist organization, will meet to celebrate its success in reducing popular support for the death penalty and to discuss tactics for continuing the effort. There is something its members ought to know, however: The tactic that has eroded popular support for the death penalty is at the same time making it easier to go ahead with executions.

Many death penalty abolitionists operate in the belief that as soon as they identify one innocent execution victim, the death penalty will die a sudden and convulsive death. This belief is chimerical. We already know the names of a number of wrongly executed people, for all the good it's done.

An investigation by the Chicago Tribune revealed that Cameron Willingham, executed in Texas on Feb. 17, 2004, was almost certainly innocent. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle demonstrated that Ruben Cantu, executed in Texas on Aug. 24, 1993, was innocent. Professor Sam Gross of the University of Michigan has identified more than a hundred innocent men who have ended up on death row.

Proponents of the death penalty nevertheless continue to say that no one has yet proved innocence in these cases because none of them involved DNA. So the abolitionists search for DNA. One day they will find it, and when they do, we will add one more name to the list, and some district attorney will apologize and say regretfully that mistakes happen. And the machine will grind on.

It will grind on because the focus on innocence has insidiously distracted the courts. When I represent a client in a death penalty case, judges want to know whether there is any chance that client is innocent. If he isn't, then they are not much concerned about anything else I have to say.

Oh, so blacks were excluded from the jury? So what, he's guilty; any jury would have convicted him. Oh, so police hid evidence? Big deal, there was plenty of other evidence that he did it. Oh, so his lawyer slept through trial? Why does that matter? Clarence Darrow himself couldn't have kept him from the gallows.

This past week the Supreme Court agreed for the second time to hear the appeal of LaRoyce Smith, a death row inmate in Texas, because the Texas courts, convinced of Smith's guilt, believed they could therefore ignore the fact that his right to a fair trial was violated. Yet the Supreme Court itself is partly to blame. In the recent case of Kansas v. Marsh , Justices Antonin Scalia and David Souter engaged in an extraordinary debate over the persuasiveness of Gross's study and whether any innocent person has been executed in the modern death penalty era.

Of course, only the most naive person -- or perhaps the most disingenuous -- would think that we miraculously identify everyone who is innocent just in the nick of time. But what was even more astonishing about this debate was that the arcane legal issue in Marsh had absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether Marsh was innocent or even with the issue of innocence in general.

Innocence is a distraction because most people on death row are not in fact innocent, and the possibility of executing an innocent man is not even remotely the best reason for abolishing the death penalty.

The best reason is that killing is wrong. The second-best is that the death penalty is unfair: the system favors white skin and devalues dark; it favors the wealthy and penalizes the poor. The third-best reason is that it tempts the government to cheat, and the government does cheat routinely; police lie and prosecutors withhold evidence. The fourth is that it is economically unsound; we have failing public schools, citizens without adequate health care and potholes in our streets, yet we squander a billion dollars carrying out unnecessary executions.

Innocence is important, but death penalty opponents, of all people, should beware of diminishing the best and more powerful reasons for abolition and in the process, making the execution of the guilty acceptable -- because it is not.

The writer, university distinguished professor at the University of Houston Law Center, has represented more than 75 death row inmates. His most recent book is "Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/13/AR2006101301414.html

Posted by lois at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2006

Ithaca NY: First Annual Locks Conference Oct. 21, 2006

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...

Mumia Abu-Jamal
LIVE FROM DEATH ROW
special welcome address

Harold Wilson
122nd innocent person released from death row

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

Kym Clark
Founder, Prison Families Community Forum
New York Campaign for Telephone Justice

Ewuare Osayande
People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism (POWER)

Vanessa Johnson
presenting HAIR TALES...

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

plus....
THE AFTER PARTY....
evening EDU-TAINMENT featuring
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
Ewuare Osayande
cypher:dissident
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.

Want to $upport S.T.A.M.P. without spending a dime?
Choose STAMP as your charity at http://www.goodsearch.com.
Search the web using Yahoo. $upport S.T.A.M.P. at the same time!

Posted by lois at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2006

CO: Private Prisons Fined Over Staffing Shortages

Private Prisons Fined Over Staffing Shortages
Burlington Prison Had 567 Positions Open

POSTED: 12:36 pm MDT October 13, 2006
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Six private prisons in the state are being fined $131,000 for failing to staff mandatory positions. The Colorado Department of Corrections said it is the second time penalties have been levied since a riot broke out in 2004 at the Crowley County Correctional Facility, and an audit exposed staffing problems at the prisons. The department released documents this week that showed the six prisons had 1,071 vacant positions from February to May. The Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington received the largest fine of more than $83,100 for having 567 positions open. It was previously docked more than $103,000 for leaving 701 jobs vacant between November and January. The center is operated by Corrections Corporation of America, which also runs the Crowley County Correctional Facility.

Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/10071629/detail.html

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

Iowa: Change in K-9 Policy

Prisons Change K-9 Policy
WHOTV
October 13th, 2006 - Iowa's prisons are changing guidelines for using police dogs with uncooperative prisoners.

Until now, Iowa was one of five states to use police dogs when trying to get a prisoner out of his cell. The department of corrections says the dogs were only used when a prisoner would not cooperate.

But now there's a change in policy. It comes after the Human Rights Watch released a report called "Attack dogs used against prisoners."

The Iowa Department of Corrections issued a release saying that now "K-9's will only be used in cases of life threatening incidents."

The governor's office tells us Governor Vilsack agrees with the change.

Posted by lois at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2006

New Study estimates toll of war in Iraq to be 655,000 people

655,000: The toll of war in Iraq
Survey suggests violent death rate in Iraq is now running at one every three minutes By Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Ben Russell
Published: 12 October 2006
The Independent, UK

The human cost of the war in Iraq could be far higher than previously thought. A new survey says more than 650,000 Iraqis have lost their lives as a consequence of the invasion by the United States and Britain, with an estimated 200,000 violent deaths directly attributable to Allied forces.

The new figure is much larger than all previous estimates - more than 20 times higher than President George Bush claimed 11 months ago - and will add considerable weight to the calls of those seeking a withdrawal of troops.

The 654,965 deaths estimated to have resulted from the invasion represent about 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population. It means people have been dying at a rate of about 560 a day, equivalent to one death every three minutes, or less

Two years ago, a study by Dr Les Roberts and a team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, estimated that at least 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the war. This new survey, conducted by the same team and based on similar methodology but using a larger sample, suggests the situation is getting worse rather than better - a conclusion at odds with claims made by President Bush.

Dr Roberts said: "Yes [this finding was a surprise]. I didn't realise that things there were twice as bad as when we carried out our first survey in 2004. I did not know it was that much." Dr Roberts said he expected there would be many who would seek to undermine the report, as happened two years ago. But he said: "Let's have these people tell us what we have done wrong and what the true numbers are. Our study is pretty easy to verify. If they go to a graveyard in a small village and ask how many people are being put in the ground..."

The survey was overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. Epidemiology is considered a cornerstone methodology for public health research, and is highly regarded in evidence-based medicine.

The study, published by The Lancet, was based on a survey of 1,849 households at 47 random locations in Iraq this summer. A team of Iraqi doctors asked heads of households how many members had lost their lives in the year before the invasion in March 2003 and then in the three subsequent years.

In 92 per cent of the 87 per cent of households where the questioners asked to see death certificates, the households were able to provide them.

The findings were then extrapolated to match the total estimated population of Iraq. The survey concluded Iraq's mortality rate has increased from 5.5 people per 1,000 prior to the invasion to 13.3 in the period since.

The survey also found the overwhelming majority of the 650,000-plus deaths between March 2003 and July 2006 were "violent deaths" and included civilians, insurgents and Iraqi security forces. About 75 per cent were men. About 50,000 deaths were attributed to other causes such as a disrupted health service, the exodus of doctors, insufficient water supplies and disruption to infrastructure - all related to the war.

Of the 601,027 violent deaths, 31 per cent were directly attributed to Allied forces, with 24 per cent attributed to "other" causes and 45 per cent attributed to an "unknown" cause.

Fifty-six per cent of all violent deaths were caused by gunshots, 13 per cent by car bombs, 14, per cent by other explosions and 13 per cent by air strikes. The number of people killed by car bombs increased markedly between June 2005 and June 2006, as did the total violent deaths.

"In Iraq, as with other conflicts, civilians bear the consequences of warfare," the survey's authors concluded. "The combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone."

The US and Britain have long insisted they have not recorded Iraqi death figures. Yesterday, Mr Bush sought to dismiss the survey, claiming without elaboration that its methodology was flawed. "I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General George Casey [the commander of US forces in Iraq] and neither do Iraqi officials," he said.

"I do know a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence."

The Foreign Office - which also questioned the previous mortality survey's findings - said it was studying the report. It claimed continuing violence in Iraq meant troops had to remain to support the Iraqi government.

Others said the survey confirmed US and British forces were part of the problem. The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, said: "Time is running out. There is a desperate need for a new strategy led not by the US, but by the UN, providing for a peace process with a reinvigorated reconstruction programme and concerted... engagement."

Andrew Murray, chairperson of the Stop the War Coalition said every night people were confronted with images of carnage from Iraq. "Two years ago, some people were willing to believe it was going to work out for the best but it has become all too obvious that is not the case," he said.

John McDonnell, chairman of the Socialist Campaign group of MPs, said: "The absolutely shocking scale of casualties The Lancet has revealed demonstrates the disastrous decision of the Cabinet to back Bush's decision to invade Iraq."

In the US, the Iraq war is one of the key issues of November's mid-term elections in which the Democrats are seeking to break the Republican stranglehold. Polls suggest Democrats could seize control of the House and possibly the Senate.

The last report

When The Lancet first published research claiming that the death toll in Iraq had reached 100,000 in the 18 months since the invasion, the reports unleashed a political firestorm. The figure, based on data collected by scientists in Baltimore, was far above any official estimate then available.

The British Government, and the Pentagon, tried to cast doubt on the research, but it prompted calls for a full inquiry into the scale of civilian deaths since the invasion. There is, however, still no official estimate of the death toll among Iraqi civilians.

The human cost of the war in Iraq could be far higher than previously thought. A new survey says more than 650,000 Iraqis have lost their lives as a consequence of the invasion by the United States and Britain, with an estimated 200,000 violent deaths directly attributable to Allied forces.

The new figure is much larger than all previous estimates - more than 20 times higher than President George Bush claimed 11 months ago - and will add considerable weight to the calls of those seeking a withdrawal of troops.

The 654,965 deaths estimated to have resulted from the invasion represent about 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population. It means people have been dying at a rate of about 560 a day, equivalent to one death every three minutes, or less

Two years ago, a study by Dr Les Roberts and a team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, estimated that at least 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the war. This new survey, conducted by the same team and based on similar methodology but using a larger sample, suggests the situation is getting worse rather than better - a conclusion at odds with claims made by President Bush.

Dr Roberts said: "Yes [this finding was a surprise]. I didn't realise that things there were twice as bad as when we carried out our first survey in 2004. I did not know it was that much." Dr Roberts said he expected there would be many who would seek to undermine the report, as happened two years ago. But he said: "Let's have these people tell us what we have done wrong and what the true numbers are. Our study is pretty easy to verify. If they go to a graveyard in a small village and ask how many people are being put in the ground..."

The survey was overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. Epidemiology is considered a cornerstone methodology for public health research, and is highly regarded in evidence-based medicine.

The study, published by The Lancet, was based on a survey of 1,849 households at 47 random locations in Iraq this summer. A team of Iraqi doctors asked heads of households how many members had lost their lives in the year before the invasion in March 2003 and then in the three subsequent years.

In 92 per cent of the 87 per cent of households where the questioners asked to see death certificates, the households were able to provide them.

The findings were then extrapolated to match the total estimated population of Iraq. The survey concluded Iraq's mortality rate has increased from 5.5 people per 1,000 prior to the invasion to 13.3 in the period since.

The survey also found the overwhelming majority of the 650,000-plus deaths between March 2003 and July 2006 were "violent deaths" and included civilians, insurgents and Iraqi security forces. About 75 per cent were men. About 50,000 deaths were attributed to other causes such as a disrupted health service, the exodus of doctors, insufficient water supplies and disruption to infrastructure - all related to the war.

Of the 601,027 violent deaths, 31 per cent were directly attributed to Allied forces, with 24 per cent attributed to "other" causes and 45 per cent attributed to an "unknown" cause.

Fifty-six per cent of all violent deaths were caused by gunshots, 13 per cent by car bombs, 14, per cent by other explosions and 13 per cent by air strikes. The number of people killed by car bombs increased markedly between June 2005 and June 2006, as did the total violent deaths.

"In Iraq, as with other conflicts, civilians bear the consequences of warfare," the survey's authors concluded. "The combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone."

The US and Britain have long insisted they have not recorded Iraqi death figures. Yesterday, Mr Bush sought to dismiss the survey, claiming without elaboration that its methodology was flawed. "I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General George Casey [the commander of US forces in Iraq] and neither do Iraqi officials," he said.

"I do know a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence."

The Foreign Office - which also questioned the previous mortality survey's findings - said it was studying the report. It claimed continuing violence in Iraq meant troops had to remain to support the Iraqi government.

Others said the survey confirmed US and British forces were part of the problem. The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, said: "Time is running out. There is a desperate need for a new strategy led not by the US, but by the UN, providing for a peace process with a reinvigorated reconstruction programme and concerted... engagement."

Andrew Murray, chairperson of the Stop the War Coalition said every night people were confronted with images of carnage from Iraq. "Two years ago, some people were willing to believe it was going to work out for the best but it has become all too obvious that is not the case," he said.

John McDonnell, chairman of the Socialist Campaign group of MPs, said: "The absolutely shocking scale of casualties The Lancet has revealed demonstrates the disastrous decision of the Cabinet to back Bush's decision to invade Iraq."

In the US, the Iraq war is one of the key issues of November's mid-term elections in which the Democrats are seeking to break the Republican stranglehold. Polls suggest Democrats could seize control of the House and possibly the Senate.

The last report

When The Lancet first published research claiming that the death toll in Iraq had reached 100,000 in the 18 months since the invasion, the reports unleashed a political firestorm. The figure, based on data collected by scientists in Baltimore, was far above any official estimate then available.

The British Government, and the Pentagon, tried to cast doubt on the research, but it prompted calls for a full inquiry into the scale of civilian deaths since the invasion. There is, however, still no official estimate of the death toll among Iraqi civilians.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article1842559.ece

Posted by lois at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

ACLU Report VA: Assessing VA's Death Penalty Finds Numerous Flaws

ACLU OF VIRGINIA E-NEWS
October 12, 2006
A new report released today, Equal Justice and Fair Play, finds that Virginia’s capital punishment system fully meets only 12 of the 85 criteria established by the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment as essential to a fairly administered death penalty system. Produced by Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, this is the third major report in the last six years on flaws in Virginia's capital punishment process. The first two--Unequal, Unfair and Irreversible (2000) and Broken Justice (2003)-- were published by the ACLU of Virginia.
October 12, 2006

New Report Assessing Virginia’s Death

Penalty Finds Numerous Flaws

Only 12 of 85 recommended procedures for a fairly administered death
penalty system are completely satisfied -- 47 fail completely

Richmond, VA – A study released today sheds new light on the scope and breadth of the flaws in Virginia’s death penalty system. Equal Justice and Fair Play looks at how Virginia’s procedures stack up against 85 recommended procedures for a fairly administered death penalty system. It finds that only 12 of the 85 are fully satisfied, and that 47 completely fail to satisfy the recommendations.

Published by Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and endorsed by the ACLU of Virginia and 12 other Virginia organizations, Equal Justice and Fair Play is the third major report in recent years addressing inequities in Virginia’s capital punishment system. The two previous reports, Unequal, Unfair and Irreversible (2000) and Broken Justice (2003), were published by the ACLU of Virginia.

The previous reports focused on broad issues such as the quality of defense counsel, prosecutorial misconduct and discretion, judicial review, and racial discrimination. Equal Justice and Fair Play examines many of these issues again, but breaks them down into more discrete parts. It also looks at police procedures and investigations, pointing out additional inadequacies not fully explored in any previous report on the death penalty in Virginia.

“From anecdotal information and the previous reports, Virginia’s lawmakers have been aware for years of major problems with Virginia’s death penalty system,” said ACLU of Virginia executive director Kent Willis. “With this new report, they now have a very specific list to work from.”

In 2000, after 13 Illinois death row inmates were exonerated, then Governor George Ryan imposed a moratorium on the death penalty and convened a commission to examine the state’s capital punishment system. In 2002, the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment recommended 85 specific procedures that should be in place for a properly and justly administered capital punishment system. Equal Justice and Fair Play compares Virginia’s existing procedures with the 85 recommendations made by the Illinois commission.

A copy of Equal Justice and Fair Play, as well as the two previous reports, can be found on the ACLU of Virginia website at www.acluva.org/pages/publications.html

Posted by lois at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)

New Sentencing Project Report: Mixed Picture on Felony Disenfranchisment

October 11, 2006
Mixed Picture on Felons' Voting Rights
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Almost 4 million Americans who have completed their prison terms remain unable to vote because of laws in most states that prevent them from doing so, according to a new report. But moves to restore those voting rights are spreading -- even making the Nov. 7 ballot in Rhode Island.

The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a report Wednesday that 16 states have expanded voting access for ex-convicts in the past 10 years, enabling more than 600,000 people to regain voting rights.

Most of the changes have been made by legislatures, including those in New Mexico and Nebraska, which repealed lifetime prohibitions on felons voting.

This Election Day, however, a statewide electorate will have a say for the first time on a measure specifically aimed at expanding such voting rights. Rhode Islanders will consider a proposed state constitutional amendment that would allow felons to vote upon release from prison; they currently cannot vote until completing probation and parole, as is the case in more than 30 states.

The measure is supported by a coalition of civic groups, as well as by Police Chief Dean Esserman of Providence, the state's largest city. Its opponents include Republican Gov. Don Carcieri, who argues that felons haven't fully paid their dues to society until they complete parole.

Ryan King, the Sentencing Project policy analyst who authored the new report, predicted the Rhode Island measure would pass, and contended that most Americans support voting rights for people who've served their sentences.

''A lot of citizens find this policy (of disenfranchisement) doesn't mesh with their vision of America, that every person should have the right to vote,'' King said in a telephone interview.

In some states, the debate over voting rights has been complicated by partisan skirmishing. A disproportionate number of disenfranchised felons are black -- a generally pro-Democratic voting bloc -- and there has been some debate over whether reforms would aid Democratic candidates.

However, King noted that some of the recent reform measures have been signed by Republican governors and enjoyed broad bipartisan backing.

According to his report, 5.3 million Americans will be unable to vote on Nov. 7 because of laws affecting felons. About 1.4 million are in prison, the rest have been released.

The report also said that, in 2004, roughly 1 in 12 African-Americans was disenfranchised because of a felony conviction, a rate nearly five times that of non-blacks.

Only two states -- Maine and Vermont -- allow prison inmates to vote. In 36 states, felons on parole cannot vote, while 11 states have lifetime voting bans that affect at least some felons.

''Any reason for optimism on the policy front should be tempered by the reality that United States disenfranchisement laws remain some of the most restrictive in the world,'' King wrote in the report. ''Continued momentum to expand voting rights is essential.''

Among those who would benefit if the Rhode Island measure passes is Andres Idarraga, who served more than six years in prison for drug dealing and gun possession, and is now a student at Brown University studying literature and economics. Under the current law, he would not be able to vote until completing probation in 2037.

''But I want to make a difference now,'' he said in a campaign ad. ''I need a voice.''

^------

On the Net:

Sentencing Project: http://www.sentencingproject.org/

Posted by lois at 01:44 PM | Comments (0)

Report: 5 states use dogs inside prisons

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Wednesday, October 11, 2006 ·
Report: 5 states use dogs inside prisons

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK -- Five U.S. state prison systems allow the use of trained attack dogs to control inmates, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued Wednesday.

The report, "Cruel and Degrading: The use of dogs for cell extractions in U.S. prisons," says policies in Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah allow guards to use "aggressive, unmuzzled" dogs to compel uncooperative inmates to leave their cells. It said dogs may be ordered to bite prisoners if they resist.

"The entire world has seen the photo of an Abu Ghraib detainee crouched in terror before a snarling dog, but the use of attack dogs against prisoners here in the U.S. has been a well-kept secret," said Jamie Fellner, U.S. director of Human Rights Watch. "Longtime corrections professionals were appalled when we told them that guards in some states use dogs on prisoners."

"Human Rights Watch knows of no other country in the world that authorizes the use of dogs to attack prisoners who will not voluntarily leave their cells," the report said.

The independent group, based in New York, said it does not object to the use of dogs to patrol prison grounds.

The report notes that in South Dakota, Utah and Delaware, dogs are rarely used in cells, if at all. In Connecticut, dogs were used in 20 cases in 2005, and in Iowa in 63 cases between March 2005 and March 2006, it says.

However, a spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Correction, Brian Garnett, said the number of Connecticut cases is closer to a half-dozen a year. He said the prisons currently have 22 dogs, and have used dogs since the mid-1980s.

"The Connecticut Department of Correction has only used trained canines for cell extraction under extreme circumstances and on minimal occasions," Garnett said. "When an inmate presents an imminent danger to staff or the public and only after all viable options have been exhausted."

Human Rights Watch said prison officials it interviewed in Connecticut and Iowa said using dogs to remove prisoners from cells reduces injuries to guards and keeps prisons safer.

---
On the Net:
Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_US_Prisons_Attack_Dogs.html

Posted by lois at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2006

Women Incarcerated at CA Institution for Women Failed to Get Basic Health Care

Corona inmates said they sometimes were denied the basics. Some changes have been made.
By Maeve Reston
Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
October 7, 2006

Some prisoners held at the California Institution for Women in Corona failed to get basic health and dental care and told researchers they had often waited months to see a doctor or get their prescriptions filled, according to a study conducted by an advocacy group and the San Bernardino County Department of Health.

Study Faults Women's Prison Healthcare

The inmates, interviewed in July and August of 2005, also told researchers they had often skipped visits to the prison doctor because of a $5 mandatory co-payment, which they say they cannot afford when they are making 28 to 30 cents an hour.

One woman said that there was no follow-up after she had surgery, and others reported they had never had a PAP smear, a standard test for cervical cancer.

The study, released Friday, was conducted by Kim Carter, who cycled in and out of prison 20 times before she got her life on track and became an advocate for women in prison.

Carter's report focused both on women in prison and those out on parole - and she is calling for more attention from public officials to the difficulties the women face when they reenter society.

She enlisted the help of statisticians at the county Department of Health, who helped her develop the questions for the prison focus groups and analyzed the data from both prisoner and parolee interviews.

"I was looking at women who are recycling in and out of prison, like I was, and their story wasn't being told," Carter said.

A number of inmates interviewed for the study said they faced major hurdles when they tried to enroll in drug rehabilitation programs, either because their offenses did not make them eligible or because the programs were full.

There have been major changes in the state's prison healthcare system since Carter conducted the interviews.

In February, a U.S. district judge seized control of the state's $1.2-billion prison healthcare system and transferred it to the jurisdiction of a federal receiver to improve conditions.

At the women's prison, Warden Dawn Davison said the institution was already addressing many of the problems highlighted in Carter's report. In the last several years, Davison said, she has hired more medical, dental and mental health staff to deal with the long waits for care. The prison also brought in a community college program and added five teachers to respond to complaints about the lack of access to education.

The prison plans soon to allow some pregnant inmates to keep their babies with them in prison for as long as 18 months before the inmates are paroled into special community centers.

"We've done a lot of good things at CIW to really improve those conditions that the ladies were talking about," Davison said.

Carter, who serves on a special commission within the California Department of Corrections that is working on improving conditions for female inmates, said she is heartened by the attention that prison healthcare is getting at the state level but hopes that city, state and county officials will pay more attention to the fact that women on parole are continually denied jobs and housing on the basis of their criminal records - often leading them to return to crime.

She is pushing for a new "re-entry commission" that would help track parolees in San Bernardino County, which has one of the largest parolee populations in the state.

"Right now, nobody is doing anything". This hasn't been a priority for anyone," Carter said. "People tend to only want to look at the prison system itself, when the prison system is just one piece."

Carter began the study, "Invisible Bars," after launching her foundation, Time for Change, in 2002, and opening two sober-living homes for women on parole in San Bernardino. With $25,000 in seed money from the California Endowment, a private health foundation that gives money to community organizations, she launched another phase of her project: face-to-face interviews with 152 women on parole in the county.

She asked them about many of the same issues discussed with women in the prison - including health needs, living conditions and their experience trying to find a job after prison.

Of the female parolees interviewed, researchers found:

* More than 80% said they did not have jobs - often because prospective employers refused to consider them after finding out they had been in prison.
* 41% said they were homeless.
* More than 60% said they did not have health coverage, and the majority of the women covered were on Medi-Cal or local programs for indigents.
* 38% said they went to emergency rooms for healthcare.

San Bernardino County Supervisor Josie Gonzales, who attended Carter's presentation Friday, said county and city officials are beginning to focus on providing a more supportive environment for former inmates to help cut crime.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prison7oct07,1,2368538.story
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

The report can be found at http://www.timeforchange.us/news/9_12_06.pdf

Posted by lois at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)

The Failing American Prison System

"Just as national security planners faked a "missile gap" in order to justify extravagant expenditures for defense, criminal justice policy makers are currently faking a "crime gap" in order to justify similar expenditures on prisons. Just as the military- industrial complex is a means of exercising international control so is the prison-industrial complex a means of exercising domestic control. This system is less about keeping the streets safe or rehabilitating criminals and more about serving a dual role in social management. Prisons are used to warehouse members of the unwanted social groups. Simultaneously, the job creation from the expansion of the prison system serves as a means of partially compensating and pacifying elements of the population negatively affected by outsourcing, automation, and farm failure."

The Failing American Prison System

By Lucas Power
Posted: 10/10/2006 Pine Magazine
http://pine-magazine.com/content.php?id=229

A “tough on crime” approach has guided criminal justice policy in the United States since the 1970s. This approach has involved hiring more police, building more prisons, and handing out longer and more certain prison terms for a variety of offenses, many of them non-violent or drug related. Although scholars dispute the impact of such measures, they generally agree that these steps stem in part from widespread public concern over crime and a desire for the criminal justice system to treat suspects and criminals more punitively.

Prior research, however, has found that racial prejudice partly underlies punitive sentiments among the public. In addition, this mentality is not the result of skyrocketing crime rates, but a combination of unwarranted public hysteria over crime generated by the mass media and influence over the political process by groups that profit from mass imprisonment. This tough on crime image obscures some harsh realities about our system of incarceration.

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 714 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Belarus, Bermuda and Russia (all 532 per 100k). Almost 58 percent of the world’s countries have rates below 150 per 100,000 people. By the end of 2004, one in every 138 U.S. residents was incarcerated in State or Federal prison or in a local jail. Although the violent crime rate in the US still dwarfs those of many western European countries, the rate of violent crime in the United States has decreased since 1991. In 1980 about half the people entering state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been convicted of a violent crime.

The enormous increase in America's inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences of non-violent and drug offenders. Prisoners sentenced for drug offenses constituted the largest group of Federal inmates (55 percent) in 2003, half of those prisoners were low-level offenders, such as mules or street-dealers. Only 11 percent qualified as high-level dealers. Currently, the U.S. nonviolent prisoner population is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.

So, if the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, why has the number of people in prison or jail risen by 50 percent? Steven R. Donziger, an attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons. If crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower."

A quick look at the numbers shows that perhaps there is more to the prison boom than civic interest. One of the fastest growing businesses in the private sector is private corrections companies.

Private investment in the prison industry is attractive to many becuase it is deemed a “recession proof” industry. Investment firm Smith Barney is a part owner of a prison in Florida. American Express and General Electric have invested in private prison construction in Oklahoma and Tennessee. Correctional Corporation of America, one of the largest private prison owners, already operates internationally, with more than 48 facilities in 11 states, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Under contract by government to run jails and prisons, and paid a fixed sum per prisoner, the profit motive mandates that these firms operate as cheaply and efficiently as possible. This means lower wages for staff, no unions, and fewer services for prisoners. Private contracts also mean less public scrutiny. By cutting corners with substandard diets, extreme overcrowding, and abuses by poorly trained personnel, prison owners have made billions. The industry conducts trade shows and elaborate conventions, maintains mail-order catalogs and involves thousands of corporations. These include construction and architectural firms, Wall Street financiers, real estate brokers and developers, manufacturers, telephone service providers, health care companies and countless others, with a high level of profiteering and price-gouging involved.

Communication companies like AT&T, Sprint, and MCI provide inmates with exorbitant phone calling rates, often six times the normal long distance charge. The nearly two million inmates in the United States are ideal customers: phone calls are one of their few links to the outside world most of their calls must be made collect and they are in no position to switch long distance carriers. A pay phone at a prison can generate as much as $15,000 a year about five times the revenue of a typical pay phone on the street. It is estimated that inmate calls generate a billion dollars or more in revenues each year. The business has become so lucrative that MCI installed its inmate phone service, Maximum Security, throughout the California prison system at no charge. As part of the deal it also offered the California Department of Corrections a 32 percent share of all the revenues from inmates' phone calls. MCI Maximum Security adds a $3 surcharge to every call. When free enterprise intersects with a literally captive market, abuses are bound to occur. MCI Maximum Security and North American Intelecom have both been caught overcharging for calls made by inmates. In one state MCI was adding an additional minute to every call.

As the prison industry has grown, it has assumed many of the attributes long associated with the defense industry. The line between the public interest and private interests has blurred. In much the same way that retired admirals and generals have long found employment with defense contractors, correctional officials are now leaving the public sector for jobs with firms that supply the prison industry. These career opportunities did not exist a generation ago, and this revolving door holds all the same dangers from the military-industrial complex. Just as national security planners faked a "missile gap" in order to justify extravagant expenditures for defense, criminal justice policy makers are currently faking a "crime gap" in order to justify similar expenditures on prisons. Just as the military- industrial complex is a means of exercising international control so is the prison-industrial complex a means of exercising domestic control. This system is less about keeping the streets safe or rehabilitating criminals and more about serving a dual role in social management. Prisons are used to warehouse members of the unwanted social groups. Simultaneously, the job creation from the expansion of the prison system serves as a means of partially compensating and pacifying elements of the population negatively affected by outsourcing, automation, and farm failure.

The proliferation of such an industry would seem to be a textbook illustration of political repression, particularly if repression is to be defined as an effort by haves to prevent have-nots from advancing themselves into becoming the status quo. The over- whelming majority of persons herded through the penal system tend to be from the socially disadvantaged sectors. Under federal law, it takes only five grams of crack cocaine to trigger a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. But it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine (100 times as much) to trigger this same sentence. The political repression becomes even more brazen when it is recognized that these same persons are losing their legal rights to participate in the political process. Also, the permanent status of prisoners as "convicted felons" renders their labor less marketable and therefore lessens their collective income.

Lucas Power is just a simple man trying to make his way in the universe. He stays in Atlanta, where he paces back and forth in his apartment, looking savage and obsessing over people who are trying to take over the world.

Posted by lois at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2006

War on Drugs Victimizes Women

War on Drugs victimizes women
By LOIS AHRENS
Op-Ed- Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
We live in Orwellian times. We are asked to believe that the peacekeeper missile delivers peace and declaring war on a nation will bring democracy. Now Sally Van Wright, soon to be assistant superintendent of the Hampden County House of Correction, a new jail for women, states ''We incarcerate to set free.''

Despite the beliefs of jailers, when the public is polled, as they were in a study by Peter Hart (''Changing Public Attitudes Toward the Criminal Justice System,'' February 2002), they say incarceration cannot solve the deep social and economic problems that drive crime, nor is criminalizing addiction more viable than treating it as an illness. Jailing women does not set them free. It also drains money from programs that could treat drug addiction, prevent and treat childhood sexual abuse, and fund quality education.

Quality education and good jobs are real crime deterrents. These are long-term solutions; but right now we can alleviate the need for new bigger jails. Approximately half of the women being held at the Hampden County jail are there because they are too poor to make $200-$500 bail. Often their inability to make bail means that they and their children will become homeless and remain homeless, further destabilizing their life and the life of their children. Sheriffs around the country are creating programs that help rather than hinder a person's ability to get their life back on track. Improving release procedures, creating bail reform and pre-trial diversion programs, allows for release pending trial, freeing jail space for those who might abscond or the few women who are truly dangerous.

The women to be incarcerated in the new regional jail in Chicopee will come from four counties: Hampshire, Hampden, Franklin and Berkshire. While the jail location will change, the life-histories of the women will remain the same. Kate Decou, the former assistant superintendent of the Hampden County jail, wrote in the Journal of Correctional Health in 1998 ''that 75 percent of women reported histories of sexual and physical violence, 82 percent were arrested for drug offences, 15 percent had severe mental illness, 50 percent reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, 33 percent were homeless upon arrest and 85 percent were mothers.''

It now costs more than $3,600 for one woman to stay in jail for one month. Eighty-two percent of women at the Hampden County jail - pre-trial and sentenced - are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. A May 2006 NIH study found ''that society earns $7 in benefits for every $1 spent on addiction treatment.'' Researchers found that the average stay in treatment costs $1,600. For each person included in a nine-month period, treatment yielded $11,500 in benefits, including $7,500 in savings on crime and incarceration-related costs and $3,400 in increased earnings.

If new programs sound expensive, just the opposite is true. The yearly cost of western Massachusetts jails is more than $80 million. When the new regional jail for women opens in Chicopee, the yearly total will reach more than $100 million.

While $100 million for four jails is a lot of money, it represents only a fraction of the actual costs. A group of researchers have spent the past two years attempting to calculate social costs of incarcerating a parent who is convicted of a drug felony. The calculation includes the cost of policing, prison, private and public defense, child care, foster care, and parole/probation supervision, and loss of productively of the sentenced person. The astounding total is $776,297 per person. The research project is ongoing because the list of costs continues to grow.

Research demonstrates that the most expensive and least effective approach to addiction is incarceration. Yet in Massachusetts and throughout the country, funds for substance abuse treatment have been severely reduced. The inevitable question is: Why is addiction criminalized instead of addressed as a public health issue?

In 1975, the total jail and prison population in the United States was 250,000 men and women. Today the United States is the largest incarcerator worldwide, with 2.2 million people in jails and prisons. Between 1986 and 1999, the incarceration rate for women for drug offences grew by 888 percent. This unprecedented rise is due to the War on Drugs, which replaced judicial discretion in sentencing with long mandatory sentences and over-policing in poor, African American and Hispanic neighborhoods. Drug arrests are easier to make in inner-city neighborhoods where drug markets operate more openly than in middle- class areas. Policing that targets inner-city neighborhoods as the primary method for addressing the drug problem generates arrests of drug users and small-time dealers and fills the jails but does little to curb the drug trade.

Women especially have been caught in the War on Drugs since the war has been fought not against drug ''kingpins'' but on small drug dealers and drug users who sell small quantities of drugs to maintain their own habits. Often women receive long sentences because they do not have information to trade in plea bargains and end up getting longer sentences than those with larger amounts of drugs.

In Hamden County especially, the use of ''school zone'' sentencing enhancements have resulted in longer sentences for women. In 1989, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law requiring a two-year minimum mandatory incarceration for dealing or possessing drugs within 1,000 feet of a primary, secondary or vocational school. The two years are in addition to any other punishment imposed. ''An Empirical Study of School Zone Law in 3 Cities in MA'' found that in Springfield, ''Although less than 1 percent of the drug dealing cases involved sales to minors, approximately 80 percent occurred within school zones.'' This is because in Springfield, like other urban areas, almost the entire city constitutes a ''school zone.'' For women in Springfield, this means that when they are arrested for possession, they accept a plea bargain of two years jail time. The prosecution and use of school zone ''enhancements'' pack the jail.

The War on Drugs and the destruction it causes to individuals, families and communities falls disproportionately on African Americans. As researched by the Washington-based Sentencing Project, African Americans constitute 12 percent of the nation's drug users, the same percentage as white and Hispanic drug users. However, African Americans are 38 percent of those arrested for drug possession; receive 59 percent of drug possession convictions and are 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug possession.

All of us need to be outraged by the double standard of justice reflected in a drug policy that drives mass incarceration. The War on Drugs, its policing, prosecution and sentencing could not exist without the racism which fuels it.

Lois Ahrens, a Northampton resident, is director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project, a national organization working for prison reform. Its Web site is at www.realcostofprisons.org

Posted by lois at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

October 09, 2006

Sensenbrenner: Immigration Profiteer

Sensenbrenner: Immigration Profiteer
Alexandra Walker | Thursday, October 5, 2006 11:29 AM
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/05/sensenbrenner_immigration_profiteer.php

Rep. James Sensenbrenner is at the center of what appears to be a classic case of hypocrisy and crony capitalism. In case you've forgotten, Sensenbrenner is the chief advocate of a get-tough approach to undocumented immigration. He rails against illegal immigration as this nation's biggest national security threat and pushes harsh enforcement and builiding a wall around America as solutions. Now a new report reveals that Rep. James Sensenbrenner is not only making money from companies that use undocumented labor but also from his investments in firms receiving contracts for the government's border security program that Sensenbrenner champions. No wonder he has pursued the immigration issue so fiercely he's earned the name "pit bull ."

Yesterday, Roberto Lovato of New American Media published ananalysis of millionaire Sensenbrenner's financial portfolio. He found "that the congressman has invested in companies that have directly hired or subcontracted with employers who hire undocumented workers" and "stands to benefit from investments in companies contracted by the federal government to provide services he has proposed as part of his immigration reform legislation."

And to make matters dirtier, the corporation in which Sensenbrenner has stock is none other than Halliburton:

Drawing especially strong criticism are the $86,500 in stocks Sensenbrenner holds in the construction and infrastructure colossus Halliburton. The Texas-based giant has been the subject of Senate hearings into its labor practices in the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina. News reports and several panelists at Senate hearings have stated that Halliburton used subcontractors hiring hundreds, perhaps thousands of undocumented workers as part of no-bid federal contracts to cleanup Belle Chasse Naval base and other military facilities in the devastated region. Halliburton has also secured a $385 million Department of Homeland Security contract to build gigantic immigrant detention centers near the U.S.-Mexico border and stands to secure further contracts from proposals to reopen closed military bases to house deportees and detainees.

Halliburton has also been mentioned as one of the main contractors to build increased security infrastructure, security roads and improved employment verification systems at ports of entry.

Sensenbrenner owns more than $563,536 in General Electric stocks. GE's Security Unit has been a Pentagon subcontractor, providing video surveillance and other electronic security systems at the border. and contributed to Sensenbrenner through its employee PAC. Boeing, which recently secured a $2.5 billion contract order to install sensors, radar and cameras along the U.S. borders, is among the top contributors to Sensenbrenner's PAC.

Even though Sensenbrenner has recently criticized companies that profit undocumented labor, according to Lovato's report, he's making a wad of dough from companies that do just that:

Other investments raising flags in Milwaukee include the $44,179 in shares Sensenbrenner holds in Darden Restaurants Inc. Darden operates chains like The Olive Garden and Red Lobster, which have been reported to employ undocumented workers.

Lovato interviews a cook at a Red Lobster restaurant in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa in Sensenbrenner's district:

[Jose] was unaware that he was working for a company that made the Congressman that proposed "el Muro" (the wall) richer. "I don't have papers and had to cross the border from Mexico," Jose said. "Is he schizophrenic? Does he like our work and hate us?"

get-tough approach

Sensenbrenner Introduces Immigration Reform Bill
Dec 6, 2005 - U.S. Newswire
http://www.romingerlegal.com/newsviewer.php?ppa=8oplo_%5BfhkpvrpWSjhw11rbfek%5C!

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wis.) today introduced legislation that aims to prevent illegal immigration by addressing the hiring of illegal immigrants and gaining control of our borders. H.R. 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, aims to reestablish respect for immigration laws and to hold people accountable by cracking down on employers hiring illegal workers, smugglers trafficking in human beings as well as confronting the emerging problem of alien gangs. H.R. 4437 also incorporates the border security legislation approved by the Homeland Security Committee last month, H.R.

4312. H.R. 4437 will be considered Thursday by the House Judiciary Committee with House consideration expected next week.

Chairman Sensenbrenner said, "It's my hope this legislative effort will not only help regain control of our borders and prevent illegal immigration, but will also help strengthen and promote our compassionate and welcoming legal immigration system. Everyone recognizes our current immigration system is broken, plagued by insufficient immigration enforcement and border security resources, and a wholesale disregard for our immigration laws."

"Fixing these enormous problems will require a comprehensive effort addressing alien removal, worksite enforcement, the hiring of illegal workers, border security and interior immigration enforcement as well as ensuring America's labor needs are met. This legislation, crafted in consultation with the House Leadership, the Homeland Security Committee, and the Bush Administration, addresses many of these key issues. I anticipate this legislation will serve as a solid legislative foundation for tackling problems with our immigration system," added Chairman Sensenbrenner.

The text of H.R. 4437 is available at http://judiciar y.house.gov/media/pdfs/SENSEN_104_XML.pdf . A section by section summary is available at http:// judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/immbillsection.pdf . Information on the Homeland Security Committee's provisions from H.R. 4312 can be found at http://homeland.house.gov/files/B order percent20Bill percent20Post-Markup111705.pdf .

Some Highlights of H.R. 4437 (excluding Homeland Security Committee provisions from H.R. 4312):

-- Combat Hiring of Illegal Workers - Institutes an employment eligibility verification system in which employers will check the Social Security numbers and alien identification numbers provided by employees against Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records in order to weed out fraudulent numbers and ensure that their employees are not working in the U.S. illegally. Modifies provisions from H.R. 19 introduced by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) by building upon a voluntary pilot program currently in use. Increases civil and criminal penalties for knowingly hiring or employing an illegal worker.

-- Increase Penalties for Alien Smuggling - Under current law, individuals convicted of alien smuggling crimes often receive lenient sentences. These provisions would greatly increase criminal penalties for alien smuggling by establishing mandatory minimum sentences, among other things. These provisions were recommended by a panel of border-area U.S. Attorneys to make it easier to deport smugglers and illegal entrants.

-- Crackdown on Alien Gang Members - This provision incorporates H.R. 2933, introduced by Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.). This provision would render alien street gang members inadmissible and deportable, and authorize the Attorney General to designate groups or associations as criminal street gangs if they meet certain criteria. Also mandates the detention of alien street gang members and bars alien gang members from receiving humanitarian benefits.

-- Increase Penalties for Aliens Reentering Illegally - Incorporates H.R. 3150, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R- Calif.) that would stiffen penalties, including establishing mandatory minimum sentences, for aliens who reenter the United States after having been removed.

-- Aggravated Felony Provisions - The provisions would make aggravated felons inadmissible and would bar refugees and asylees with aggravated felony convictions from receiving green cards.

-- Cooperation between Border Sheriffs and Federal Law Enforcement - Based upon Rep. Culberson's (R-Tex.) "Border Law Enforcement Act of 2005" (H.R. 4360), authorizes and reimburses local sheriffs in the 29 counties along the southern border to enforce the immigration laws if authorized under a separate written agreement pursuant to section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and to transfer illegal aliens to federal custody. It also specifically reimburses those Sheriffs for costs associated with detaining illegal aliens whom they arrest until they are able to hand them over to federal authorities.

This provision deems aliens in Sheriffs' custody to be in federal custody once determined to be in an unlawful status.

-- Increasing DHS Authority for Long-Term Detention - The U.S. Supreme Court has limited DHS's ability to detain dangerous aliens with decisions that have forced hundreds of dangerous aliens, such as murderers, to be released into American communities. One alien released because of these Court decisions later shot a state trooper in the head. This change would amend the INA to allow for continued detention of aliens who pose a threat to Americans.

-- Renewing DHS Authority to Use Reinstatement of Removal Process - In Morales-Izquierdo v. Ashcroft, the Ninth Circuit recently invalidated DHS reinstatement of removal regulations, which allows DHS to remove an alien previously deported by simply reinstating the alien's prior order of removal. The House Judiciary Committee has been told that this procedure was used in some 90,000 cases last year, and the Ninth Circuit's decision affects 40 percent of removals in the Ninth Circuit. This amendment to the INA would clarify DHS's authority to reinstate orders.

-- Barring Terrorist Aliens from Naturalization - This provision bars aliens who are terrorists or security risks from becoming U.S. citizens.

-- Deportation for DUI - Render multiple DUI offenses a deportable offense for aliens.

http://www.usnewswire.com

New Report

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Pit Bull

‘Pit Bull’ of the House Latches On to Immigration
By MARK LEIBOVICH
July 11, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/washington/11sensenbrenner.html?ei=5088&en=7ea255238c20f4fd&ex=1310270400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. has no tolerance for illegal immigrants, either in his political life or personal life.

“My housekeeper in Wisconsin was born in Wisconsin,” says Mr. Sensenbrenner, the Republican congressman and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “My housekeeper here is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Nicaragua.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner is so loath to risk dealing with illegal immigrants that when his Cadillacs need cleaning, he prefers do-it-yourself car washes that require tokens. “They don’t have Montezuma’s picture on the front of them,” Mr. Sensenbrenner says of the tokens.

He is sitting in his Capitol Hill office dominated by two life-size portraits of himself. He looms heavily here, as he does in the thick of the national debate over immigration in which he has defied President Bush’s plans for reform and arguably holds more sway than anyone else in Congress. A bipartisan irritant from a state nowhere near the Mexican border, he has outsize influence on the fate of the country’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants.

In each portrait in his office, Mr. Sensenbrenner appears regal and contented — in contrast to the rumpled and fed-up image he conveys in real life. He is commonly described as “prickly,” “cantankerous” and “unpleasant.” And this is by his friends.

“I would describe Jim as — what’s a nice word — how about ‘idiosyncratic’?” says Representative Dan Lungren, a California Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Lungren equates Mr. Sensenbrenner’s leadership to something the Green Bay Packer guard Jerry Kramer said about his coach Vince Lombardi. “He treats us all equally,” Mr. Lungren says of Mr. Sensenbrenner. “He treats us all like dogs.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner, 63, can be neutrally described as a Washington piece of work — a big-bellied curmudgeon with a taste for old Caddies, pontoon boats and enormous cigars. He is equally at home discussing policy minutiae or the details of his Dalmatian’s recent intestinal problems. His honking voice and Upper Midwestern enunciations make him one of the most mimicked politicians on Capitol Hill. (“Noooo interviews in the hallway” is a familiar refrain as he blows past reporters.)

One could dismiss him as something of a cartoon, except that Mr. Sensenbrenner has been a feared and vital character in some defining political dramas, like the Clinton impeachment, the passage of the USA Patriot Act and the current legislative donnybrook over immigration, an issue that he calls his toughest in nearly four decades of public life.

He has approached the matter with characteristic stubbornness, righteousness and, of course, brusqueness. He delights in placing himself above the chummy niceties of Washington. (On the subject of his crotchety nature, he smiles big and becomes almost giddy — most unSensenbrenner-like.)

His conservative populism and maverick tendencies play well in a state that has elected political outliers including Senators Joseph R. McCarthy and William Proxmire. They also suit the solidly Republican district outside Milwaukee that first elected Mr. Sensenbrenner in 1978.

But he does not always suit the House Republican leadership, many Senate Republicans and the Bush White House. He has been the chief promoter of the House’s “enforcement first” approach to immigration overhaul, emphasizing border security, criminal penalties for illegal immigrants and sanctions against employers who hire them. The president and the Senate have favored a package that offers illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

In recent weeks, Mr. Sensenbrenner has refused to yield on anything, derided what he calls the “amnesty” of the Senate bill and warned that he is willing to walk away without a compromise. He says his views have been influenced by the flood of immigration-related cases coming through his office and what he sees as the failure of previous immigration reform efforts he has worked on.

He is known as one of the toughest negotiators in Congress, which invites another canine metaphor from a colleague. “Sensenbrenner is a pit bull,” says Representative Ric Keller, a Florida Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “And the Senate negotiators he’s up against are wearing Milk-Bone underwear.”

During a 50-minute interview that feels, at times, like a lecture, Mr. Sensenbrenner says:

¶“You have to be prickly to prod people into accomplishing something.”

¶“I’ve adopted a philosophy of telling it like it is.”

¶“I’ve been referred to ... as a difficult child.”

¶“If you go along to get along, you don’t get anything accomplished.”

For as much as Mr. Sensenbrenner decries the impulse to “go along to get along,” he also pays close attention to what is said about him. This is underscored by how wary colleagues are of speaking on the record about him.

Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who has been mentioned as a possible successor as Judiciary Committee chairman, said he would gladly talk about Mr. Sensenbrenner. But later, a spokeswoman for Mr. Smith called to demur, saying, “It’s not the right time for us to comment.”

To a surprising degree, Democrats on the committee praise Mr. Sensenbrenner for his fairness, efficiency and willingness to heed the concerns of the minority party. He has also been lauded for spearheading an extension of the Voting Rights Act.

“The House leadership has relied on me to do some very difficult jobs over the years,” says Mr. Sensenbrenner, who served as a House manager during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and whose six-year stint heading the Judiciary Committee will end in January.

He clearly enjoys being a high-profile committee chairman — even his wife of 29 years, Cheryl, calls him Mr. Chairman (“but only when she’s mad at me,” he says).

He is easily annoyed when his authority is disregarded. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for instance, recently promoted a compromise immigration plan that would have focused on enforcement and border security first, then carry out the more contentious changes. Asked about the McCain proposal, Mr. Sensenbrenner stares blankly and flips his hand dismissively.

“McCain has not called me to propose that,” he says, even though the notion had been widely discussed on Capitol Hill. It is as if no such possibility could exist until the House chairman was personally informed of it.

Mr. Sensenbrenner goes on to say that he has no relationship with Mr. McCain, with whom he served two terms in the House in the 1980’s. “There’s some senators who come back from whence they came, and McCain is not one of them,” Mr. Sensenbrenner says. ‘‘When he left, we never saw him again.’’

“I deal with Specter,” he adds, referring to Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

When asked what it is like to negotiate with Mr. Sensenbrenner, Mr. Specter pauses for several seconds. Then he says, “He is a lot more cordial in person than his reputation.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner projects the self-assurance of a lucky man. He reaped a fortune from a great-grandfather who invented the Kotex sanitary napkin. He won $250,000 in 1997 on a lottery ticket he purchased while buying beer. He lists assets of almost $11 million, according to public filings.

Mr. Sensenbrenner was born in Chicago, graduated from Stanford University and, while at college, worked as an aide to a Republican congressman. After earning a law degree, he began an uninterrupted political career that started in the Wisconsin Assembly and landed him in the United States House of Representatives at age 35.

Not given to navel gazing, he prefers, he says, to spend time on his pontoon boat on a Wisconsin lake, smoking behemoth cigars imported from Honduras or the Dominican Republic. The family Dalmatian, Solomon — also known as Stinky — comes along, too.

Mr. Sensenbrenner concludes with an aside about Stinky — specifically, the case of giardia that the dog picked up a few weeks ago, which requires Mr. Sensenbrenner to force-feed Stinky four pills a day. This is not easy.

But the chairman says he picked up a strategy from a guy he met in the beer tent of a church festival. He places the pills in the dog’s throat, and blows in his face. Stinky then swallows them. “I’d never tried that before, blowing in a dog’s face,” Mr. Sensenbrenner marvels.

He has never tried it with a senator, either. “I have given them pills that don’t taste very good,” he says. “I’ve done that.”

Analysis

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no-bid federal contracts to cleanup Belle Chasse Naval base and other military facilities in the devastated region.

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Gulf Coast slaves

Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.

By Roberto Lovato
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/11/15/halliburton_katrina/index.html

November 15, 2005 | Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.

Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.

Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.

He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.

Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it -- and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the military and Halliburton/KBR deny -- even after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle Chasse facility last month. Visits to the naval bases and dozens of interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring -- and abuse -- of these workers.

Right after Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast, the Bush administration relaxed labor standards, creating conditions for rampant abuse, according to union leaders and civil rights advocates. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay "prevailing wages" for labor used to fulfill government contracts. The administration also waived the requirement for contractors rebuilding the Gulf Coast to provide valid I-9 employment eligibility forms completed by their workers. These moves allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have recently been reversed in the face of sharp political pressure: Bush reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act on Nov. 3, while the Department of Homeland Security reinstated the I-9 requirements in late October, noting that it would once again "exercise prosecutorial discretion" of employers in violation "on a case-by-case basis." But critics say Bush's policies have already allowed extensive profiteering beneath layers of legal and political cover.

Halliburton/KBR, which enjoys an array of federal contracts in the United States, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long drawn criticism for its proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly Halliburton's CEO. Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross declined to respond directly to allegations about undocumented workers in the Gulf. "In performing work for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an e-mail. "KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable labor laws and provisions when performing this work."

Victoria Cintra is the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, which recently partnered with relief agency Oxfam America to help immigrant workers displaced by Katrina. She says KBR is exposing undocumented workers like Martinez to unethical and illegal treatment, even though they are supposed to be paid with federal Katrina-recovery dollars to clean and rebuild high-security facilities like the one President Bush recently visited. Cintra is one of several people fighting to recover the wages owed the workers: She drives her beat-up, chocolate-colored car across the swamps, damaged roads and broken bridges of the Gulf Coast to track down contractors and subcontractors. With yellow legal pad in hand, she and other advocates document abuses taking place at Belle Chasse, the Naval Construction Battalion Center at the Seabee naval base in Gulfport, Miss., and other military installations.

I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport -- where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises, and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.

Cintra and other critics say there's been no accountability from the corporate leaders who signed on the dotted line when they were awarded multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contracts. "The workers may be hired by the subcontractors," Cintra says, "but KBR is ultimately responsible."

"Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the proper conditions to protect them," adds Cintra, who recently provided tents to Martinez and several other unpaid Mexican workers who fled Belle Chasse for Gulfport after being dismissed by Tovar. Cintra, a Cuban exile and born-again Christian, has since seen a small tent city of homeless immigrants spring up in the yard of her church, Pass Road Baptist, in Gulfport. "This is evil on top of evil on top of evil," she says. "The Bush administration and Halliburton have opened up a Pandora's box that's not going to close now."

Halliburton/KBR is the general contractor with overarching responsibility for the federal cleanup contracts covering Katrina-damaged naval bases. Even so, there is an utter lack of transparency with the process -- and that invites malfeasance, says James Hale, a vice president of the Laborers' International Union of North America. "To my knowledge, not one member of Congress has been able to get their hands on a copy of a contract that was handed out to Halliburton or others," Hale says. "There is no central registry of Katrina contracts available. No data on the jobs or scope of the work." Hale says that his union's legislative staff has pressed members of Congress for more information; apparently the legislators were told that they could not get copies of the contracts because of "national security" concerns.

"If the contracts handed out to these primary contractors are opaque, then the contracts being let to the subcontractors are just plain invisible," Hale says. "There is simply no ability to ascertain or monitor the contractor-subcontractor relationships. This is an open invitation for exploitation, fraud and abuse."

Congress has heard a number of complaints recently about Halliburton/KBR's hiring practices, including the alleged exploitation of Filipino, Sri Lankan, Nepalese and other immigrant workers paid low wages on military installations in Iraq. And KBR subcontractor BE&K was a focus of Senate hearings in October, for the firing of 75 local Belle Chasse workers who said that they were replaced by "unskilled, out-of-state, out-of-country" workers earning $8 to $14 for work that typically paid $22 an hour.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who has been an outspoken critic of the use of undocumented workers at Belle Chasse and on other Katrina cleanup jobs, said in a recent statement, "It is a downright shame that any contractor would use this tragedy as an opportunity to line its pockets by breaking the law and hiring a low-skilled, low-wage and undocumented work force."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., is also against the practice, citing its "serious social ramifications." As he told Salon, it devastates "local workers who have been hit twice, because they lost their homes."

Seventeen-year-old Simitrio Martinez (no relation to Arnulfo) is another one of the dozens of workers originally hired by Tovar, the North Carolina job broker working under KBR. "They were going to pay seven dollars an hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us nothing," says the thin Zapotec teenager. Simitrio spent nearly a month at the Seabee base. "They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days. Cookies, nothing else," he says.

Simitrio, his co-workers, and the dozens of KBR subcontractors that employ them operate under public-private agreements like federal Task Order 0017, which defines the scope of work to be fulfilled under the contracts. Under the multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contract, KBR is supposed to provide services for "Hurricane Katrina stabilization and recovery at Naval Air Station Pascagoula, Naval Air Station Gulfport, Stennis Space Center and other Navy installations in the Southeast Region," according to a Defense Department press release.

But the details of the agreements remain murky. "Not only is it very difficult to see the actual signed DoD contracts, but it is nearly impossible to see the actual task orders, which assign the goods or services the government is buying," says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight in Washington. The military can ask for goods and services on an as-needed basis, he says, which means that the contracts, which add up to tens of millions of dollars, can remain open ended. According to DoD press statements, the contracts call for considerable manual labor, including "re-roofing of most buildings, barracks, debris removal from the entire base, water mitigation, mold mitigation, interior and exterior repairs to most buildings, waste treatment plants, and all incidental related work."

Simitrio and any other workers on the high-security military bases must get permission before entering the guarded gates, where they get patted down by M-16-wielding military police. Responsibility for getting private-sector construction and cleanup workers on the bases rests with the general contractor -- in KBR's case, security chief Kevin Flynn. One of Flynn's responsibilities is to negotiate passes and entry for KBR subcontractors -- and their hires -- to do the work stipulated by the task order.

Yet, following several complaints by Landrieu, and just a few days after President Bush visited the Belle Chasse base, agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency raided the facility and detained 10 workers who ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback said had "questionable" documentation.

Representatives of Halliburton/KBR do not acknowledge the existence of undocumented workers providing labor for their operations on the Gulf Coast bases. Flynn suggested speaking to the U.S. military, who he said "has real strict control" and would know whether there were undocumented workers. "We have workers from all ethnic groups on the base," Flynn said. "To the best of my knowledge, there are no undocumented workers."

Steve Romano, head of housing on the Belle Chasse base, said, "We have no relationship with [KBR] at all. I have no idea what that's about." A similar response was given by an official at the base's health facility when asked about undocumented workers who complained about health issues and injuries sustained on the KBR sites. The only military person to acknowledge seeing Latino workers was a watch commander who greeted me at an entry to the base. The commander estimated there were 100 such workers there. Meanwhile, representatives with the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance say they received calls from undocumented workers at Belle Chasse who estimated there were more than 500, or "about eight busloads" of immigrant workers on-site.

Texas-based DRS Cosmotech is another subcontractor that provided cleanup crews to Halliburton/KBR in the Gulf. Roy Lee Donaldson, CEO of the company, refused to respond to accusations of non-payment and exploitation leveled at his company by several workers, including 55-year-old Felipe Reyes of Linares, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. (Donaldson hung up the phone when I identified myself as a reporter.)

"Mr. Donaldson promised us we'd live in a hotel or a house. We lived in tents and only had hot water that smelled like petroleum," Reyes said. The city of Belle Chasse has been identified in recent years as one of the most toxically polluted areas in the entire region, with several major energy companies operating there. A wide range of advocacy groups have warned about serious health risks facing Katrina cleanup workers.

"They didn't want to pay us for two weeks of work. So we stopped working. We started a huelga [strike] on the base" added Reyes, who along with other workers, says he was later paid $1,100 -- only part of what he says he was owed.

Another KBR subcontractor, Alabama-based BE&K, says it is not responsible for keeping track of the workers. BE&K spokesperson Susan Wasley said, "I can't say that we require our subcontractors' employees to produce documentation for us, because that's what our subcontractor as employer has to do. That's his responsibility."

At the bottom of the KBR subcontracting pyramid are job brokers like Tovar and Gregorio Gonzalez, who helped hire laborers for Florida-based On Site Services, another subcontractor that reportedly failed to pay wages owed to workers in the Gulf Coast. The job brokers find workers by placing ads in Spanish-language newspapers like La Subasta and El Dia in Houston; the ads typically promise room, board and pay in the range of $1,200 a week. Job brokers also run television ads on Spanish-language stations like Univision. And they attend job fairs in places like Fresno, Calif.

Not all subcontractors refuse to discuss their links to KBR. Luis Sevilla is pretty open about it if you can get to the crowded hangar on the restricted premises of the Seabee naval base where he and his crew sleep and work. Sevilla put together crews for KBR subcontractors to remove asbestos and do other construction work; his workers told me they are paid and treated well. Asked about the people who own the R.V. with a "KBR" logo outside the hangar where his workers crowd into small tents, Sevilla says, "They contract with many, many companies." Interviews with members of Sevilla's crew revealed a number of undocumented workers.

Despite the evidence of undocumented workers cleaning up after Katrina, Halliburton/KBR maintains that it runs its operations within the bounds of the law. "KBR operates under a rigorous Code of Business Conduct that outlines legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors are expected to follow in every aspect of their work," spokesperson Norcross said by e-mail. (She did not respond to several requests for a phone interview.) "We do not tolerate any exceptions to this Code at any level of our company."

Standing in spitting distance of the KBR-branded R.V., which is parked as if it were guarding the hangar, Jose Ruiz of Nicaragua knows that his role in the Katrina cleanup is anonymous at best. "I don't have any papers, kind of like in that song by Sting -- 'I'm an illegal alien,'" says Ruiz, who lived in the United States for many years before arriving to work for Sevilla at the Seabee base. "That's the way it is."

$385 million Department of Homeland Security contract

Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps
New America Media, News Analysis/Commentary, Peter Dale Scott, Feb 08, 2006
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=eed74d9d44c30493706fe03f4c9b3a77

Editor's Note: A little-known $385 million contract for Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build detention facilities for "an emergency influx of immigrants" is another step down the Bush administration's road toward martial law, the writer says.

BERKELEY, Calif.--A Halliburton subsidiary has just received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security to provide "temporary detention and processing capabilities."

The contract -- announced Jan. 24 by the engineering and construction firm KBR -- calls for preparing for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies, such as "a natural disaster." The release offered no details about where Halliburton was to build these facilities, or when.

To date, some newspapers have worried that open-ended provisions in the contract could lead to cost overruns, such as have occurred with KBR in Iraq. A Homeland Security spokesperson has responded that this is a "contingency contract" and that conceivably no centers might be built. But almost no paper so far has discussed the possibility that detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law.

For those who follow covert government operations abroad and at home, the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees," in the context of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States. North's activities raised civil liberties concerns in both Congress and the Justice Department. The concerns persist.

"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

Plans for detention facilities or camps have a long history, going back to fears in the 1970s of a national uprising by black militants. As Alonzo Chardy reported in the Miami Herald on July 5, 1987, an executive order for continuity of government (COG) had been drafted in 1982 by FEMA head Louis Giuffrida. The order called for "suspension of the Constitution" and "declaration of martial law." The martial law portions of the plan were outlined in a memo by Giuffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff.

In 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 188, one of a series of directives that authorized continued planning for COG by a private parallel government.

Two books, James Mann's "Rise of the Vulcans" and James Bamford's "A Pretext for War," have revealed that in the 1980s this parallel structure, operating outside normal government channels, included the then-head of G. D. Searle and Co., Donald Rumsfeld, and then-Congressman from Wyoming Dick Cheney.

After 9/11, new martial law plans began to surface similar to those of FEMA in the 1980s. In January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets. One month later John Brinkerhoff, the author of the 1982 FEMA memo, published an article arguing for the legality of using U.S. troops for purposes of domestic security.

Then in April 2002, Defense Dept. officials implemented a plan for domestic U.S. military operations by creating a new U.S. Northern Command (CINC-NORTHCOM) for the continental United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called this "the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1946."

The NORTHCOM commander, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, is responsible for "homeland defense and also serves as head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).... He will command U.S. forces that operate within the United States in support of civil authorities. The command will provide civil support not only in response to attacks, but for natural disasters."

John Brinkerhoff later commented on PBS that, "The United States itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the United States that we apply in other theaters of war."

Then in response to Hurricane Katrina in Sept. 2005, according to the Washington Post, White House senior adviser Karl Rove told the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, that she should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get." The White House tried vigorously, but ultimately failed, to compel Gov. Blanco to yield control of the state National Guard.

Also in September, NORTHCOM conducted its highly classified Granite Shadow exercise in Washington. As William Arkin reported in the Washington Post, "Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."

It is clear that the Bush administration is thinking seriously about martial law.
Many critics have alleged that FEMA's spectacular failure to respond to Katrina followed from a deliberate White House policy: of paring back FEMA, and instead strengthening the military for responses to disasters.

A multimillion program for detention facilities will greatly increase NORTHCOM's ability to respond to any domestic disorders.

Scott is author of "Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). He is completing a book on "The Road to 9/11." Visit his Web site .

Posted by lois at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)

American Prison Camps Are on the Way

American Prison Camps Are on the Way

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet. Posted October 9, 2006.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/42458/

Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of Bush's "unlawful enemy combatants." Americans are certain to be among them.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."

Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.

Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.

The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.

Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.

In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.

The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it.

The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.

Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).

During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting." One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."

We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law," will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress.

Posted by lois at 03:19 PM | Comments (0)

WA: Huge Prison Bill on Its Way

Huge prison bill on its way
Extra cash sought to house inmates

JOSEPH TURNER; The News Tribune (WA)
Published: October 8th, 2006 01:00
The Legislature’s get-tough policies on criminals come at a price,and a big part of the bill for throwing so many lawbreakers into prison will come due over the next two years.

Harold Clarke, the secretary of Washington’s Department of Corrections, is asking the governor to increase his budget by $175 million for the next two years, in large part because his staff will have to operate another 2, 000-inmate prison by mid-2008.

Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Eastern Washington will be fully
operational by June 30, 2008.

Clarke wants to hire an additional 1,000 employees by mid-2009, which
would give the agency more than 9,000 workers and a two-year budget of almost $1.68 billion.

“The majority our request is pure caseload,” said Randi Warick,
administrator of budget, research and strategic planning for the state prison system. She was referring to the growing numbers of inmates who are expected to be sent to prison over the next two years.

State analysts predict Washington’s prison population will grow from
18,157 inmates today to 20,159 by mid-2009, an increase of 2,002 – enough to fill a prison.

More than half of the new employees that Clarke is asking for, as well as $117 million of the $175 million budget increase, are just to oversee greater numbers of inmates in prison and felons who have been released to the community.

State legislators add to the growth in prison population virtually every year. Each legislative session, they pass laws to crack down on criminals – either by defining new crimes or by meting out longer sentences for existing crimes.

This past session was no exception.

A law that requires mandatory prison time for anyone convicted of a fifth drunken driving offense within a 10-year period is expected to add 344 inmates to the state prison system by June 30, 2009.

Another law punishes sex offenders who fail to register with local
authorities.

That measure will account for an estimated 438 more state prison inmates by mid-2009.

$27,170 per prisoner per year

Lawmakers tried for several years to avoid building a full-fledged prison in Eastern Washington because of its cost – $231 million.

First, they started sending inmates out of state and renting cells in
county jails in Washington.

Today, there are nearly 1,000 Washington inmates serving time in privately run prisons in Minnesota and Arizona.

And an additional 800 state inmates are being housed in county jails all over Washington.

The state pays between $40 and $70 a day for others to house its inmates. That’s less than the $74 a day it costs to keep an inmate in a Washington prison cell.

But when the cost of transporting inmates and prison staff to and from other prisons and jails is factored in, there isn’t much of a savings.

The Legislature also suppressed the growth of its prison population by letting many inmates out early.

Offenders convicted of drug and other nonviolent crimes can get their
prison sentences cut in half.

But the prison population continues to grow, and virtually all 15 of the state prisons in Washington hold more inmates than they were designed to house.

Finally, the Legislature bit the bullet earlier this year and decided to expand Coyote Ridge. That means the Correction Department will need more money to operate the prison.

The average cost of housing one inmate is estimated at $27,170 a year.

Many of the inmates who have been sent out of state will return when
Coyote Ridge opens.

But then the cycle of sending more inmates out of state will resume, and Clarke estimates the state will need still another 2,000-bed prison by 2015 at an estimated cost of more than $250 million.

Money sought for rehab

To avoid building another prison, Clarke is asking the governor for $26 million to pay for an offender re-entry program.

The goal is to better prepare inmates for life after prison so they will be less likely to slide back into a life of crime, which means less likely to be sent back to prison.

Clarke wants more money and more corrections officers to assess inmates when they first get to prison. Do they need more schooling? Do they need training in a trade? Do they need drug treatment?

Much of the $26 million he’s seeking would be used to help more inmates get high school diplomas or help them kick drug habits.

Between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2006, the courts sent 8,757 criminals into the state prison system. Forty-three percent, or 3,761, had been to prison before.

Clarke’s budget proposal says by reducing the number of returning
criminals, his agency can slow the growth of the prison population and avoid building a $250 million prison in the future.

Clarke’s request will be reviewed by Gov. Chris Gregoire and her budget office.

They’ll decide which parts to forward to the Legislature when she proposes her 2007-09 budget in mid-December.
AMhttp://www.thenewstribune.com/news/government/story/6149637p-5382390c.html

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

October 08, 2006

Private Prison Companies Stock Rise After Schwarzenegger's declaration of "prison emergency"

2 stories below.
__________________
http://moneycentral.msn.com/inc/news/providerredir.asp?feed=AP&Date=20061005&ID=6080510>

October 05, 2006 11:51 AM ET

Sector Snap: Private Prison Shares Rise

All Associated Press News

NEW YORK (AP) - Shares of operators of private prisons climbed sharply Thursday after California -- operator of the nation's largest prison system

-- cleared the way to ship some inmates to other states to alleviate overcrowding. Shares of Corrections Corp. of America set a fresh 52-week high. Shares of Geo Group and Cornell Companies Inc. advanced in midday trading as well.

http://www.ashlandcitytimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061005/BUSINESS01/61005013>
Thursday, 10/05/06

Prison company stock rises on Gov. Schwarzenegger's declaration Corrections Corp. of America could get more inmates thanks to Arnold

By GETAHN WARD
Staff Writer

Shares of Corrections Corporation of America shot up almost 10 percent earlier today after California¹s governor issued an emergency order to address prison overcrowding.

The declaration by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger could allow the state to transfer prisoners out of state without their consent, raising prospects for new business for private companies that house inmates.

³Basically, this is good for all of the private prison operators,² said Anton Hie, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. in Nashville.

At midday, CCA¹s stock was trading at $47.75 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Schwarzenegger¹s order is aimed at alleviating overcrowding of one of the nation¹s three largest prison systems by bypassing the regular procurement process to allow for contracts to temporarily house inmates out-of-state. Initially, California could send out 2,200 inmates ‹ 200 inmates by the end of this month and 400 a month thereafter ‹ and ship out a total of 5,000 over the next year. It would be the first time state officials would be sending any significant number of inmates out of state.

"Our prisons are now beyond maximum capacity and we must act immediately and aggressively to resolve this issue,² Schwarzenegger said in a statement Wednesday.

Nashville-based CCA has inventory that it has been showing California, though many of its ³several thousands² available beds are committed to existing customers, officials said.

³We¹re excited about the prospect of doing business with California, but we¹ve not executed an agreement at this time,² said Irving Lingo, the company¹s chief financial officer.

California has 172,000 state inmates, a population projected to grow to more than 193,000 by 2011. About 17,000 of the state¹s beds aren¹t up to standard, including some in areas such as hallways and converted gyms that weren¹t designed as living space.

In addition to CCA, California has indicated it is looking at inventory from private operators The Geo Group and Cornell Cos. The Geo Group shares were up $3.08 to $33.78 earlier today. Cornell shares were up $1.14 to $18.38.

Todd Van Fleet, an analyst at First Analysis in Chicago, expects California to send inmates to Arizona, Indiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee in the near-term. CCA is likely to receive inmates in all of those states except Indiana where GEO will likely be the beneficiary, he said.

Posted by lois at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2006

Release Elderly Inmates by Jonathan Turley

Release Elderly Inmates
Older, lower-risk prisoners should be removed from the state's perilously overcrowded jails.
By Jonathan Turley
JONATHAN TURLEY is a law professor at George Washington University and the founder and director of the Project for Older Prisoners.

October 7, 2006

GOV. ARNOLD Schwarzenegger's declaration of a "state of emergency" has finally caused members of both parties to face a state prison crisis more than three decades in the making. In 2003, I reviewed the California prison system at the request of a joint committee of the state Senate and Assembly. Like experts before and since, I found a developing crisis of unparalleled dimensions.

There are 172,000 prisoners in the state system; it's likely to surpass 193,000 by 2011. It is a system in cascading failure. Local jails have had to release felons early because they are backed up with prisoners who cannot be moved into state prisons.

The situation is even more dire in those state prisons. Overcrowding has turned the system into a massive warehousing of humans. Inmates are stacked three high in cells and housed in hallways and converted gyms; rehabilitation and work programs have been eliminated to make room for bunks. Some prisons are 200% to 300% over capacity. In 29 out of 33 prisons, crowding is so extreme that prisoners are, according to the state, in "extreme peril."

In order to preserve basic living conditions and make room for incoming prisoners, correctional officials have to "rent" cells from other states. This is hardly a long-term solution, as prison officials admit. It is akin to solving overcrowding in your apartment by continually putting stuff into storage — it is merely an illusion of progress with compounding rental bills.

Perhaps the only positive aspect of this crisis is that it will force California's leaders to end years of denials. It is no longer a question of whether prisoners will be released, but which ones. This is a decision that must be made on the basis of societal and not political risks.

We must make risk-based decisions that select the lowest-risk individuals for release. Under the current system, California has the nation's highest recidivism rate; a staggering 70% of inmates commit new crimes within three years of release. Although mistakes are inevitable, the science of predicting recidivism has come a long way since the days of phrenology, or measuring heads to predict criminal inclinations.

Among the various factors, the most reliable is age. As a general rule, people become less dangerous as they age. In males, the greatest drop in recidivism occurs around age 30 and tends to continue to fall. In addition to their lower risk, older prisoners impose much higher costs on the system. Because of maintenance and medical costs, the average cost of an older prisoner is two to three times that of a younger prisoner.

Many years ago I created the Project for Older Prisoners, or POPS, to deal with the nation's rising population of older and geriatric prisoners. In California, the number of prisoners 55 and older has doubled since 1997. Today, there are almost 20,000 prisoners over 50, including 717 over 70.

The worst is yet to come. The reduction of parole and increased sentences have produced a large, stagnant group that is now entering middle age like a rabbit moving through a snake.

To make matters even worse, studies have shown that prisoners are physiologically 10 years older than they are chronologically. Inmates are becoming more demanding and costly because of their physiological age, producing ballooning hidden costs.

In 2003, POPS proposed a risk-based approach in dealing with the state's burgeoning older prisoner population. The basic components are:

• Establishment of POPS programs through law schools — a move recommended years ago by the governor's task force. POPS students are trained to identify and evaluate low-risk prisoners within the system.

• Creation of a system for the supervised release of low-risk, high-cost prisoners.

• Creation of alternative forms of incarceration for mid-risk prisoners. Many prisoners can be placed into electronic bracelet programs that can reduce the daily costs of incarceration from $65 a day to roughly $10.

• Establishment of geriatric units for high-risk, older prisoners. More than 50% of the costs of maintaining prisoners are attributed to the salaries and packages of correctional officers. Decrease the number of guards, you decrease the per capita cost of inmates. Although a geriatric prisoner may still be a risk for a given category of crime, he is unlikely to toss his walker over a razor-wire fence or outrun perimeter guards.

Such a system can lower costs, improve care for inmates and reduce crime by making room for more dangerous, younger prisoners. For example, by placing older prisoners into special units, the state can slash medical costs by having staff trained to recognize and deal with gerontological disease before they become acute conditions.

Such a system could result in the removal of hundreds or even thousands of prisoners from the system — quickly. Although politicians love to speak of fighting for victims, they have refused to act to prevent people from becoming victims in the first place. If California leaders want to be "tough on crime," they will have to make tough decisions. If they are finally ready, they should look first to their aging prison population.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-turley7oct07,0,7788538.story?track=tothtml

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

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

IN: GEO to Incarcerate Prisoners from California

Private Indiana Prison to House Inmates from California

By Gene Rodriguez, News 8 @ 6:00
Oct 5, 2006 01:32 PM
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels struck a deal with California's governor that would earn Indiana millions of dollars and add jobs to the Indiana workforce.

The New Castle Correctional Facility can house more than 2,400 inmates, but it's only 40 percent full. Governor Mitch Daniels says there are inmates ready to fill the spare beds.

"No highly dangerous felons, they will be the kind of prisoners who are housed there now and for whom it was built," said Governor Daniels.

Built for Indiana's medium security inmates, now, California will send some of theirs.

"Governor Schwarzenegger was really happy about it and so are we,"
Governor Daniels said.

Daniels says he struck a deal with Governor Schwarzenegger to relieve his state's prison overcrowding problem.

"We'll make millions of dollars that, again, no taxpayer had to provide. We thought it was good business," said Governor Daniels.

The good business of housing up to 1,200 California inmates in a private prison. While the prison earns most of the money, the state will receive $6.2 million a year. The move creates 200 jobs for Hoosiers.

"As Indiana needs the beds, and we will over the next two years, we'll reclaim the units," Governor Daniels said.

The first round of inmates from California are expected as soon as next month. No seriously violent inmates, predatory offenders, sex offenders or seriously mentally ill offenders will be held at the New Castle
Correctional Facility.
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5501070&nav=0Rce

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

MI: GEO Prison Optimistic Prison Will be Used by Prisoners from CA

"GEO has available beds at three facilities, including the Lake County site, Paez said, noting that California officials have visited the facility sites."

Ludington Daily News
Ludington, Michigan
10-6-2006

GEO optimistic prison will be used soon
By JOE BOOMGAARD

A California prison overcrowding emergency declaration could speed up that state¹s contract negotiations with GEO Group, which owns the Lake County prison.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman Bill Sessa said the agency is continuing to talk with three private prison companies, one of which is GEO, to negotiate contracts to move prisoners to out-of-state facilities.

³We¹re going to continue contract negotiations with three companies and whoever else jumps in,² Sessa said.

Officials from GEO said they are continuing talks with California.

³We¹re looking forward to working with the state,² said Pablo Paez, director of corporate communications at GEO. ³We¹re working with them and we look forward to work through the process.²

GEO has available beds at three facilities, including the Lake County site, Paez said, noting that California officials have visited the facility sites.

Paez said he has no specific timeline for contract talks, but added that the state-of-emergency declaration demonstrates ³they have an immediate need to send up to 5,000 inmates out of state.²

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday proclaimed the state of emergency.

The former Michigan Youth Correctional Facility in Webber Township closed last year when Gov. Jennifer Granholm vetoed funding the state¹s contract with GEO.

A spokesperson with the company confirmed GEO was in talks with CDCR and the Department of Homeland Security¹s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The proclamation allows the CDCR to ³bypass administrative features to contact faster,² according to Sessa.

With the emergency declared, the state can enter into multi-year contracts with the private prison companies, but could have only signed one-year deals without an emergency declaration.

Most companies wanted a longer term contract than one-year, which made business sense, and to seek sole source contracts without competitive bidding, Sessa said.

³The emergency paves the way for us to move our contacting process faster,² Sessa said.

The CDCR did not announce any contracts Wednesday.

Sessa said CDCR would like to move 200 inmates out of state within 30 days and keep moving out another 100 or so per week. The security level of the inmates ³depends on level we contract for. For the most part, they will probably level two and three, but it depends on the actual number and security level we contract for,² Sessa said.

Sessa said he didn¹t know of any lump-sum dollar figure being discussed in the contract negotiations.

³In most discussions, it¹s somewhere in low $60-per-day range,² Sessa said. ³Our day rate in California, when we have to house inmates in local jail, is higher than that.²

Still, moving inmates out of state is not seen as a cost-saving tool for California.

³It depends on the structure of the contracts and how many (inmates) agree to go, but saving money is not our motivation,² Sessa said. ³Our motivation is to relieve overcrowding so we have room for inmates we will have in the future and provide space for programs.²

Schwarzenegger issued the emergency proclamation after his legislative package failed to win support during a special legislative session called to address prison overcrowding. California Corrections officials estimate the CDCR will run out of bed space for inmates as early as June of 2007. Overcrowding has forced CDCR to house more than 15,000 inmates in areas not designed for living space, including gymnasiums, dayrooms, and program rooms, as well as 1,500 inmates sleeping in triple-bunks.
http://www.ludingtondailynews.com/news.php?story_id=33240

Posted by lois at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

CO: Budget Panel OKs Emergency Funding for Out of State "Beds"

"However, all but one of the committee members decided to grant the request since the state would need additional beds next year, and there were fears that the cost of contracting would go up if other states, such as California, are bidding on the same beds."

Prison request approved
Budget panel OKs emergency funding for out-of-state beds

By Tillie Fong, Rocky Mountain News
October 6, 2006

The Joint Budget Committee on Thursday approved a $153,887 emergency supplemental request from the Colorado Department of Corrections to contract for out-of-state prison beds.

The contract with Corrections Corp. of America would provide up to 720 beds at a private prison in Oklahoma, at a cost of $54 per inmate per day.

The rate is higher than the $51.91 per inmate per day that Colorado pays for housing inmates at in-state private prisons, three of which are also run by CCA.

Last month, officials with the DOC said they would likely start sending 200 to 300 Colorado inmates to Oklahoma this month, since all the available beds in the state will be filled.

The announcement was news to the JBC, which had been assured by the department earlier this year that it would increase the number of in-state prison beds by double-bunking inmates.

Thursday, committee members had concerns about the cost of monitoring and transporting prisoners out of state, as well as the apparent lack of planning on the part of the DOC.

However, all but one of the committee members decided to grant the request since the state would need additional beds next year, and there were fears that the cost of contracting would go up if other states, such as California, are bidding on the same beds.

In granting the request Thursday, the JBC also said it plans to send a letter to the DOC stating the committee wants to revisit the department's bed plan.

Another letter would also be sent suggesting that the DOC should refrain from spending $3.5 million that had been appropriated for the double-bunking plan.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5046692,0
0.html

Posted by lois at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Prisoners to be sent to private prisons around the country

Inmates to be sent out of state
Schwarzenegger declares an emergency to ease extreme overcrowding.

By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau
Last Updated 12:16 am PDT Thursday, October 5, 2006
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/34312.html

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a prison overcrowding emergency Wednesday in California, paving the way for inmate transfers to out-of-state institutions within a month.

Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary James Tilton said that the state is on the verge of signing no-bid, sole-source contracts with three private prison companies and that he expects to begin sending inmates to Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arizona at a rate of 100 to 200 a month within 30 days.

In a recent survey, Tilton said, 19,000 inmates expressed interest in doing their time in other states. He said his immediate goal is to get 5,000 of them to follow through.

I
The corrections secretary indicated at a Capitol press conference that he anticipates no difficulty in getting enough inmates to sign up willingly.

"If I was living in a gym with 240 other individuals and had no (educational or vocational) program, I'd probably raise my hand also, to get a chance to get out of that environment and into a safe environment, as well as to get some program," Tilton said.

But if he can't recruit enough volunteers, Tilton said, the prison agency will try to force convicts into the transfers, starting with foreign nationals.

The idea of forced transfers was met with opposition from a leading legislative Democrat, the prison officers union, an inmates rights lawyer and the public policy director of a Latino rights group.

California's prison system houses more than 172,000 inmates in space designed for about half that many.

Schwarzenegger sought twice this year to embark on an expansion program to address overcrowding, but he was rejected by the Legislature.

In the emergency proclamation he signed Wednesday, Schwarzenegger said he found "conditions of extreme peril" in 29 of California's 33 prisons, where authorities counted 4,313 inmate assaults and batteries last year, including 1,671 on the staff.

The proclamation linked the violence to overcrowding -- also a factor, Schwarzenegger said, in deadly violent prison takeovers in recent decades in Attica, N.Y., New Mexico and Lucasville, Ohio.

"Our prisons are now beyond maximum capacity, and we must act immediately and aggressively to resolve this issue," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

The Republican governor's proclamation acknowledged that "strict compliance" with the state penal code would "prevent, hinder or delay" the involuntary transfer of inmates.

As a result, the proclamation said that the "applicable provisions of these statutes are suspended" for "the scope and duration" of the overcrowding crisis -- in effect letting Schwarzenegger bypass the legislative process.

First on the list of forced transfers would be inmates who had previously been deported by the federal government.

Next would be inmates who will be paroled outside California, then inmates with no family or "supportive ties" in the state, followed by inmates with families in other states and then "other inmates as deemed necessary" by the corrections secretary.

The prospect of the forced transfers was met with protest by state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, and others.

"I believe he's breaking the law in trying to send them out on an involuntary basis," Romero said. "He's basically acknowledging that he can't handle the situation, and he's asking other states to do it for him."

California Correctional Peace Officers Association Vice President Robert Dean said forced transfers could incite violence.

"When it's not voluntary, what's the guy going to do? He's not even going to get on the bus," Dean said.

Steve Fama of the Prison Law Office said prisoners must agree to the transfers and be allowed to talk to lawyers.

"I don't like the idea that California is getting into the business of mass exportation of prisoners to private profiteers," Fama said. "I think it's a state function to imprison."

Singling out any particular group of inmates for transfers, such as foreign nationals, raises constitutional questions, according to Francisco Estrada of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

"You target any group of folks like this, and you run into problems," Estrada said.

But Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, hailed Schwarzenegger for the emergency move.

"The governor showed real leadership," Spitzer said. "We're in a desperate situation here. He called a special session of the Legislature, but the Democratic leaders did nothing to address the issue."

Tilton said he expected the transfers to result in a net cost saving to the state, with the private firms charging about $60 a day on average to house inmates compared to $90 in California.

He identified the Corrections Corporation of America, Cornell Corrections and the Geo Group as the private prison companies that will receive the no-bid contracts to handle the initial movement of prisoners to the other states.

Geo had contributed more than $90,000 to Schwarzenegger over the years. Julie Soderlund, a spokeswoman for the governor's re-election campaign, said Wed-nesday that he recently returned the contributions to the company.

TRANSFER PLAN AT A GLANCE

• State will send 100 to 200 inmates a month to private prisons in Indiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arizona.

• Administration hopes to ultimately transfer at least 5,000 inmates.

• 19,000 inmates expressed interest in going.

• Officials say the transfer could ease overcrowding and save money.

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

Posted by lois at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Officials Prepare to Transfer People Who Are Incarcerated to Other States

Los Angeles Times

Officials Prepare to Transfer Inmates to Out-of-State Prisons Authorities hope to free up 5,000 beds, starting with 200 convicts who have volunteered to go.

By Jenifer Warren, Times Staff Writer
October 6, 2006

SACRAMENTO ‹ Corrections officials prepared to sign the first contract allowing prisoners to be shipped to other states Thursday as legislators debated the plan's merits and one expert said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should forget short-term fixes and instead convene a bipartisan summit on punishment in California.

One day after the governor proclaimed an emergency in the state's severely overcrowded prisons, Republicans praised Schwarzenegger for decisive action while Democrats raised legal questions about the move and accused the governor of sitting by while the crisis escalated.

For his part, Schwarzenegger's Democratic foe, Phil Angelides, said: "For nearly three years, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has ignored California's prison crisis. Three months ago, I proposed declaring a state of emergency to fix Gov. Schwarzenegger's prison mess."

Although the first round of relocations ‹ starting with 200 inmates next month ‹ will be voluntary, prison officials said the governor's emergency order gives them authority to move convicts against their will as needed to free up beds. Currently, the penal code requires an inmate's consent for such an out-of-state move.

Corrections Secretary James Tilton said he hoped to quickly get volunteers to vacate 5,000 beds, noting that more than 19,000 had expressed interest in a recent survey. But if enough volunteers do not come forward, Tilton said, the dire conditions will compel him to export inmates without their consent. Assemblyman Todd Spitzer (R-Orange) said sending inmates to private prisons in other states represented a last resort by a governor facing a crisis.

Prison officials say they will be out of bed space by next summer and would have to close their doors to new felons, further burdening beleaguered county jails.

"The governor's preference was to have the Legislature work with him on this to solve the issue," Spitzer said, referring to a special session on prisons that ended in August with the Democratic-controlled Assembly's rejection of several measures to relieve crowding. "He gave us that opportunity and we blew it."

But state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) said that by allowing mandatory transfers, Schwarzenegger was "snubbing his nose at the law."

Barry Krisberg, president of the nonprofit National Council on Crime and Delinquency, said Schwarzenegger had little choice.

"The Third World conditions inside the prisons have created such a dangerous situation that, short of putting up tents in the desert, there wasn't much he could do," Krisberg said.

"The Assembly clearly dropped the ball by refusing to adopt a sensible package of proposals," Krisberg said.

One law professor who has written extensively on prisons urged Schwarzenegger to think more broadly about the problem.

Franklin Zimring, a professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall, said that although the transfer plan might buy the state time, it ignores fundamental problems with California's sentencing laws and penal policies ‹ problems that have helped foster the population crunch.

"What we need to do," Zimring said, "is sit down and put the entire governance of punishment in California on the table for an extensive, bipartisan analysis and fixing."

In Indiana, California's move to export its convicts was met with enthusiasm. Gov. Mitch Daniels issued a statement gleefully announcing that he would soon be housing 1,200 California felons.

In California, corrections officials confirmed that Indiana's New Castle Correctional Facility would be among those lockups likely to soon receive inmates. Others are in Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arizona. All facilities are operated by private companies. Officials said the cost of housing Californians in other states would run about $60 per day, compared with the $90 daily cost here.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prison6oct06,1,1909784.story?coll=la
-headlines-california
------------------------------------------------------------------------
jenifer.warren@latimes.com

Posted by lois at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)

Ltr re: "We Incarcerate to Set Free"

Many female inmates need treatment, not prison terms
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
October 7, 2007

To the editor:
As reported in the Journal of Correctional Health Care: ''Data from the women's unit of the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow, Mass., found that 75 percent of women reported histories of sexual and physical violence, 82 percent were arrested for drug offenses, 15 percent had severe mental illness, 50 percent reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, 33 percent were homeless upon arrest, and 85 percent were mothers.''

Does this sound like a group of hard-core criminals for whom ''this stop along the way can break a cycle of destructive behavior'' as stated by the superintendent of the new women's jail in Chicopee (Gazette, Oct. 3), or does it sound like a population of women who need meaningful, effective drug treatment, mental health services, and a safe home for themselves and their children?

As a nurse practitioner, I have been working with women who use drugs for over 16 years. Women who have been victimized do not need to be criminalized. Empowerment does not take place when women are locked up. Sally Johnson Van Wright is quoted as saying ''we incarcerate to set free,'' which is oxymoronic and a lame attempt at propaganda.

Likewise, the insistence that the biggest problem faced by the women currently incarcerated in Ludlow is that ''the male inmates are not always kind or respectful to the female inmates'' is a manipulative ploy to gather support for the new jail as a feminist issue.

Our criminal justice system is neither kind nor respectful to women inmates, and it continues to thrive on the persistence of racism. It symbolizes our failure to adequately address and reduce poverty. It draws resources from prevention efforts and drug treatment. Addiction is an illness, not a crime.

Ellen Miller-Mack

Northampton

Posted by lois at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2006

Schwarzenegger Signs Bill Allowing Shorter Parole in Exchange for Drug Treatment

Los Angeles Times

Schwarzenegger Signs Bill Allowing Shorter Parole in Exchange for Drug Treatment

By Jenifer Warren, Times Staff Writer
October 4, 2006

SACRAMENTO ‹ Hoping to reduce the number of Californians who cycle in and out of prison, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has quietly signed a bill allowing nonviolent ex-convicts to earn their way off parole early by completing an intensive drug treatment program.

The new law marks a significant ‹ and wise ‹ change in the state's approach to parole, says an expert who has previously accused the governor of wavering on prison reform. UC Irvine criminologist Joan Petersilia said other states have already demonstrated the benefit of giving low-risk ex-felons a chance to shorten their parole terms through good behavior.

"This is good policy because it adds a carrot to the stick we use so heavily in parole in this state," she said. "The research shows that if you give people incentives, they are more likely to stay involved in treatment and succeed."

Under the law, which takes effect in January, only ex-convicts who were serving time for nonviolent crimes ‹ such as drug or property offenses ‹ and have completed at least six months of addiction treatment in prison will be eligible. No one convicted of a sex offense will qualify.

Once released, eligible parolees who wish to participate will be sent directly to a residential drug treatment program for five months. If they graduate, they will immediately be freed from parole supervision.

By contrast, most California parolees now undergo three years of monitoring by their parole agent and are subject to conditions limiting travel and other aspects of their lives. A small number are discharged after one or two years, if they have no dirty drug tests or other violations.

The bill's author, state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), said she was surprised but delighted that the Republican governor signed her measure, especially during an election year when a move shortening parole terms could be labeled soft on crime.

The bill enjoyed support from a wide variety of groups, including the politically powerful prison guards union. Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., said parolees "who demonstrate that level of commitment to treatment deserve recognition for their effort."

"It's a concept worth supporting," he said. "The only question is how they are going to come up with enough drug treatment beds for everybody who qualifies."

Administration officials said they would expand the inventory of treatment programs for inmates and parolees as quickly as possible, although there is no money specified by the bill.

Speier said she sponsored the measure in part because 75% of the state's 172,000 inmates have histories of drug or alcohol addiction. Of those released each year, 60% will return to prison within three years, she said. "If we can help them conquer their addictions and get them off this treadmill of returning to prison, we'll save the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars," Speier said. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spends more than $100 million a year on drug treatment programs inside prisons, she said, but much of it is wasted because many parolees do not undergo follow-up treatment and relapse.

Speier said the new law would save the state money by keeping some ex-convicts from returning to prison and by reducing parole supervision costs, which run $4,340 annually for each parolee. Savings would be offset somewhat by the creation of new drug treatment beds for inmates and parolees.

Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Margita Thompson said the law reflects the governor's focus on "protecting public safety and reducing the recidivism rates in California's prisons."

She said research shows that in-prison treatment, with after-care in the community, improves the odds that a parolee will break the cycle of addiction.

Thompson also said the governor has repeatedly voiced the desire to better prepare inmates for release and even added the word "rehabilitation" to the name of the Department of Corrections.

Petersilia, who has worked as a corrections consultant for the Schwarzenegger administration but has also criticized its prison reform efforts, praised the governor for signing the bill. She said it marked a "serious attempt by the administration to begin basing its corrections policy on science."

"Right now in California, we have this kind of vanilla approach to parole ‹ everybody gets it for about the same length of time and under the same conditions," Petersilia said. The new law "for the first time represents an effort to tailor parole to the risk posed by the offender."

She added that if allowing nonviolent parolees with drug addictions to earn their way off parole proves successful, the state should try the same approach with other low-risk ex-convicts. She said officials could offer early release from parole to someone who, for instance, holds a part-time job and has stable housing continuously for a year.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-parolee4oct04,1,5643052.story?coll=l
a-headlines-california

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

October 03, 2006

"We Incarcerate to Set Free"

October 3, 2006
To the Editor
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA

We live in Orwellian times. We are asked to believe that the peacekeeper missile delivers peace, declaring war on a nation will bring democracy and now jailers ask us to accept that “we incarcerate to set free.”

Despite the beliefs of jailers, when the public is polled*, they say incarceration cannot solve the deep social and economic problems that drive crime nor is criminalizing addiction more viable than treating it as an illness. We do not need the new jail. What we need is drug treatment, prevention of childhood sexual abuse, quality education and good jobs. These are long-term solutions; however, right now, we can alleviate the need for new bigger jails though bail reform and pre-trial diversion programs.

Approximately 1/2 of women being held at the Hampden County jail are there because they are too poor to make $200-$500 bail. Often their inability to make bail means that they and their children will become homeless and remain homeless further destabilizing their life and the life of their children. Successful pre-trial and bail reform programs are taking place throughout the country with positive results.

If new programs sound expensive, just the opposite is true. It costs more than $3,600 for one woman to stay in jail for one month. Almost 85% of women at the Hampden County Jail---pre-trial and sentenced ---are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. A May 2006 NIH study found “that society earns $7 in benefits for every $1 spent on addiction treatment.”

Researchers found that the average stay in treatment cost $1,600. For each person included in a nine-month period, treatment yielded $11,500 in benefits including $7,500 in savings on crime and incarceration related costs and $3,400 in increased earnings.

When will we have enough of jail and start moving to humane and effective solutions?
Lois Ahrens

*“Changing Public Attitudes Toward the Criminal Justice System”, February 2002

Posted by lois at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)

New Jail for Women in western MA: "She mentioned a phrase she heard the other day: We incarcerate to set free."

Chance for intervention at a new women's jail
By KIMBERLY ASHTON Staff Writer
10/3/2006, Daily Hampshire Gazette

CHICOPEE - The women who will head the new's women's jail in Chicopee - for female inmates from Hampshire County - say they want the facility to be a place of rehabilitation and empowerment.

''Look at it as an opportunity for intervention,'' Patricia Murphy, the superintendent of the new jail, said in a telephone interview Monday. ''This stop along the way can break a cycle of destructive behavior.''

The $26.1 million, 120-cell minimum- and medium-security facility is expected to be complete in March and to open June 1, Murphy said. It will house female inmates from Hampshire, Hampden, Franklin and Berkshire counties and most cells can hold as many as two women. The original plan of 176 cells was scaled back because of cost. Murphy said she is not sure whether the additional 56 cells will ever be built.

Women prisoners in the state's western counties, with the exception of Berkshire, are now incarcerated at the Hampden Jail and House of Correction in Ludlow, a co-ed jail. Murphy is now working out of the jail in Ludlow.

But mixing the sexes is not conducive to women's rehabilitation, which is a main reason the Chicopee jail is being built. Although men and women are kept apart, women are exposed to ''very objectionable comments'' through the ventilation system or when they have to pass by men for medical and other appointments, according to Sally Johnson Van Wright, who will be the jail's assistant superintendent.

''It's a really harsh environment,'' Johnson Van Wright said. ''The male inmates are not always kind or respectful to the female inmates.'' The men at Ludlow outnumber the women 10 or 11 to 1.

As to those who oppose the opening of the Chicopee jail, Johnson Van Wright said, ''If they understood more what it's like for a woman in a men's prison I really believe they would want women to be in a separate place so if a court says a woman has to be in jail she shouldn't have to be around male inmates.''

The jail is the first women's facility to be built in the state in 125 years.

Johnson Van Wright, of South Hadley, has worked at the Ludlow jail for 12 years. She has a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Smith College and a master's in social work from Springfield College. She began working in corrections after an internship at the jail showed her that it could be a place to empower women, she said.

''I really didn't think jail would be such a place,'' Johnson Van Wright said. She mentioned a phrase she heard the other day: We incarcerate to set free.

The jail will feature a vocational program, educational opportunities and other services.

Murphy, the superintendent, has a master's degree in criminal justice from American International College and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. She worked for the Department of Youth Services and the Robert F. Kennedy Action Core for 22 years.

For the past 12 years she has worked for Hampden County Sheriff Michael Ashe at the Western Mass. Correctional Alcohol Center.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Posted by lois at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2006

NY: Drugs in Prisons - 3 articles in a series

These are three in a series for the URL to access the entire series, see below
The Buffalo News
SPECIAL REPORT: DRUGS IN PRISON
JAILHOUSE HIGHS
By LOU MICHEL and SUSAN SCHULMAN
NEWS STAFF REPORTERS
9/17/2006

Reginald Brown, a former drug user released from prison May 2005, now counsels other former inmates as program coordinator at Back to Basics, an outreach ministry on Genesee Street in Buffalo.

Illegal drugs seep into New York state prisons like rain through a leaky roof, with some inmates staying doped-up until their release - only to commit more crimes. And others dying behind bars, a Buffalo News investigation found.

Jitendra Lakram, 36, died that way.

The son of South American immigrants, Lakram hoped to start a new life once released from Attica state prison, perhaps returning, his family said, to their home country of Guyana. He never got the chance.

Neither did Michael Vlahoff, 31, a former worker in Ford's Woodlawn plant, who got mixed up in drugs, and landed in Collins state prison.

"I was so shocked that I couldn't believe it," said Lakram's mother, Kamlawaty Lakram. "I figured my son . should be safe and drug free there."

It makes no sense."

"He's not on the street," one of Vlahoff's relatives added. "He is (supposed to) dry out and get the help he needs," one of Vlahoff's relatives added. They're not supposed to get that stuff when they are in there."

Perhaps not, but it's happening.

With some 3,500 drug tests coming back positive each year, three inmates, on average, die from illegal drugs in New York prisons annually, The News found. At least 19 died this way since 2000.

But beyond that, countless other inmates are released with drug addictions, often to commit more crimes on the street.

"It [drug addiction] was just as bad when I got out," said Cheryl Davis, who resumed her "career" as a Buffalo drug addict and thief upon leaving Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

People come into court . . . want[ing] to detox off the drugs that they had been using while in custody," said Buffalo City Court Judge Robert T. Russell.

While drugs behind bars are a national problem, The News found drug use in New York prisons more widespread than in surrounding states - with marijuana and heroin being the drugs of choice. About 70 percent of all positive drug tests are for marijuana; 30 percent for heroin.

Among The News' findings:

• A greater percentage of random drug tests are positive in New York prisons than in surrounding states - more than 10 times greater than Pennsylvania. The numbers may be conservative because New York administers fewer random tests than the other states surveyed.

• New York's maximum-security prisons tend to have the biggest drug problem. Less than 30 percent of prison inmates are in the state's 17 maximum-security prisons, where more than 60 percent of drug incidents occur.

• Drugs or drug paraphernalia were found in prisons about 2,000 times in the last 51/2 years. Some 868 inmates were arrested for possessing drugs in prison over the past decade. At least 300 visitors were arrested with drugs over the past five years. About 20 prison employees are disciplined or resign annually for drug involvement in and out of prison.

• Four times as many inmates died from accidental drug overdoses in New York prisons from 2002 to 2004 as in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan combined. Nationally, inmates are nearly twice as likely to die from drug overdoses in New York prisons as in state prisons around the country.

• Similar problems exist in some county jails. Seven inmates died in New York City jails and eight in county jails outside New York City since 2000. Among them was an Erie County man whose heroin addiction, family members said, started years ago in state prison.

"Anything I can get at Genesee and Jefferson, they got in there [prison and jail]," said former inmate Reginald Brown, an ex-drug user now counseling other former convicts in Buffalo.

"We've heard from some it's even easier [to get drugs in prison than on the streets], and there's less chance of getting caught," said Erie County Deputy District Attorney Molly Jo Musarra.

Question of Safety

New York State Department of Correctional Services officials call illegal drugs a threat to prison safety, and say keeping them out is a constant challenge, given 72 percent of inmates enter prison with a history of substance abuse.

But the department says it does a good job keeping the situation under control in a system with 69 prisons that some 90,000 inmates go through each year - an average 63,000 on any given day; as well as 770,000 visitors, and some 585,000 packages to inmates annually.

"We believe we have an effective and comprehensive strategy to tackle drugs in prison," department spokeswoman Linda M. Foglia said.

b With the department's emphasis on drug treatment for addicts, and punishment for those caught with drugs in prison, positive drug tests, she said, declined in recent years, although 2005 showed an increase Of 81,000 drug tests administered last year, 3.4 percent of all tests, and 2.9 percent of randomly administered tests, were positive.

But what the state sees as a strong, successful program, others see as lacking, especially in maximum-security prisons. As many as 7 percent of random drug tests in maximum security prisons are positive, as are 10 percent of follow-up tests given to inmates who previously tested positive, and 17 percent of tests given to inmates acting suspiciously, The News found.

"You would go to the yard on Saturday or Sunday night, and it would be like a bazaar, with people going from table to table making drug deals," said Kevin Muscoreil, a former Attica inmate now working as a legal assistant to a top Buffalo defense attorney.

"We have a terrible problem with heroin in Attica. Drugs are rampant," said Corrections Officer Rick Harcrow, a union steward at the prison.

Corrections Department officials challenged those characterizations, saying positive drug tests at Attica, with 2,200 prisoners, dropped in recent years to 4 percent in 2005, from 6 percent in 2001.

"We don't have heroin rampant in Attica," Foglia said. "There is absolutely no evidence to support these claims."

Nevertheless, with New York having a higher rate of positive random drug tests than surrounding states surveyed, The News found New York is less aggressive in battling its drug problem - a situation critics say goes back 30 years.

"System failure'

In what now seems like a double whammy, the state imposed Gov. Rockefeller's tough, new drug laws - putting more drug users and sellers behind bars - at the same time it implemented some of the most liberal prison visitation policies in the country as a response to the 1971 Attica uprising.

With all the hand holding, kissing and hugging permitted - during daily visitation at maximum-security prisons and weekend and holiday visits at the others - it got easier to smuggle illegal drugs into prisons, critics say. And with more inmates coming into prison with drug histories, the demand for drugs got higher.

"Obviously, there was a system failure that allowed this high volume of drugs to be getting into the prisons," said George King, a former State Parole Board member for 10 years.

The News also found the New York prison system doesn't share drug overdose information with families.

"They told us he died of a heart attack. If the lawyer hadn't investigated, I would have never known," Jitendra Lakram's mother said. "I kept calling the investigator in [the Department of Correctional Services], and he never has given an answer."

"We were never told he had drugs in him," said Eddie Reid, whose brother-in-law, Louis Telese, died from a drug overdose at Attica last year. "We were told it was a heart attack."

It's the coroner's responsibility, not the corrections department's, to notify families on how their loved ones died, corrections officials said.

"Corrections law says the cause of death must be decided and given to the public from the coroner," Foglia said.

The cocaine habit

Michael Vlahoff grew up in Lancaster and had a good job at the Ford plant, but the father of two young boys developed a cocaine habit that overtook his life.

He ended up divorced, fired from his job and, eventually, behind bars.

His legal trouble started with a 2000 burglary and continued in 2001, when he stole a car in Hamburg. When an officer approached, Vlahoff sped away, dragging the officer, who suffered a fractured shoulder.

Vlahoff ended up in Collins Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison, serving up to three years behind bars.

His family never gave up on him. With drug counseling, they hoped he would turn things around.

"The family was supportive of him," said State Sen. Dale Volker, who knows the Vlahoffs as a "good, hardworking family" that tried to help Vlahoff beat his drug addiction.

But in prison, Vlahoff's drug habit only got worse.

At home, he did crack cocaine, his family said.

In prison, he did heroin.

One night in October 2003, Vlahoff and his cellmate were "doing lines" of heroin. The next morning, Vlahoff was dead from an overdose.

The American dream

Jitendra Lakram and his family moved to the United States in 1970, searching for the American dream after escaping discrimination against Indian families in their home country, Guyana, South America.

Lakram's parents prospered in New York, moving from Queens to Long Island's Nassau County. His sister went on to finish college and get a good job in the business world.

But Jitendra Lakram foundered. He was smoking marijuana and stealing cars.

In 1986, he went to prison for car theft. In 1991, not long after his release, Lakram threatened a man at gunpoint - he claimed the gun wasn't loaded - and stole a car.

At age 23, Lakram was back behind bars, serving 121/2 to 25 years in Attica.

Lakram's parents hoped that, once released, their son would start a new life in Guyana, . perhaps marketing an idea he patented in prison for an "unsinkable ship."

But drugs behind bars got in the way.

"We're concerned about [you] having drugs," one parole commissioner said during a hearing in 2003. "Why is this going on in jail?"

"I use drugs recreationally to relieve my stress," Lakram said. Parole commissioners reacted harshly.

"You do realize how outrageous that is, given your situation, and where you are?" a commissioner responded.

The following year, on Nov. 22, 2004, Lakram was found dead in his cell. He overdosed on heroin.

Thriving drug culture

The drug culture thrives in prisons, The News found, partly because of innovative ways drugs are smuggled in, but also because of New York's liberal visitation policies.

"It is mostly girlfriends, wives, family members bringing drugs in," said District Attorney John Trice from Chemung County, where two prisons are located. "I've had mothers bringing it in to Junior."

Other states do background checks on visitors, send trained dogs to find drugs on visitors and in their cars, and conduct high-tech drug screening of everyone entering the prison.

Not in New York State prisons.

The state has three electronic ion scanners shared among the 69 prisons to detect drugs on visitors.

Most visitors to New York prisons can show up, sign in, walk through a metal detector and visit an inmate. Even if the visitor is a drug dealer.

And while some states keep inmates and visitors physically apart - with glass partitions or video visitation rooms - New York, despite rules to the contrary, allows many inmates and visitors to spend hours hugging and kissing in crowded rooms, often with limited supervision, The News observed.

"When I started back in the 1970s, many of the prisons had glass partitions, and you spoke through a phone, and there was minimal contact visitation," said Denny Fitzpatrick, spokesman for the New York State corrections officers' union, after the Attica riot, many things were changed, and they took a very liberal approach in dealing with inmates."

How liberal?

New York is one of just six states that allows married inmates conjugal trailer visits, according to the National Institute of Corrections.

State officials say they are considering the purchase of more scanners to check inmates for drugs, but that it would be inefficient to do background checks and use drug dogs on visitors in a prison system as large as New York's.

Deadly mystery

State Police investigators believe Vlahoff got his deadly heroin through another inmate, who had a visitor smuggle the drugs into prison.

"When he got back to the cell . . . we started doing lines," cellmate Bruce Ferguson said.

Authorities don't know how Lakram got or ingested the heroin that killed him.

"They searched his cell, and no apparatus, a needle or smoking device, was found," State Police Capt. George Brown said.

It all leaves the Vlahoff and Lakram families struggling to come to terms with the deaths.

And it raises concerns within the law-enforcement community for society in general.

If you can't keep drugs out of a facility like Attica, there's no hope of keeping them out of other institutions like schools," said Gerald L. Stout, district attorney in Wyoming County where two state prisons, including Attica, are located.

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Buffalo News

SPECIAL REPORT: JAILHOUSE HIGHS
THREE MONTHS TO GET CLEAN

Inmates get 90 days to kick habit at one prison devoted to treatment

By LOU MICHEL and SUSAN SCHULMAN
News Staff Reporters
9/20/2006

Cheryl Davis and Stacey Baxter are longtime drug addicts who have been in and out of jail for years.

Davis still roams the streets of Buffalo, stealing to pay for her dope.

Baxter is now drug-free, although it's a constant struggle.

The difference, in part, could be how the criminal-justice system treated the women.

Baxter was scooped up by her parole officer and sent to Willard Drug Treatment Center after the 35-year-old Jamestown woman injected herself with heroin in an inpatient drug treatment center.

Years earlier, when Davis' drug addiction landed her back in court, her attorney begged the judge to place Davis, 37, in Willard, too.

"If she has any chance at all of ever being successfully assimilated into society and having any kind of a meaningful and productive life, she has to deal with her addiction problem," attorney Bonnie McLaughlin told the judge.

But Davis didn't meet Willard's court-required entrance criteria, so instead was sent to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a women's prison in Westchester County.

"We'd do heroin at the Erie County Holding Center," Davis said. "In state prison, [drugs] are more plentiful. I got drugs from other convicts and guards."

A one-time agricultural school converted into a state hospital for the mentally ill, Willard was transformed in 1995 into New York's only prison exclusively for drug addicts, a 900-bed facility in the Finger Lakes.

Some say Willard offers lessons on how to keep illegal drugs out of New York's prisons.

But Willard's not a panacea. It doesn't transform everyone.

Craig M. Lynch went to Willard twice, only to kill a beloved Buffalo nun while high on crack cocaine less than a year after his release.

Bruce Ferguson, who grew up in Williamsville, also went there but returned to committing crimes when he got out. He ended up in state prison, snorting heroin with another inmate. Ferguson survived. His cellmate, Michael Vlahoff of Lancaster, didn't.

There are others. No one knows how many. The state doesn't keep statistics on former Willard inmates. They don't know how many succeed on the outside, and how many relapse. They don't know if the recidivism rate is any better than the 40 percent in traditional prisons.

Nonetheless, Willard is one of the few correctional facilities in New York where inmates can't seem to get their hands on drugs. No Willard inmates tested positive in drug screenings, and there are no reports of drug confiscations at the center, state officials said.

Inmates don't bring drugs into the facility because the program is devoted to changing behavior, and because inmates know if they get caught with drugs, they will get an extended sentence at a traditional prison, rather than 90 days at Willard, officials said.

"They know they're going home rather than going to prison. It's a carrot," said Deputy Superintendent Daniel M. West.

Intense experience

Stacey Baxter was at Willard for three months last fall. It was an intense experience, she said.

The day began at 5:30 a.m., with a one-to three-mile run before breakfast, followed by drug treatment sessions, academic instruction and vocational training. Random drug tests are also part of the routine.

It's all in a military-like setting, with dormitory-style quarters rather than cells and corrections officers acting more like drill sergeants than prison guards. In fact, officers come around making sure beds are properly made and personal items are kept neatly in cabinets.

Inmates are allowed visitors once every two weeks, on weekends only. Contact visits are allowed, just as at traditional prisons.

"I hated it when I came here," Baxter said of Willard, but added: "If I didn't [go to Willard] I'd be dead. I think it is the best thing I've done."

Now home in Jamestown, Baxter regularly attends outpatient drug treatment sessions initially set up by Willard. Still, it's a constant battle.

Since she was 12 years old, Baxter says, she has taken drugs. She spent much of her life in foster care, detention and behind bars. Now, while drug-free, she dreams of getting high at night and thinks about drugs during the day. In fact, she had one slip since being released from Willard that landed her back in the hospital.

But with two children, and a third on the way, Baxter says she's committed to staying clean.

"Now I'm fine. I'm clean off everything. I put myself back in outpatient," she said, adding: "It's too hard to be a dope fiend. I don't miss that life."

Cheryl Davis' world

Cheryl Davis still lives in that world.

Standing outside her West Side apartment last winter, Davis was thin and tired. She wanted a heroin fix.

"You know I'm a drug addict," she said. "I can't talk today."

Another day, when doped up and feeling better, Davis said her mother, then father, died in separate car accidents only months apart when she was a young girl.

"I come from a very good family," she said.

By the time Davis turned 16, she was a high school dropout and prostitute. Her life has been a constant mix of drugs, prostitution and thievery, broken up periodically by jail, prison and halfway houses. She has been arrested 71 times in the Buffalo area.
In 1999, after stabbing another drug user, Davis was back in court.

While her attorney wanted Davis sentenced to Willard, the judge said Davis didn't qualify because she was a violent felon. She got a prison sentence of 16 months to 3 years.

She came out of prison as drug-addicted as when she went in.

And since her release, she's been arrested 13 times on drug, prostitution, theft, assault and forgery charges. Davis spent the better part of 2006 in jail, after being caught stealing from stores along Niagara Falls Boulevard. She is now back on the streets.

Judges can place convicts in Willard for drug-related offenses, but not violent felonies. District attorneys and judges, however, appear reluctant to ship convicts to Willard's 90-day program in lieu of lengthier prison sentences. Just 18 of the state's 62 counties refer convicts to Willard directly from court, Willard Superintendent Melvin Williams said.

Willard inmates are also referred to the facility for violating parole. Unlike the courts, parole can commit violent felonies to Willard. That's how Baxter got in. Davis qualified under those terms, but never got such a referral.

"The community wants people to go to prison," Williams said.

Seeking solutions

Some suggest beefing up drug tests and imposing tighter procedures on contact visits, including drug-sniffing dogs as a way to combat drugs in state prisons. But those ideas have detractors, who complain of costs to the state and civil rights of visitors.
An alternative, some say, is to expand programs such as those offered in Willard into regular prisons, even creating drug-free wings.

Inmates in these wings would voluntarily receive aggressive drug testing as well as early drug treatment.

Buffalo City Judge Robert T. Russell Jr., who runs the city's drug court, said he has seen drug-free wings in European prisons, where corrections officers take a more active role in rehabilitating drug addicts.

Such programs disrupt the market for drugs in prison, said Alan Rosenthal, director of justice strategies at the Center for Community Alternatives in Syracuse.

"Many people are processed through [prisons], and they never receive drug treatment," Rosenthal said. "The inmate who is in an intensive treatment program is less likely to be searching out drugs."

Beyond that, better outpatient treatment when prisoners are released is also needed, Rosenthal said.

Improved drug treatment in and out of prison, Russell said, would help inmates and better protect the public - and could also save money.

Drug-addicted inmates released back into society "are going to come back, and you're going to spend $35,000 a year to reincarcerate them," Rosenthal said.

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SPECIAL REPORT: JAILHOUSE HIGHS
NO SAFE HAVEN

County jails are just as drug-infested as state prisons housing convicted felons

By LOU MICHEL and SUSAN SCHULMAN
NEWS STAFF REPORTERS
9/19/2006

It's not just the state prisons, with their razor-wire fences and mammoth brick walls, letting drugs in.

County jails, often holding people awaiting trial, can be just as drug-infested, some more so, The Buffalo News investigation found.

And jail inmates, like prison inmates, are dying.

In New York State, the dead include:

Jason Ciurczak, 30, the son of Amherst man and a Youngstown woman, being held in the Erie County jail on drug charges.

Daniel Riccio, 28, from a suburban Long Island family, being held in the Nassau County jail because of drugs charge.

Kathleen Brennan, 26, the daughter of a New York City police officer, being held in the Orange County jail because of drug charges.

All three were drug addicts - awaiting trial, sentencing or rehabilitation placement on drug charges - who fatally overdosed on drugs they obtained while in county jails.

In New York State, at least 10 inmates fatally overdosed in 10 county jails outside New York City since 2000. Another 10 died of drug overdose in New York City's jails, state records show. That's in addition to the 19 who died of drug overdoses in New York state prisons.

Nationally, a prisoner in a county jail is more than four times as likely to die of a drug overdose than a state prison inmate. Overdoses represent 1.2 percent of deaths in all state prisons versus 5.2 percent of the deaths in county jails.

"Jails are a stepchild of the criminal justice system," said Ken Kerle, with the American Jail Association.

Jailers bringing drugs in

With their budget limitations, constant flow of inmates and sometimes head-in-the-sand attitudes, The News found, county jails often don't have the ability or interest to keep illegal and deadly drugs away from inmates.

As with prisons, visitors smuggle most of the drugs into jails, but employees are also involved. The News found at least a dozen county corrections officers arrested over the past decade for smuggling drugs into jails outside New York City, including one who allowed drugs to be mixed in with orders of Chinese food brought into jail. Another 26 corrections officers at Rikers Island, New York City's primary jail, were arrested over the past 15 years, state records show.

The state doesn't keep statistics on drug-related incidents in county jails, but a News survey found more than 300 inmates and visitors arrested on drug-related charges annually in the state's 60 county jails outside New York City and some 250 last year in New York City jails.

Outside New York City, the incidents are more prevalent in the state's most-populous urban counties, including Erie and Monroe, and suburban New York City counties, including Orange and Nassau.

That's also true with overdose deaths.

Addicts in the family

The Brennan, Riccio and Ciurczak families acknowledge their loved ones were drug addicts.

"He was at my house with [a girlfriend], and they went into the bathroom, and I happened to walk around the corner and the door was open. I just wanted to collapse. It was heartbreaking," said Ciurczak's mother, Susan Canfield. "[His girlfriend] was shooting him up. He had a bungee cord around his left arm. I yelled at him, "Why the hell are you doing this? You're letting this ruin your life.' "

Canfield, like relatives of the other overdose victims, was relieved when her son ended up in jail on a drug possession charge. There, she felt, her son would be safe, away from the drugs she feared were killing him.

But within months, Ciurczak was dead, killed on Jan. 17, 2005, by an overdose of heroin that a fellow Erie County jail inmate injected into the 30-year-old's neck.

It was a similar story with Daniel Riccio, a drug addict sent back to jail in 2001 after his parole officer determined Riccio was still using drugs. He died of a drug overdose in Nassau County jail on Feb. 14, 2001, while waiting to be placed in a drug treatment program.

Kathleen Brennan was sent back to jail after failing to complete a drug rehabilitation program. On Nov. 26, 2003, four days before her release from the Orange County jail, Brennan was snorting heroin that another inmate smuggled into jail. She died of an overdose.

"We were totally blown away when we heard she OD'd," said her mother, Denise Brennan. "How was another inmate able to secret 100 bags of heroin into the jail?"

Kissing bans overturned

In their defense, some county jail officials say that they recognize visitors are smuggling drugs to inmates but that they don't have the wherewithal to stop it.

Two counties - Cayuga and Wayne - banned inmates and visitors in recent years from kissing on the lips, hoping that would stop drug exchanges.

But the bans were challenged by the state Commission on Corrections, which oversees county jails, and overturned.

In addition, while state prisons confine inmates already convicted, usually of felonies, county jails hold inmates convicted of misdemeanors and also serve as holding centers for defendants awaiting resolution of pending court cases. These people are still considered innocent.

Given that, local jails can't routinely strip-search inmates, something state prisons do.

Jails also handle inmates serving weekend jail sentences.

"Weekend-sentenced inmates often bring in the drugs. They have all week to figure out how to get it in," said Lt. James Ginty, a Sullivan County jail supervisor.

Also, most jail inmates live in the community where the facility is located, making it easier for friends, family and criminal associates to visit. It also may be why county jails appear to have more problems than state prisons with corrections officers bringing drugs into the facilities.

"It might be in some localities the officers know the inmates from their neighborhoods, and, unlike state prisons, there's a familiarity that occurs with inmates who keep coming back," said Dominick Orsino, administrator of the Orange County jail and a former deputy superintendent at two state prisons.

Many jail officials also say they just don't have the money needed for such things as drug testing, electronic drug detection devices, drug-sniffing dogs.

"We're looking at [electronic drug detection] scanners, but they are pretty expensive for a small, local jail," said Lt. John Mack, head of the Cayuga County jail.

Not that all jail administrators think there are problems.

Erie County Correctional Facility - where Jason Ciurczak died - requires visitors to open their mouths before entering the visiting room so officers can check for drugs. Visitors are also often searched by drug-sniffing dogs.

"I don't think drugs are a problem in jail," said Donald J. Livingston, the facility's superintendent. "Jason was an anomaly in my mind. He was determined to get drugs in, and he did."

Questions raised

Yet, Ciurczak's death raised questions among state investigators over the Erie County jail's procedures for detecting drugs smuggled into the facility, as well as the training deputies receive for recognizing signs of drug abuse.

Ciurczak was dead in his bunk for three hours, the state found, before he was discovered by jail deputies.

The commission also recommended the Erie County jail revise its inventory controls on the distribution and disposal of hypodermic syringes that the jail's medical staff controls.

Authorities never determined how Ciurczak obtained a needle in jail, but the man who fatally injected him told authorities Ciurczak got it from a diabetic inmate.

The state had similar criticisms and recommendations for the jails in Orange and Nassau counties, where Brennan and Riccio died.

Nassau County should increase the use of drug-detecting dogs and purchase other types of interdiction equipment, the commission wrote.

"Introduction of prison contraband continues to be an issue and has been cited as a contributing factor in previous inmate deaths at the Nassau County Correctional Center," the commission stated.

The jail also needs to develop a system identifying inmates, like Riccio, who got caught with drugs during prior incarcerations in the jail, the state said.

After Brennan's death in Orange County, the state also determined that the jail needs better drug detection equipment and inmate supervision.

Brennan was so high the night she died, other inmates had to help her into her cell and came by to check on her, with permission from a corrections officer. Apparently, jail officers didn't question what was going on, the state found.

The state also questioned a statement from a corrections officer who claimed to have checked Brennan at 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 26, 2003, and found she was fine. In fact, the state pointed out, she had died 71/2 hours earlier.

Jail personnel should "have their conduct reviewed for not verifying that Brennan was alive and breathing . . . ," the commission wrote.

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Other articles in this series are on line at http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/jailhousehighs.asp

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October 01, 2006

Experiment Will Test the Effectiveness of Post-Prison Employment Programs

October 1, 2006, NY Times
Experiment Will Test the Effectiveness of Post-Prison Employment Programs
By ERIK ECKHOLM

CHICAGO — As raw garbage streamed by on a conveyer belt, newly released convicts pulled out paper, plastics and other recyclables on a recent morning, throwing aside the occasional brick or mattress.

Noisy, dusty and smelly, paying $6.50 an hour, the jobs yield neither the swagger nor the swag that these men and women chased as drug dealers, thieves or worse. But many of them see the temporary work as a fresh start.

The jobs are arranged by a Chicago charity, the Safer Foundation, which works with current and former prisoners. Offering transitional jobs like these — immediate, closely supervised work and help finding permanent employment — is a growing tactic in the effort to usher felons back to society and curb recidivism. Now the effectiveness of this approach is about to be tested scientifically for the first time.

Starting in January, the employment and recidivism rates of 2,000 newly released male prisoners, all with similar histories of little work and poor schooling, will be studied in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Chicago.

Half of the men will receive more limited aid: instruction in work behavior, résumé preparation and other employment skills and help looking for a job. The other half will get those services and also a few months of temporary work in places like the recycling plant here — a chance for them to get into the unfamiliar rhythms of a regular job.

The experiment, which will track the two groups over three years, is being sponsored by the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and directed by the Manpower Development Research Corporation in New York, which specializes in scientific studies of poverty programs.

Separately, the research group is conducting a controlled study of the transitional jobs program at the Center for Employment Opportunities in New York, which provides maintenance crews for public facilities and has been a national model.

“If you ask inmates what they want most, they want a job,” said Mindy Tarlow, executive director of the center in New York. “But they don’t know what that means.”

She added, “What we’re competing with is making some money at night on a street corner instead of having to show up somewhere at 8 a.m. every day.”

Despite the apparent promise of transitional jobs, questions remain about their long-term effectiveness that the study hopes to address.

Are those who last through these programs such a select group — so motivated to change — that they would succeed anyway, or can well-timed help turn others around, too?

Can work-site counseling, sobriety meetings and a strong dose of mainstream work overcome the criminal pull of old haunts and friends?

And more fundamentally: will people with low skills, even if they adapt to steady work, ever make wages high enough to support a family and stifle the temptation to return to crime?

Roberto Reyes, a 36-year-old high school dropout in Chicago who has served seven years on burglary, gun and drug charges, works the conveyer belt at a recycling plant that is run for the city by Allied Waste Services.

Mr. Reyes has labored at the plant for four months, the longest he has held a job. “The money here is not that much, but it’s better than nothing,” he said. “Sometimes you wake up and don’t want to come to work, but I’m not going to leave this until I find another job. I knew I couldn’t just keep going on with that lifestyle and see life pass me by.”

Mr. Reyes’s determination is evident, but the numbers and records of people in his situation are daunting.

In Chicago, more than 20,000 prisoners come home from state facilities each year. Fifty-four percent are re-incarcerated within three years for new crimes or parole violations — a tale of wasted lives and victimized communities that is repeated nationwide among more than 600,000 prisoners that are released annually.

While common sense, and prisoners themselves, say that employment is vital to an honest new life, the obstacles are huge. A majority of those leaving prison did not finish high school and have little legitimate work experience. Many have serious drug or psychological problems that must be treated before they can hold a regular job. And while transitional programs may acclimatize them to the time-clock world of the workplace, many are likely to remain stuck in low-end jobs anyway.

Those who work with prisoners say that enticing onetime thugs to give work a try is not always as hard as it sounds. “They tell us that what comes with the street life is looking over your shoulder all the time,” said Diane Williams, president of the Safer Foundation. One key, she said, seems to be getting released prisoners into work quickly, when the desire to normalize their lives is strongest.

Jimmy Parker, 24, was in and out of prison and hustling until six months ago when he decided, as he put it, “enough is enough.”

“This job is rough, but I’m trying to change my life around,” he said during a break at another recycling site run by Allied. “I’ve accomplished one thing — I got my own studio apartment — and someday I want to get custody of my daughter.”

The Safer Foundation has eight employees who search for companies willing to hire former prisoners. Allied Waste’s experience with such workers has been positive, said Robert Kalebich, general manager for the company in Chicago. Safer keeps a full-time “job coach” at each work site to advise workers and deal with disputes.

“If anything we see an advantage in this arrangement,” Mr. Kalebich said. “If we hire off the street we have to wonder are they trained, are they here legally, are they properly drug tested.”

Raphael Carter served drug time when he was 18, stayed out for nearly a decade, then found himself in prison again. “I woke up and said, I can’t do this anymore, it’s a dead end road,” he recalled, adding that he now has two children, 13 and 6, who depend on him.

“You have to weigh the options, would you rather go back to jail or get a little increment of money and see your kids,” said Mr. Carter, 30, who lives with his girlfriend and her four children. “Being older, I made the right choice.”

He worked for six months at the recycling job, then found a chance in a nearby city driving a forklift for the attractive wage of $11.60 an hour. But his car broke down once too often during the hour and a half drive to work, he said, and he was let go.

Now he works for a company that erects large party tents, a seasonal job at $8.50 an hour, and he is consulting the Safer listings for a permanent job.

“By myself I wouldn’t have had any of these opportunities,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/us/01reentry.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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