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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
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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 Govern