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November 30, 2006
Meth: The Overstated Addiction
AlterNet
Meth: The Overstated Addiction
By Margaret Dooley, Drug Policy Alliance
Posted on November 30, 2006, Printed on November 30, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/44915/
The Department of Justice has declared today National Methamphetamine Awareness Day. What better way to observe it than taking a break from the hype? Rather than repeating the popular fiction about methamphetamine (that use is skyrocketing, that only stepped up policing will counter the trend, and that addiction is untreatable), let's take a moment today to consider the evidence.
First, methamphetamine use is not prevalent. Although some 12 million Americans have tried methamphetamine, this is far fewer than the number who have tried inhalants (23 million), hallucinogens (34 million), cocaine (34 million), or marijuana (96 million). Of those who have tried methamphetamine, only 1.5 million have used the drug in the last year; and only 583,000 have used it within the last 30 days.
There is no indication that methamphetamine use is increasing. The proportion of Americans who use methamphetamine on a monthly basis has hovered in the range of 0.2 percent-0.3 percent since 1999. In fact, according to the 2005 Monitoring the Future survey, the percentage of high school seniors who reported using methamphetamine in the last year fell to a low of 2.5 percent in 2005. (Use of depressants, meanwhile, increased from a low of 2.8 percent in 1992 to around 7 percent in 2005.)
Second, policing is not "taking care" of methamphetamine. While limits on purchases of precursors have pushed many illicit labs out of our neighborhoods, the drug is still being manufactured -- just now it's across the border. Indeed, methamphetamine is now as available and cheap as it has ever been. This comes as no surprise. As long as demand for an illegal drug exists, there will be supply to meet it.
While policing has failed to curtail use of methamphetamine, it has successfully overloaded our jails and prisons. In the 1980s-90s, California followed national trends by relying increasingly on punishment and prisons as its primary response to arrests for illicit drug use. The total number of people imprisoned in California for drug possession quadrupled between 1988 and 2000, peaking at 20,116.
It was in response to this trend that California voters decided to change tactics. In 2000, 61 percent of California voters passed Proposition 36, the treatment-instead-of-incarceration law, which provides treatment to over 35,000 Californians convicted of nonviolent low-level drug offenses each year. Over half (53 percent) of Prop. 36 participants -- over 19,000 people -- enter treatment for methamphetamine abuse each year.
Prop. 36 has provided valuable evidence that methamphetamine addiction is quite treatable. According to state data on Prop. 36, methamphetamine users have a treatment completion rate of 35 percent, higher than users of cocaine/crack (32 percent) or heroin (29 percent). Although this was an important learning opportunity for policymakers, it was not news to treatment specialists. In fact, there have been at least twenty recent studies showing the efficacy of methamphetamine treatment.
The next step for policymakers is to provide treatment on demand, so that people suffering from addiction have access to treatment outside of the criminal justice system. It is both cheaper and better for public safety to provide treatment to those who need it sooner rather than later.
Other evidence shows that California's public health measures have not gone far enough. Although the Governor signed the Pharmacy Syringe Sale and Disease Prevention Act in 2004, well under half of California's 58 counties have implemented the program to allow nonprescription purchases of up to ten syringes at pharmacies. This is literally killing some of our state's most vulnerable residents.
According to the California Society of Addiction Medicine, 30-50 percent of those with newly identified HIV-infection use methamphetamine. Increasing the availability of sterile syringes through syringe exchange programs, pharmacies, and other outlets is proven to reduce unsafe injection practices, curtail transmission of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, increase safe disposal of used syringes, and help intravenous drug users obtain drug education and treatment.
The truth about methamphetamine is that its use is not growing exponentially, that addiction is treatable, and that the risks it poses to public health can be mitigated.
Margaret Dooley, who is based in San Diego, is the outreach coordinator for the Drug Policy Alliance.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/44915/
Posted by lois at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2006
CT: Justice Reinvestment
Re-Entry Policy Council Newsletter 11/29/2006
Connecticut Implements Justice Reinvestment Strategy to Manage Prison Growth and Generate Savings
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Connecticut Implements Justice Reinvestment Strategy to Manage Prison Growth and Generate Savings
Many states have had difficulty developing and implementing the programs and policy needed to improve outcomes for people returning to the community from prison or jail. Often these difficulties stem from the prohibitive cost of starting new programs or improving existing programs and protocol. However, states across the country are taking steps to mitigate these costs by generating strategic savings in other aspects of the criminal justice system and reinvesting in communities to increase their capacity to receive individuals released from incarceration.
Policymakers in Connecticut recently generated savings by decreasing existing criminal justice costs and reinvesting in a variety of re-entry efforts. State officials worked with CSG's Criminal Justice Program staff to analyze the state's prison population and spending patterns in the communities to which people released from prison most often return. Among other things, the analysis found that parole and probation technical violators accounted for 25 percent of the prison population on any given day.
In 2004, Republican and Democratic legislators, the governor, and agency leaders worked together to enact measures to streamline the parole process, reduce parole and probation violations by 20 percent, and require the state to develop a comprehensive re-entry strategy. In response to these measures, probation officials established two innovative programs, the Technical Violations Unit (TVU) and the Probation Transition Program (PTP), to reduce the number of people incarcerated as a result of technical violations during the probation period.
Legislators were also able to cancel Connecticut's contract with the Virginia Department of Corrections for 2,000 additional prison beds, which yielded $30 million annually in averted costs. From these savings, approximately $13 million was reinvested in re-entry programs and initiatives. One million dollars of the savings was used to develop pilot re-entry projects in New Haven and Hartford.
Since the reinvestment, probation violations are on the decline, dropping from over 400 per month in July 2003 to less than 200 in September 2005. The state also saw a four percent decline in the prison population between mid-year 2003 and mid-year 2006.
The Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which is coordinated by CSG, is developing a forthcoming case study on Connecticut's efforts to reduce spending on the state's prison system, reinvest in re-entry programs, and curb the growth of the state's prison population. For more information on the Justice Reinvestment Initiative's work in Connecticut, contact Crystal Garland (cgarland@csg.org)
Posted by lois at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)
A full scholarship for a single mom; housing provided for mom and up to two kids.
A full scholarship for a single mom; housing provided for mom and up to two kids.
The Sister Thea Bowman Foundation has four scholarships for African-American single mothers and their child to attend the College of St. Mary in Omaha, Nebraska. The Foundation will grant $30,000.00 over a period of four years to the College of St. Mary on behalf of each student. In return the College of St. Mary will match that grant with an additional $24,000. The student must be an African-American single mother who has completed high school. She must be from low income housing. She must be able to gain admission to College of St. Mary. She need not be Catholic. Each student will have an African-American mentor during her course of study at the College of St. Mary. Each student will also have an African-American host family from Omaha who will also serve as mentor. Each mother may take up to two children with her to the College of St. Mary. The cut off age for the child is nine. Each mother will live in a dorm with other single mothers and their children. This dorm has been especially renovated to accommodate mothers and their children.
If interested, please contact Mary Lou Jennings, Executive Director of the Sister Thea Bowman Foundation at: marylouj11@aol. com
Posted by lois at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
CA: High Court Will Not Review Ruling on County Strip Search Policy
High Court Will Not Review Ruling on County Strip Search Policy
By KENNETH OFGANG, Staff Writer-November 29, 2006
Staff Writer
A Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding unconstitutional the Ventura County sheriff's policy of subjecting all suspects arrested on drug charges to strip searches with visual body cavity inspection was left standing yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The justices, without comment, left standing the April 20 panel decision in Way v. County of Ventura, 04-55457. The ruling held that the county cannot conduct the intrusive search when a suspect is charged with a misdemeanor offense of being under the influence of drugs, unless there is individualized suspicion that the accused is hiding contraband or the person is going to enter the general jail population.
The court left open the question of whether such searches are permissible when a suspect is booked on other types of drug charges.
Alan Wisotsky, the Oxnard attorney who represented the county, said the case will now return to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California for trial on damages, "or possibly mediation." The ruling will also effect a separate class action brought on behalf of suspects who were subjected to the searches, he said.
The plaintiffs in that action are represented by Ventura attorney Ernest Bell, who also represented Noelle Way, the plaintiff in the action that the Supreme Court declined to hear.
Wisotsky told the MetNews that the policy was changed on an interim basis after District Judge Consuelo Marshall rejected it in 2002. "At this juncture we clearly have to revisit it and make appropriate permanent modifications," he said.
Way was tending bar at the Red Cove Bar in Ventura during the early hours of Sept. 6, 2000 when a Ventura police officer arrested her on suspicion of being under the influence of cocaine or methamphetamine. The officer reported that she had dilated pupils, a rapid pulse rate, a nervous attitude and rapid speech.
The charge was dropped after a blood test proved negative, but not before Way was forced to submit to the body cavity inspection and detained in a holding cell for several hours before posting bail.
Public Safety
The county defended the policy on the basis of public safety needs and Penal Code Sec. 4030(a), which permits strip searches and bodily cavity inspections of misdemeanor suspects held on weapons, drug, or violence charges. But Marshall, who has since taken senior status, held that the policy violated Way's Fourth Amendment rights and that neither Sheriff Bob Brooks nor the female deputy who conducted the search were entitled to qualified immunity.
In rejecting the immunity claim, Marshall reasoned that the defendants should have known, based on prior Ninth Circuit decisions, that the policy would not pass constitutional muster.
The Ninth Circuit panel, in an opinion by Judge Pamela Ann Rymer, agreed that the policy was unconstitutional as applied, but said the individual defendants acted in good faith and were entitled to qualified immunity, since the court had never specifically ruled as to whether the fact that someone was charged with being under the influence of drugs was enough to justify an intrusive search.
No Showing Made
Prior rulings, Rymer explained, have characterized body cavity searches and "frightening and humiliating," even when conducted in a private room by a single deputy. To justify such searches by way of blanket policy, the judge wrote, authorities must show a link between the policy and legitimate security concerns.
In the case of suspects like Way, "who are spontaneously arrested and detained temporarily at the facility for being under the influence," no such showing was made, Rymer said. While Wisotsky asserted at oral argument that there had been problems at the facility since the interim policy was instituted in response to Marshall's ruling, there was nothing in the record to show what the problems were, the appellate jurist wrote.
"In effect, they ask us to take security implications on faith," Rymer wrote.
District Judge Edward J. Reed Jr. of Nevada, sitting by designation, concurred in Rymer's opinion. Judge Kim Wardlaw concurred separately, arguing that the qualified immunity ruling as to the individual defendants was appropriate only because neither the policy nor the statute had been declared unconstitutional prior to the search.
Copyright 2006, Metropolitan News Company
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Posted by lois at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
Democrats Could End Discriminatory Prison Sentencing on Crack vs. Powder Cocaine
Democrats Could End Discriminatory Prison Sentencing Rules
By Jackie Jones, Black America Web
Posted on November 28, 2006, Printed on November 29, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/44813/
A new Democratic majority in Congress may finally be able to push through a recommendation from the U.S. Sentencing Commission to end the disparities in crack versus powdered cocaine sentencing, reform advocates say.
Critics of the current sentencing policy say it discriminates against black defendants who get substantially more prison time for possession of much smaller amounts of crack than those convicted of possession of powdered cocaine.
A conviction for possession of 500 grams of cocaine carries a mandatory five-year prison sentence, but it only takes five grams of crack cocaine to get the same sentence.
"Over-incarceration within black communities adversely impacts those communities by removing young men and women who could benefit from rehabilitation," Carmen Hernandez, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified before at a commission hearing two weeks ago. "Drug amounts consistent with state misdemeanors become federal felonies, resulting in disenfranchisement, disqualification for important public benefits, including student loans and public housing, and significantly diminished economic opportunity. As a result, many of these persons become outsiders for a lifetime, and their families suffer incalculable damage and suffering."
The Commission held a daylong public on Nov. 14 at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., with testimony from judges, lawyers, law enforcement officials, the ACLU, the NAACP and the Fraternal Order of Police. The commission has recommended three times to Congress that the sentencing gap be narrowed.
A bill pending in Congress, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) would reduce the penalty for crack cocaine and raise the penalty for powder cocaine and would also shift the emphasis from the quantity of the drug possessed to the type of criminal conduct related to possession.
For example, the bill would increase penalties for violent crimes and for dealers who use women and children as couriers. It would decrease penalties for those who play minimal roles in the distribution of drugs, for example a girlfriend or a child of a dealer who was not compensated for carrying or delivering the drugs.
Current sentencing policy "is a gut civics lesson in how difficult it is to undo policy mistakes," said Dr. Gail Christopher, director of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy Institute.
"Legislators make laws; they don't unmake them," Christopher told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "Laws such as 'three strikes-you're out,' and zero tolerance haven't been informed by research but by headlines and reaction."
Christopher said she is hopeful that the Democratic majority in Congress -- particularly in the House where Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.), who have been outspoken supporters of sentencing reform will now have key committee positions -- will be able to push through legislation correcting sentencing inequities.
U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who was an early supporter of heavier punishment for crack cocaine charges, told the sentencing commission that the discrepancy in sentencing had become "unconscionable."
In his testimony, Walton said that punishment must be fair. "And just as important, the punishment must be perceived as fair. While I cannot categorically say that some degree of difference in punishment for crack and powder cocaine is not warranted, no reasonable justifications exist for the 100-to-1 disparity."
Walton, a former federal prosecutor who was a deputy drug czar in President George H.W. Bush's administration, told BlackAmericaWeb.com that he never anticipated that the disparity in sentencing would become so great.
"It creates a perception of the judicial process," Walton said. "I have heard comments from jurors and prospective jurors and a large percentage of African-Americans feel the criminal justice system is not fair."
Walton said that unfairness, real or perceived, not only impacts those being sentenced, but threatens the fabric of the judicial system for black Americans.
"I have a profound interest in making sure our criminal laws work properly. Obviously we fought very long and hard to give people the opportunity to participate in the criminal justice system as jurors, and if they're opting out of the process because they believe it's unfair" it defeats the purpose of giving black Americans the chance to have a say in the judicial process, Walton said.
"I just think the disparity, however it is fixed," he said, "needs to be fixed."
"We definitely support eliminating the crack/powder cocaine disparity," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates no differentiation between sentences for the two different types of cocaine.
Piper told BlackAmericaWeb.com that the Sessions bill "is a step in the right direction, but we don't think it goes far enough" in ending the disparities.
Raising the threshold for the amount of crack needed to trigger the mandatory sentence and lowering it for powder cocaine doesn't really solve the racial disparity, Piper said.
"You're lowering the prison time for African-Americans who are usually charged with crack possession and raising it for Hispanics who usually are charged with powder cocaine. That's a tradeoff we found unacceptable," Piper said.
"Beyond the racial disparities, the (federal) thresholds for crack and powder are too low to get people into diversion programs" on the local court level, Piper said. "The emphasis ought to be in the lower courts to get people diverted to (drug treatment and recovery) programs and the (federal) focus ought to be put on the big dealers."
Piper said that 2002 federal figures showed only about 7 percent of those facing federal charges for cocaine possession were major traffickers.
"If anything, we shouldn't be talking about grams; we should be talking about kilograms," he said.
Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, told the commission that the FOP was not opposed to adjustments in sentencing, but the organization believed that crack had a more deleterious affect on communities and deserved to be weighted more heavily than powder cocaine. The FOP, he said, wanted to ensure "reasonable mandatory minimums" based on the quantity of the drug in a defendant's possession.
"We believe that the sentencing guidelines should include additional aggravating factors -- the presence of firearms or children, use or attempted use of violence are a few examples -- in the determination of a final sentence," Canterbury also said.
Piper said he thought the Sessions bill was dead for this Congress, but "I think with the Democrats taking over (in January) will give it a boost. Now there is an opportunity for a true bipartisan bill."
"I think it has to be absolutely (a bipartisan effort)," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas.) told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
She said she has been active with her Democratic colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee since coming to Congress in 1995, trying to get sentencing disparities ended.
"One of my first votes was to end cocaine sentencing disparities, not because I believe in drug use, but because I believe in fairness," Lee said.
She said she believes the bipartisan will exists to change the law and give the judiciary the flexibility it needs to hand down more equitable sentences, "so we have to have a new framework."
After this week's hearing, the sentencing commission is likely to work with all three branches of government to develop a new policy plan. It may publish proposed amendments in January, hold another hearing on March and possibly sponsor a panel or two on the issue. The commission has until May 1 to submit any proposed legislation to Congress.
The commission can change sentencing guidelines, but Congress has the final say on mandatory minimum sentences.
"I would hope with the kind of thoughtful thinking between Republicans and Democrats," Lee said, "we would want to be above worrying about criticism that we are soft on crime and reform the system."
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/44813/
Posted by lois at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2006
FL: 7 Guards and A Nurse Charged in Death of 14 year old boy
November 28, 2006, NY Times
8 Charged in Boy’s Death at Florida Boot Camp
By ANDY NEWMAN
MIAMI, Nov. 28 — In a case that caused wide outrage and an overhaul of Florida’s juvenile justice system, seven guards and a nurse were charged today with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a 14-year-old boy in January at a boot camp in the Florida Panhandle.
The death of the boy, Martin Lee Anderson, was initially ruled to be a result of natural causes even though he had been repeatedly kicked, hit and forced to inhale ammonia smelling salts after he stopped running on his first day at Bay Boot Camp in Panama City. But a second autopsy, ordered by a special prosecutor, found that he died of suffocation.
The defendants face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
Gov. Jeb Bush, who had said the first autopsy “defied common sense” but had come under increasing pressure as the case dragged on, applauded the charges announced today by the special prosecutor, Mark Ober.
“The family should be pleased with the results,” the governor said.
In May, Governor Bush signed a law named for Martin that closed Florida’s five juvenile boot camps and sharply restricts the use of force at their eventual replacements, which will be known as Sheriff’s Training and Respect, or STAR, programs.
Martin was sentenced to the camp after being arrested for violating probation by taking his grandmother’s car joyriding. During an orientation drill on Jan. 5, he fell while trying to complete a 1.5-mile run, prosecutors said. Guards spent the next 20 minutes holding him down, covering his mouth and forcing him to inhale ammonia, pressing on pressure points and striking him, prosecutors said. The episode was captured on videotape. Martin died the next day at a hospital.
The local medical examiner, Charles Siebert, conducted an autopsy and ruled that Martin had died of complications of sickle cell trait, a blood disorder that mostly affects blacks and is usually not fatal.
After a public outcry, Governor Bush ordered the second autopsy, which was conducted by a county medical examiner from Tampa, 400 miles from Panama City. That inquest determined in May that blocking Martin’s mouth and forcing him to inhale ammonia had caused his vocal cords to spasm and blocked an airway.
The Florida Legislature passed the Martin Lee Anderson Act, which bans the use of stun guns, pressure points, mechanical restraints and some forms of psychological intimidation at juvenile detention centers.
Dr. Siebert has stood by his findings. He was placed on probation by the state’s medical examiner commission in August.
The charges announced today did not include specific allegations against any of the defendants, and Mr. Ober, the special prosecutor, did not offer details.
Posted by lois at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)
November 27, 2006
AL: Editorial: Private prisons raise big issues for state
Editorial: Private prisons raise big issues for state
November 27, 2006
Montgomery Advertiser
The facts are indisputable. Alabama has a serious overcrowding problem in its prison system, which has about twice the number of inmates its facilities were designed to handle. Solutions to the problem, however, are decidedly in dispute.
One proposed solution -- the expanded use of private prisons -- raises some fundamental issues for the state. These issues should not be ignored or discounted, nor should the debate focus solely on fiscal questions.
In a study by the Alabama Policy Institute, researcher Kirk A. Johnson makes the points that private-sector concerns can produce prison bed space more quickly and less expensively than the state can. That is probably true, but it misses a key point about incarceration.
When the state deprives an individual of liberty -- justifiably, when a crime against it has been committed -- it takes a somber, serious action. Few actions of government have greater impact.
In so doing, it also assumes responsibility for the individual now in its custody. Note the name of the state agency responsible for the prisons. It's not called the Department of Incarceration. It's called the Department of Corrections, and in that name is the clear implication that those sentenced to prison are not simply to be locked up, but are also to be subject to efforts at rehabilitation in preparation for a return to society.
This is a solemn obligation that accompanies the act of incarceration. Remember that very few inmates die in prison. Most will eventually be released to rejoin society. How well they are prepared to do that has enormous implications for the future.
With a private prison, inherent conflicts exist. A private prison is a for-profit operation, of course, established by its investors in hopes of making money. The profit motive is a great asset in a free-market economy, but its virtues are markedly less appealing when turned to a governmental responsibility.
As long as profit is the goal, there will be an incentive to cut corners, which in an ordinary business might not be dangerous. In a prison, however, it raises real concerns about the safety of the public, as well as that of inmates and prison personnel.
As for the education, training, counseling and other programs consistent with the word Corrections in the department's name, these are often missing in private prisons, making them little more than warehouses for inmates. That may plug a short-term need, but surely it can have no long-term benefit.
Some things simply are the responsibility of government. Prisons -- and the people in them -- are good examples.
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061127/OPIN
ION01/611220374/1012/OPINION
Posted by lois at 10:54 PM | Comments (0)
TX: State looks at alternatives to more prisons
State looks at alternatives to more prisons
11/27/2006
Lisa Sandberg
San Antonio Express-News Austin Bureau
AUSTIN - When it comes to criminal justice, could the Lone Star State become the next Massachusetts?
In what may indicate a pendulum shift in a state that's become almost synonymous with incarceration, two key Texas lawmakers, a Republican and a Democrat, are showing little appetite for more concrete walls and steel bars.
You heard right. With Texas prisons again overflowing, they are stressing the need for rehabilitation, treatment - even parole.
Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, and Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, who head the criminal justice committees of their respective chambers, say building more prisons will only beget more prisoners.
"The bottom line is, we have sufficient space now if we prioritize our needs," Whitmire said last week. "Prison should not be the first option for non-violent offenders."
Said Madden: "We have to be smart on crime. I think a lot of members agree with that, both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. It's a mixed group."
The problem is this: Nearly two decades after Texas embarked on the biggest prison construction boom in U.S. history, it has run out of beds. In October, the population in state prisons and state jails reached more than 154,000 - the highest in state history, and 166 above capacity.
So the state is renting close to 2,000 beds from private and county jails.
But things are expected to get worse, with the prison population growing by 11,000 within five years, if state projections prove accurate.
Officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice have proposed building two new prisons, with a third constructed and run privately, to house a total of 5,000 prisoners. The price tag? Some $440 million in building costs, plus $72 million a year to operate them.
"Without addressing population growth drivers such as recidivism, the state's investment will do little to ensure that a similar crisis will not occur again in the future," said a recent Texas Sunset Advisory Commission report.
Whitmire and Madden believe the answer lies in boosting parole rates for non-violent offenders and allocating more money for treatment programs.
Consider these figures: Last year, 59 percent of state prisoners were identified as chemically dependent. But long waits for substance abuse programs meant that only 5 percent of them received treatment.
"We have largely eliminated alcohol and drug treatment from prison systems," Whitmire said.
Whitmire said it is safer and more cost-effective to segregate in minimum-security facilities the 5,500 repeat drunken drivers now incarcerated, for instance, and offer them treatment, rather than to house them with violent offenders without treatment.
He complained that non-violent offenders who might otherwise be paroled often remain in prison because there's no room in the treatment programs they're required to enroll in.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recently came under fierce attack for denying parole to scores of low-risk offenders.
The board's six panels that make parole decisions were accused in the Sunset report of ignoring the board's own guidelines in determining whom - and whom not - to release.
Last year, the state's overall release rate for parole-eligible offenders was 28 percent. It had projected a release rate of 40 percent. Parole rates varied by region, as well, with the panel in San Antonio approving parole in 15 percent of the cases before it. In Palestine, the parole approval rate was less than 1 percent.
The board's chairwoman, Rissie Owens, said the guidelines are only "a tool" each panel uses. "These are discretionary decisions."
Talk about boosting parole rates worries Dianne Clements, of the Houston-based victim advocacy group, Justice for All.
"These influential lawmakers seem to be leading us to where we were 15 years ago, when we had a prison population that was a revolving door because we didn't have enough prison beds and parole boards had no alternative but to release people," she said.
But Marc Levin, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Center for Effective Justice, a conservative think tank, said the winds are shifting in Texas.
"There's an alliance on both the right and the left. There's a consensus we need to do something besides build more prisons," he said.
lsandberg@express-news.net
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA112706.01A.overcrowded_pr
isons.300367e.html
Posted by lois at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)
AFL-CIO "Mobilizes Young Men of Color"
AFL-CIO "Mobilizes Young Men of Color"
By Lorinda M. Bullock, NNPA National Correspondent
November 27, 2006
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - The AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor organization, announced a new nationwide initiative that will provide job training and job opportunities for young Black men. They also announced their "Mobilization for Young Men of Color" initiative would start in the predominately Black and Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.
In response to former Congressman Ron Dellums Commission's latest series of reports including "A Way Out: Creating Partners for Our Nation's Prosperity By Expanding Life Paths of Young Men of Color," Its goal was to give public and private sectors recommendations on how to reverse the negative social, economic and educational trends happening among young men of color.
"It was an amazing moment," said Gail Christopher, the director of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Health Policy Institute. The Washington-based think tank sponsored the commission's reports.
"It had all these burly, robust, tall, labor guys standing there saying, 'we have to take our country back and it starts with young men of color. It was amazing'," she said.
According to the Commission's report that was also released last week, it's going to take efforts of large groups like the AFL-CIO and many others to save minority males, especially African Americans, who account for the worst high school graduation and mortality rates in comparison to their White counterparts.
The commission reported, "more than 29 percent of African- American males who are 15 years old today are more likely to go to prison at some point in their lives compared to 4.4 percent of White males of the same age."
Christopher said a number of issues have to be addressed in order to end the "pipeline" to prison and the commission recommendations try to tackle the underlying issues hinder the progress and success of young minority men.
"We've put policies in place that exacerbate that historic problem. We expel them now from school at the drop of a hat through zero tolerance programs, we have disinvested in mental health care so when they have substance abuse problems or other types of challenges, from the standpoint of behavior and mental health, they go to jail instead of to treatment. We're warehousing our young people in jails where they learn to be criminals. That is wrong," she said.
The Dellums Commission, which is chaired by former Congressman and Mayor-elect of Oakland, Calif., Ronald V. Dellums, was formed by the HPI to analyze policies that affect young men of color and to develop action plans to improve their lives. The commission members, Christopher said, come from a variety of backgrounds.
"We didn't just fill it with thinkers and analysts. We filled it with judges and legislators and superintendents of schools and psychiatrists-people who live with these populations and treat them and understand something's got to be done."
Increasing the minimum wage; extending health care coverage to all uninsured children through the age of 18 who aren't covered by state programs; repealing mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes were among some of the commission's recommendations.
Helen Kanovsky, Chief Operating Officer AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, said the AFL-CIO is equally excited about the new initiative, and has been successful in similar ventures. To date, Kanovsky said the AFL-CIO has provided job skills and apprenticeship programs for years and spends more than $500 million annually for programs at 2,000 training centers across the country.
"They (the commission) talked with a large number of corporations as well, but it was labor that stepped up first. Labor stepped up and said we hear what you say, we've read your report, we agree and we're here to help and here's what we propose as our first step with you in implementing some of your recommendations," Kanovsky said.
The organization was among many, including the Congressional Black Caucus that received advanced copies of the commission's report. Christopher said the CBC was responsive to the recommendations and vowed to share them with other legislators.
For the AFL-CIO program, Kanovsky said the organization wanted to do a more comprehensive program with not only job training but job placement and mentoring programs.
"It's on the job training, apprenticeship, distance learning-we have a significant role for the national labor college-this includes setting up an E-learning center with satellite facilities," she said.
"The plan is to create something we call an anchor facility, which is a physical center to all of this where there is a place for community partnerships for labor, for business, for media for mentoring. We've talked to a number of people in the sports world who are interested in participating in the mentoring piece."
Kanovsky said New Orleans was an obvious choice for the location of the Pilot program especially with the rebuilding efforts that will allow the young men hands-on experience on construction sites doing a range of skillful jobs as electricians or bricklayers.
Currently, the AFL-CIO is scouting buildings for the "anchor facility" and a date has not been set for the opening, but Kanovsky said the location of the facility is expected to be decided in the coming months.
"It really builds on the kinds of things the labor movement has done for a long time, which is find a way to take people, give them a skill set and put them on the road to a middle class economic life," she said of the new initiative.
"That's how you sustain communities. And that's how you give people real hope and opportunity. You give them the skills that lead to the jobs that lead to the income that make them be not just productive members of society but let them achieve their personal goals of being able to support themselves, (and) support their families."
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KS: Tough on Crime? It's Hard on Coffers
Sun, Nov. 26, 2006
Tough on crime? It’s hard on coffers
Now with a Jessica’s Law, Kansas must find the money to house a projected inmate boost.
By JIM SULLINGER
The Kansas City Star
Kansas legislators are learning that getting tough on crime can be costly.
This year lawmakers approved Jessica’s Law, a measure sending felons convicted of sex crimes to prison for long stretches. Now, legislators are finding that the price tag could be as much as $192.4 million for additional prison space over the next 10 years.
Roger Werholtz, secretary of the Kansas Department of Corrections, will present a slate of options to lawmakers when they convene a new session Jan. 8.
“Our estimate is we’ll need about 1,880 beds if nothing changes and, obviously, you don’t build all of those beds at once,” Werholtz said.
In the plan are additions to several current prison facilities and construction of a new prison. Werholtz said the costs range from $185 million to $192.4 million using current construction dollars. In addition, operational costs would range from $49.5 million to $63 million annually.
Jessica’s Law, named in memory of a murdered Florida girl, mandates 25-year sentences for sex offenders who victimize children. Some discretion could be granted to first-time offenders if there are mitigating circumstances. Second-time offenders would get 40 years, and third-time offenders would get life without parole. Offenders released from prison would be monitored for life.
“The bottom line is that the state of Kansas is on a path to incarcerate far more people than we have places to put them,” said Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt, an Independence Republican. “We have cast the easy votes over the last decade and now it’s time pay the price.”
Schmidt said he hoped lawmakers could pass a comprehensive plan “that lays out a road map on how” to add more prison capacity.
“This isn’t going to be a one-solution situation,” said Schmidt, who is a proponent of allowing private prisons to be built in Kansas. “We need to look at adding traditional state-owned capacity, and it’s reasonable to look at having a private component as part of a larger strategy.”
Schmidt also said he would like to see as one component a substance abuse treatment facility specifically aimed at drug offenders.
One way to cut costs, some lawmakers say, would be to reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders.
After the fall campaigns, Sen. John Vratil, a Leawood Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that option was politically impossible.
Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline heavily criticized the Legislature for passing a law in 2000 that reduced the time offenders were placed on post-release supervision and released 887 inmates from prison early.
“We’ve discussed that (option) in the Sentencing Commission, and what I’ve told them is that is not politically possible,” Vratil said, who added that no lawmaker wanted to face a charge of being soft on crime in the next election.
There also is a question of whether the state can afford an expensive prison construction proposal.
Rep. Paul Davis, a Lawrence Democrat, said finding the money for more prison space would not be easy over the next couple of years. He pointed to a three-year, $466 million school-finance plan enacted by lawmakers this year, and efforts by the highway lobby to persuade lawmakers to enact a multiyear road-construction initiative.
“A lot of people are operating under this notion we’re swimming in money right now because the revenue projections just keep getting better and better,” he said.
Davis added that most of that additional money has been spoken for, and he predicted tight budgets over the next few years.
He said lawmakers may need to adjust Jessica’s Law, a sweeping bill that had a lot of parts — “and I’m not sure a lot of those elements were thought out very well.”
Rep. Tim Owens, an Overland Park Republican, said he wanted to get tougher on people convicted multiple times for drunken driving. But the bill he has proposed would result, if enacted, in an increase of 4,000 prison inmates over the next 10 years.
“One side of the coin asks, ‘Do we to go that route, because it costs so much?’ ” he said.
Already, an interim legislative committee wants to make it unlawful for a registered sex offender to frequent places where children congregate, such as parks or day-care centers.
Violators could be returned to prison, which could add even more inmates to the current projection.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/16098388.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Posted by lois at 07:39 PM | Comments (0)
CCA Signs Lucrative CA Prison Deal
Saturday, 11/25/06
CCA says latest growth spurt on more solid footing than last
Prison company signs lucrative California deal
By GETAHN WARD
Staff Writer
Until earlier this month when 80 California inmates checked in at a Corrections Corporation of America prison in West Tennessee, doing business with the Golden State was only a dream for the nation's largest private prison operator.
Coming after years of opposition from California's prison guards' union, a breakthrough contract this fall to house up to 1,000 inmates by next spring reflects a shift in fortunes for Nashville-based CCA. Two years ago, the company's problem was finding clients to fill 8,000 empty beds. Now, the challenge is staying ahead of the curve to meet the growing need for prison beds.
"All the stars have kind of aligned at this point in terms of demand for beds is high and supply is low," said Jim Macdonald, a stock analyst at First Analysis Securities in Chicago.
CCA plans to complete work that will add 3,931 beds next year in its biggest expansion since overbuilding of prisons and problems with a real estate investment trust left the company on the brink of collapse in 1999.
It also plans to begin construction of an additional 4,000 to 6,000 beds to meet future demand as more states shun building their own prisons, turning instead to private operators to keep corrections department costs under control.
"It's just politically not palatable to spend money on prisons when it could be spent on schools," said analyst Anton Hie at Jefferies & Co. in Nashville.
The California opportunity has materialized as overcrowding and other problems have worsened for that state's prison system.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an emergency declaration last month, allowing the immediate transfer of inmates out of state without competitive bidding. Initially, CCA and two other private prison operators are expected to receive 2,260 inmates while California officials grapple with what else they might do to ease prison overcrowding. The state's prisons hold about double the number of inmates for which they were built.
The decision to use out-of-state jailers faces a legal challenge by the prison guards' union, which has filed suit suggesting that the transfers violate state civil services rules. This week, a California judge denied the union's request for an immediate injunction but said the group had a good chance of winning at trial starting in February because the governor may have exceeded his emergency powers and violated the state's constitution.
State officials don't see it that way.
"We're confident that these contracts meet our constitutional requirements," said Bill Sessa, press secretary for California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
John D. Ferguson, chief executive officer with CCA, said the company knew the "logjam" in California's prison system would eventually break, and asked its customer relationship manager to renew contacts with the state about three years ago.
"We thought the opportunity for CCA was pretty good even before California made its decision," Ferguson said, pointing to the company's 19 other state clients and assorted federal agencies it serves.
Roughly 60 percent of CCA's business is with state and local government agencies. Federal agencies, including Immigration and Custom Enforcement, account for the other 40 percent. California will pay CCA $63 a day per inmate, much lower than the roughly $90 it currently costs the state to house prisoners.
Most of CCA's roughly 4,100 empty beds are under contract with existing customers. Construction by the company includes the 1,896-bed Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Ariz. CCA, meanwhile, has submitted or plans to submit bids on deals such as Arizona's request for proposals for roughly 5,000 beds and the U.S. Marshals Service's request for 1,500 beds at Laredo, Texas.
"It's a seller's market right now for private prisons and they (private prison operators) are able to get better pricing out of existing customers," said Hie, the Jefferies & Co. analyst. "And to the extent that customers may not be willing to accept the price increases, you could see customers getting fired."
Hie cited a recent instance in which CCA's rival Cornell Cos. Inc. of Houston told Oklahoma that it wouldn't renew a contract under which it houses inmates in Hinton, Okla., after that state wasn't willing to give "cost-of-living" increases sought by the prison operator.
Most of the 4,000 to 6,000 additional beds CCA plans to start work on for 2008 and beyond will be brand new buildings, not expansions of existing prisons that account for most of the immediate growth, Ferguson said. The company expects to fund projects with cash on hand and can borrow without piling on too much debt relative to earnings, he added.
"This management team is disciplined enough and will measure it so it doesn't harm the company in any way," Ferguson said.
This isn't Corrections Corporation of America's first try to do big business with California.
In the late '90s, CCA was so optimistic about prospects there that it reassigned then company President David Myers to the newly created role of president of the West Coast region and based him in California.
CCA built two prisons in California with a combined 3,300 beds. It built the beds without contracts to fill them. In retrospect, Myers said, the company underestimated the influence of the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which fought using private operators in a bid to protect their job security.
"I made a decision after being out there a year or so that we were not going to get state business," said Myers, who today remains a resident of California but is no longer involved with CCA or prisons. "The atmosphere at the time wasn't right."
Now, Macdonald, the Wall Street analyst, said the company faces a balancing act as it plays catch up with soaring demand.
"You don't want to have too many beds," he said, "because if something softens, you don't want to be left with a bunch of beds again."
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061125/BUSINESS01/61
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November 26, 2006
Paper Abstracts for Nov 30-Dec 1, 2006 Conference: Punishment: The U.S. Record
http://www.newschool.edu/centers/socres/punishment/
Punishment: The U.S. Record
A Social Research Conference at The New School on Thursday, November 30 and Friday, December 1, 2006
PAPER SUMMARIES
SESSION I: WHY WE PUNISH: THE FOUNDATION OF OUR CONCEPTS OF PUNISHMENT
Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Punishment Practices, James Q. Whitman
In the early nineteenth century, the American approach to criminal punishment was regarded as the most advanced and humane in the western world, and numerous European visitors made the voyage across the Atlantic to learn from it. Today matters are different. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Our punishment practices are far harsher than those of countries like France and Germany. Rather than looking to us for moral leadership, Europeans view us with distaste and apprehension. What happened? How did the great American republican experiment end up yielding a system notable for its harshness, and sometimes brutality? In order to answer this troubling question, we must dig deep into American history, and we must recognize the inherent dangers in certain aspects of the American political tradition. American anti-statism has, paradoxically, contributed mightily to the making of our uncommonly harsh system of criminal punishment. So has the American tradition of egalitarianism, which has tended to undermine any program that might guarantee dignity in punishment. In the early nineteenth century, observers like Tocqueville were confident that American republicanism would always go hand in hand with mildness in punishment. The last two centuries of our history make it hard indeed to feel that kind of confidence any longer.
The Legacy of Theology (Transgression, redemption, atonement, retribution and forgiveness), Moshe Halbertal
The purpose and justification of punishment is usually defined through three main goals: deterrence, retribution and reform. Each of these goals has its inner logic, and it implies in turn different economies of punishment that conflict with one another. I will investigate an earlier and more fundamental conception of punishment as atonement, and its deep connection to sacrificial rituals that still resonate within practices of punishment. Atonement is based upon substitution, in which a harsher punishment is replaced by its symbolic substitute (hence the connection to sacrifice). If punishment is atonement, in each case of punishment there is therefore some element of forgiveness, which makes the ritual of punishment highly ambiguous. This ambiguity is based on the complex relationship of the sovereign (God) and the victim, which include among them the bond of creaturely love. I will investigate this structure through the study of Biblical and religious conception of punishment, and in particular the attitude Rabbinic and Christian attitudes towards crucifixion.
Punishment and the Spirit of Democracy, George Kateb
This paper will deal with the idea that the most democratically suitable defense of punishment is deterrence of the wrongdoer and others. Retribution is, in my judgment, wholly alien to the spirit of democracy. Furthermore, punishment must be inflicted with reluctance. The spirit of democracy is attuned to what I call magnanimity towards wrongdoers. Magnanimity consists of two principal elements: fairness, which is exemplified by the counter-intuitive provisions of due process of law; and by leniency, which means such things as presumption of innocence and mildness of punishment. The history of democracy in Athens begins with an act of leniency: Solon's policy on the indebtedness of the lower classes. Fairness and leniency belong intrinsically to democracy, even though the US and other democracies practice an anti-democratic severity and often rationalize it by reference to the Old Testament or to Kant's theory of punishment as necessary to respect for the personhood of the wrongdoer.
Beyond the Cultural Turn: 21st Century Meditations on Punishment, Bernard Harcourt
Since the modern era, the discourse of punishment has cycled through three sets of questions. The first, born of the Enlightenment itself, asked: On what ground does the sovereign have the right to punish? Nietzsche most forcefully, but others as well, argued that the question itself begged its own answer. The right to punish, they suggested, is what defines sovereignty, and as such, can never serve to limit sovereign power. With the birth of the social sciences, this skepticism gave rise to a second set of
questions: What then is the true function of punishment? What is it that we do when we punish? From Durkheim to the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, 20th century moderns explored social organization, economic production, political legitimacy, and the construction of the self‹turning punishment practices upside down, dissecting not only their repressive functions but more importantly their role in constructing society and the contemporary subject. A series of further critiques‹of functionalism, of scientific objectivity, of metanarratives‹softened this second line of inquiry and helped shape a third set of questions: What does punishment tell us about ourselves and our culture? What is the cultural meaning of our punishment practices? These three sets of questions set the contours of our modern discourse on crime and punishment. But what happens now, though, now that we are beyond the cultural turn? What today is the right question to ask of our punishment practices? And how can we relate tomorrow¹s inquiry back to the central idea that has always and still today motivates the very questioning itself‹the idea of just punishment?
SESSION II: WHAT AND HOW WE PUNISH: LAW, JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT
Changes in the Law: From the Present to the Past, to the Present, Michael Tonry
One way to describe the history of American punishment practices is in terms of a normative pendulum swinging slowly back and forth between opposed normative ideas about personal responsibility and social need. Another is to untangle the functions that punishment has served in maintaining changing patterns of economic, class, and race relations. Thinking about punishment tends to lag decades behind changes in practices and social norms. Our time is an extreme instance. Current prevailing punishment ideas that focus on responsibility, retribution, and proportionality like so many flies in amber reflect and respond to perceived policy problems and normative concerns of the 1970s and have little helpful to say about the 21st century.
Economic Models of Crime and Punishment, John J. Donohue III
Gary Becker launched the economic analysis of law, which has been influential in changing the course of American criminal justice policy. Some of that analysis has been successful in that at the time that Becker wrote his seminal piece there was a rejection of the notion of incarceration as a tool to decrease crime, and the U.S. experience has shown that increases in incarceration have indeed had a dampening impact on crime. But some of Becker's lessons about the need to evaluate costs and benefits of criminal justice policies have not been heeded, and indeed the level of incarceration has been pushed beyond the optimal level in that the costs of incarcerating the last 200-300,000 prisoners in all likelihood has exceeded the benefits in reduced crime. Moreover, while Becker's disciples have played a major role in the perpetuation and expansion of capital punishment in the US, there is a puzzling lack of rigor in the evaluation of the deterrent impact of the death penalty. Becker now concedes that the empirical evidence in support of the deterrent effect of capital punishment is "murky," yet the strong priors that the economic model has generated -- specifically that since demand curves slop downward, the death penalty must deter murders -- has been taken to trump the empirical evidence. The paper discusses whether the theoretical model is powerful enough to guide policy even in the absence of empirical validation.
Retribution: Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? Andrew von Hirsch
My presentation will address Retributivism in penal theory. Its focus will be on 'deserts' theory, a contemporary liberal version of retributivism that favors proportionate sentences and moderate penalty levels. The theory emphasizes punishment's role as providing a public valuation of conduct, rather than 'paying back' offenders for their wrongs. The theory has been influential in a number of jurisdictions, including Minnesota and Oregon in the US, and Sweden, Finland, England and Wales, and South Africa. The presentation will sketch the theory briefly, address a number of unresolved problems with it, and then evaluate its prospects for continued influence.
The Forms and Functions of American Capital Punishment, David Garland
Today's American system of capital punishment - defined as the whole set of discursive and non-discursive practices through which capital punishment is enacted, evoked and experienced - has a peculiar institutional form. This paper argues that an analysis of that distinctive form, and the processes that have produced it, can help explain the retention of this institution in a context of widespread abolitionism and provide important clues to the real functions of today's death penalty.
SESSION III: SPECIAL EVENT
Richard Gere and others: A Reading of Prison Writings
SESSION IV: WHO WE PUNISH: THE CARCERAL STATE
The Rise of the Carceral State, Jonathan Simon
The reconstruction of American political institutions since the 1960s around the problematic of crime, and forging of mass imprisonment as a preferred policy option in the succeeding three decades is now being recognized (Beckett 1997; Garland 2001; Simon forthcoming 2006). It deserves to be seen as one of the great changes in our political and constitutional development, up there with Reconstruction and the New Deal (Fraser & Gerstle 1989). But like those earlier profound transformations, the most enduring changes take place below the threshold of the major political institutions, at the capillary levels where power is exercised not just up and down, but laterally. At this level we can observe that the carceral state is anchored in everyday struggles for power where the ability to name certain identities, claim certain rights, and blame certain responsible parties determines outcomes. In this paper I argue that the ³carceral state² by this measure is far more powerfully rooted than the ³welfare state² it is often contrasted to. Concurrently, I suggest that any effort to move American society beyond mass imprisonment will require a vigorous contestation with these identities, rights, and responsibilities whose history we must attend to.
Inequality and Punishment, Bruce Western
Over the last thirty years, the prison population of the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over two million people, including large numbers of young black men with little schooling. By the early 1990s, almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties had spent time in prison. Record incarceration rates significantly influence social inequality.
Institutionalizing large numbers of disadvantaged young men creates "invisible inequality" in which standard measures of labor force status provide an optimistic picture of economic well-being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Mass imprisonment also deepens inequality, by diminishing the economic opportunities of ex-prisoners after they are released from prison. The U.S. penal system in the first years of the twenty-first century is thus significant not chiefly for its effects on crime but for its contribution to a novel, and distinctively American, system of social stratification.
When is Imprisonment Not a Punishment?: Immigrants and Immigration, Mark Dow
Imagine that you are being held in a prison or jail although you are not doing time for any crime. You¹re dressed in an orange prison uniform and permitted to hug your wife briefly at the beginning and end of her visits. You might be taken in front of a judge and confronted by a prosecuting attorney, but you have no right to an attorney yourself. Or you¹re sympathetic enough that a legal advocacy group has taken up your case, but you are moved from jail to jail, from state to state, in the middle of the night, without warning, so the lawyer you once had can¹t find you anymore. Imagine you¹ve been incarcerated like this for a week, or a month, or several months, or several years. And imagine that the law says you are not being punished. All of this is possible when you are a non-citizen ³detainee,² held in ³administrative detention² by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Department of Homeland Security. Mark Dow will discuss the largely invisible immigration prison system that holds some 23,000 ³detainees² each day a number that might soon be doubled, depending on the outcome of current legislation.
Supermax as a Technology of Punishment, Lorna A. Rhodes
Supermax prisons are a technology of control specifically designed to separate prisoners from the general prison population and to isolate them from one another. Subsumed within the larger architectural and management strategies of supermax are a number of associated technologies such as electric shields, taser guns, special door designs, and computerized operation and surveillance programs. These technologies of punishment achieve near-complete domination over prisoners¹ daily lives, producing an extreme form of exclusion that represents an extension and intensification of mass incarceration. This paper examines some of the elements shaping supermax technologies, such as the influence of behaviorism, correctional industry marketing, and a penal ideology of individualism and ³choice.² It concludes with a discussion of the harmful effects on prisoners, and raises questions about the larger consequences of the drive toward total control.
SESSION V: CONSEQUENCES OF A CARCERAL STATE
The Social Effects of Imprisonment: A Labor Market Perspective, David Weiman
Criminologists have clearly shown the centrality of the labor market for ex-offenders returning to and reentering their families and communities. The pathway from crime and future prison spells, what criminologists call desistance, depends on employment, specifically finding and holding a good job. By contrast, the probability of recidivism‹cycling out of and back into prison‹varies inversely with an individual¹s labor market opportunities, measured by both employment and real earnings.
Drawing on published and ongoing research, I examine the critical question of how released prisoners have fared in the labor market with a focus on how a prison record affects their labor market opportunities. Where appropriate, I present evidence testing the hypothesis that a criminal justice record reinforces the steepening barriers to employment at least in formal labor markets for those on the socioeconomic margin. Although the results may not be definitive (for reasons briefly discussed), they suggest that less educated, skilled individuals with a criminal record will experience lower employment rates and/or earnings than their ³clean² peers. Given the employment-crime link, the evidence implies that ex-offenders face significant risks of recidivism and hence future prison spells, notably when they are released into weaker labor markets. In other words, they are more likely to fall into a vicious cycle, a revolving door of prison release-crime-incarceration.
This labor market perspective does not discount the public safety benefits from an expanded criminal justice system, but instead warrants a fuller accounting of its costs and so net returns. Standard benefit-cost analyses focus on the benefits side of the equation ‹ the reductions in crime rates because of incapacitation and deterrent effects of tougher criminal sanctions. They measure the costs simply in terms of the fiscal expenditures on building and operating more prisons as opposed to other public goods. If mass incarceration yields significant, unintended individual and social costs, as current and research suggests, then the standard accounting is biased in favor of imprisonment as opposed to alternative sanctions.
The Impacts of Incarceration on Public Safety, Todd Clear
This paper will explore the evidence for the proposition: "high levels of incarceration, concentrated in poor communities, causes crime to increase." It will present and explain a model of the incarceration-crime relationship that includes the negative impact of incarceration on crime (incapacitation,
primarily) balanced against the positive impact, through the way incarceration destabilizes private and parochial forms of social control. It will conclude with a series of recommendations about how to deal with the problem.
Punishment Once Removed: How Prisons Punish Families, Elizabeth Gaynes
Elizabeth Gaynes will discuss the impact of incarceration on the family, including minor children. The current carceral state represents the greatest separation of families since the end of chattel slavery. More than 10 million American children have experienced the impact of parental arrest and incarceration. Children and families experience trauma, stigma, shame, guilt and fear when a loved one goes to prison, yet they are rarely considered in policies regarding punishment or incarceration. Considering the evidence that family ties and pro-social networks have a significant impact on success following release, the interruption of social networks and family relationships is clearly counter-productive, yet the desire to punish far exceeds the desire to transform those whom we punish. The American system of punishment, including building prisons far from people's homes and severely restricting contact with children and families, suggests a willingness to have families pay the price for an individual's crime. In this presentation, I will discuss what the price is, why issues related to race, ethnicity and religion are profoundly implicated, and - of course - another way of thinking about families and children as the access to a new paradigm.
Incarceration and Reentry Reforms in an Era of Robust Democracy, Jeremy Travis
A critical dimension in the changes in American criminal justice policy over the past generation has been the increased influence of the legislative branch, at the expense of the judicial and executive branches of government. This new reality helps explain the current level of imprisonment in America, which continues to increase despite record low levels of crime. In thinking about future penal policies, the new reality of legislative dominance also limits the potential reach of those reforms. Ironically, because of the emergence of a new "reentry movement" that has developed broad political support, this new reality might simultaneously open other avenues for justice reform advocacy.
Posted by lois at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2006
Nevada: Request for huge prsion increase expected
"Incoming Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said the alarming numbers were the driving force to create the Select Committee on Corrections, Parole and Probation for the upcoming session, to be led by Assemblyman David Parks, D-Las Vegas. The new committee will examine the state's corrections system from both a policy and funding perspective. "The estimate of our needs for prison beds over the next 20 years is absolutely staggering," Buckley said."
LAS VEGAS SUN
November 24, 2006
Report: Nevada ranks last on corrections programs
ASSOCIATED PRESS
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - A report by the U.S. Justice Department ranks Nevada last when it comes to per capita spending on prison and justice system programs.
The report, provided to the Legislature last month, said Nevada in 2003 spent $147 on such programs per state resident, ranking the state 50th. The amount spent was less than one-quarter of the $621 spent by Alaska, which ranked first, and less than one-third of the $478 spent in Delaware, which ranked second.
The national average was $228.
Nevada spent $328 million in justice expenditures in 2003, according to the report.
But the Nevada Department of Corrections could increase the amount spent on such programs in the 2007 session of the Legislature.
The agency, which has not added many prison beds over the past few years, is expected to ask the Legislature for a huge increase in capital construction dollars to deal with overcrowding and projected inmate growth.
The agency is seeking $268 million for five construction projects in the upcoming session, including a 300-bed expansion of the Southern Nevada Women's Correctional Center at a cost of $61 million and the addition of two housing units at the High Desert State Prison at a cost of $51.7 million.
The agency has been recommended for 45 percent of the $708 million two-year construction budget for the next two years by the state Public Works Board.
By comparison, $59 million, 14 percent of the total, was allocated to corrections for construction in the current two-year budget.
Outgoing Gov. Kenny Guinn, in his most recent budget calculations, said the growth in the inmate population for the coming two years will require an additional $29 million in funding for new correctional officers and other expenses.
Guinn has also recommended $10 million more in one-time funding for modular housing units for up to 380 inmates to deal with short-term overcrowding problems at various correctional facilities.
Gov.-elect Jim Gibbons, who takes office in January, is evaluating and developing his own budget.
Incoming Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said the alarming numbers were the driving force to create the Select Committee on Corrections, Parole and Probation for the upcoming session, to be led by Assemblyman David Parks, D-Las Vegas.
The new committee will examine the state's corrections system from both a policy and funding perspective.
"The estimate of our needs for prison beds over the next 20 years is absolutely staggering," Buckley said.
Those who violate the law must be punished, but the state might use cheaper alternatives to prison beds, such as restitution, house arrest and community service for nonviolent offenders, Buckley said.
"We need to find less costly ways to address inmate growth than by committing so many of our general fund dollars to new prisons," she said.
State Budget Director Andrew Clinger said the average inmate population in fiscal year 2005-06 was 11,700. Projections estimate the population to grow to 13,337 and 13,900 in each of the next two years of the upcoming budget cycle.
"I get the sense that based on the projections, unless they do something on the front end to change the numbers, I don't know what else you can do," Clinger said. "We're already doing as much as we can on the back end, with parole," he said.
Corrections Director Glen Whorton in September told lawmakers that methamphetamine use, and crimes committed by those addicted to the drug, is a big factor in the increasing inmate population.
The department has no data specifically for methamphetamine, but it has 1,884 drug offenders in its inmate population of about 11,700. Of that, 1,884, or 38 percent, had one or more prior felony convictions in Nevada.
Assemblyman Bernie Anderson, D-Sparks, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and vice chairman of the Select Committee, said controlling inmate growth is critical.
Without a commitment to treatment programs to deal with methamphetamine addiction and to help reduce recidivism among inmates, Nevada's prison population could grow by 50 percent in the next 15 to 20 years, he said.
"If we don't take care of this in the next couple of sessions, prisons will be the No. 1 cost to the state," Anderson said.
"We have other issues, including transportation needs and other infrastructure issues including water, to deal with. But if we're building the 'Big House,' we're not building roads."
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http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2006/nov/24/112410382.html
Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
Posted by lois at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2006
NY: Pataki Rebuked on Confining Sex Offenders
"In his statement yesterday, Mr. Pataki said he was ³deeply disappointed² by the high court¹s ruling. Though his successor, Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, also supports new civil-confinement legislation and said yesterday that he would push for it when he takes office next year, Mr. Pataki signaled that he wanted to make one more effort at passing the law on his own watch. ³I remain committed to do everything in my power as governor to keep these predators away from our children and away from society and have been working for years to give our mental health and criminal justice professionals the tools they need to protect our children and families from sexually violent predators,² the governor said."
New York Times
Pataki Rebuked on Confining Sex Offenders
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: November 22, 2006
New York State¹s highest court yesterday struck down the Pataki administration¹s practice of confining sex offenders in psychiatric hospitals after their prison terms end and ordered immediate hearings to determine whether those being held should be released.
The 7-0 decision by the state Court of Appeals was a sharp rebuke to Gov. George E. Pataki, who last year ordered the confinement of 12 sex offenders after lawmakers failed to agree on legislation that would have explicitly permitted such detention.
In yesterday¹s ruling, the court found that the state erred in using mental hygiene laws to confine the 12 men, 11 of whom are still held involuntarily at psychiatric hospitals in New York City. The men had legal protections as prisoners that entitled them to hearings before being ordered confined upon their release, the court found.
³These people were characterized as being free citizens. The fact is that they were prisoners, and were entitled to the protections built into the correction law before they can be sent from prison to a psychiatric hospital,² said Stephen J. Harkavy of Mental Hygiene Legal Service, a state agency that represented the 12 men.
Reacting to the ruling, Governor Pataki, who is a possible candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, said he would call for a special session of the Legislature next week to push for legislation to allow for the civil confinement. The governor has made tougher treatment of recidivist sex offenders a signature law-enforcement issue, and he blamed Democrats in the State Assembly for stalling on the matter in years past.
In a statement, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver dismissed that criticism as ³lies and mistruths.² He noted that the Assembly, like the Republican-controlled State Senate, had passed civil confinement legislation in January, but that Senate Republicans had avoided reconvening a conference committee to work out differences in the two bills. Hinting that Mr. Pataki called for the session to bolster his presidential credentials, Mr. Silver said, ³Instead of participating in another political road show aimed at misleading New Yorkers and garnering headlines, the governor and the Senate should work with the Assembly on tough, effective laws that crack down on sex predators.²
The ruling plunges New York back into a volatile national debate over the treatment of sex offenders. Eighteen states ‹ including four in the
Northeast: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania ‹ have laws that allow the confinement of sex offenders after they are released from prison. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that such programs do not constitute double jeopardy, and that the laws are legal as long as the state can prove the offender suffers from a mental abnormality that makes him ³unable to control his dangerousness.²
The men covered by yesterday¹s ruling were serving sentences for a range of crimes; one was convicted of raping a 3-year-old boy, for example, another of sexually abusing three young girls. About 100 other men throughout the state were also transferred to civil confinement while the original case worked its way through the courts.
The new ruling, however, will not directly affect them. The law already permits them to challenge their confinement after they have been committed, and each of the plaintiffs is doing so. Advocates for the detainees say, though, that the order may hasten those hearings.
In yesterday¹s ruling, Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, who was appointed by Mr. Pataki¹s predecessor, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, wrote, ³We do not propose that these petitioners be released, nor do we propose to trump the interests of public safety. Rather, we recognize that a need for continued hospitalization may well exist.²
The decision reversed an earlier ruling by an appellate court, which had overturned a 2005 State Supreme Court ruling in favor of the 12 men.
In his statement yesterday, Mr. Pataki said he was ³deeply disappointed² by the high court¹s ruling. Though his successor, Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, also supports new civil-confinement legislation and said yesterday that he would push for it when he takes office next year, Mr. Pataki signaled that he wanted to make one more effort at passing the law on his own watch.
³I remain committed to do everything in my power as governor to keep these predators away from our children and away from society and have been working for years to give our mental health and criminal justice professionals the tools they need to protect our children and families from sexually violent predators,² the governor said.
Mr. Pataki originally sought to have the 12 men confined in September 2005 under a novel interpretation of the state¹s mental hygiene laws, which usually govern hospitalization of the noncriminal mentally ill. Later that year, Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan held that while it was reasonable for state officials to be concerned about the risks to the public should the men be released, state law required that court-appointed doctors examine the men to determine whether they met the requirements for civil confinement.
In upholding that initial decision, the court of appeals said that prison officials had ignored the corrections law governing such confinements, which is more restrictive than the mental hygiene laws under which the men were transferred to the psychiatric hospitals. The corrections law requires that court-appointed doctors determine whether an inmate is mentally ill and a formal court order to commit them involuntarily. It also allows the inmate to contest the order before a judge prior to being committed.
A spokesman for Mr. Pataki, David Catalfamo, said yesterday that the governor would continue to seek civil confinement for imprisoned sex offenders who are near release and deemed likely to commit crimes in the future. But he will do so under the corrections law, ³with all attendant procedural requirements,² said Mr. Catalfamo, rather than under the mental hygiene law.
Abby Goodnough contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/nyregion/22confine.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref
=slogin&ref=nyregion&adxnnlx=1164402230-tFnvxd6O/Gi9WRXUl/cADw
Posted by lois at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)
FL: DCF Chief May Go To Jail
"DCF officials say judges statewide are declaring inmates mentally incompetent for trial nearly twice as often as they were eight years ago, creating the logjam. Last year, about 1,483 inmates were declared incompetent, up from 863 commitments in 1998-99. To meet the need, Dillinger speculated that DCF might have to rent beds at private facilities. He said those beds can cost up to $800 per day. He said DCF should have secured funding for more beds long ago."
St. Petersburg Times
DCF chief may go to jail
Lucy Hadi faces contempt charges for failing to get mentally ill inmates out of jail.
By CHRIS TISCH, Times Staff Writer
Published November 22, 2006
If the head of the Florida Department of Children and Families doesn't get mentally ill inmates out of the Pinellas County Jail soon, she might join them behind bars.
A Pinellas judge Tuesday charged DCF Secretary Lucy Hadi with seven counts of indirect criminal contempt for failing to get the inmates out of the jail. The maximum penalty for each of those counts is five months and 29 days in jail.
Asked by the St. Petersburg Times whether he would jail Hadi, Circuit Judge Crockett Farnell responded: "Oh, I'd love to. I'll do whatever I have to do to get somebody's attention."
Farnell's order is the latest move by judges and lawyers statewide who are trying to clear local jails of the mentally ill.
Hadi is to be arraigned on the charges Dec. 14. It was unclear whether a state agency head has ever been jailed on contempt charges. Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger said he doesn't recall it happening in his 30-year legal career.
State law requires DCF to move mentally incompetent inmates out of local jails and into mental health facilities within 15 days. But the DCF wait list for beds swelled this year to more than 300 people, and inmates have languished in jail for an average of about three months. Some have harmed themselves during the long waits.
The issue has generated statewide outrage among judges, lawyers and advocates for the mentally ill. It also has gained nationwide attention, including a front-page article in the New York Times last week. The prospect of an agency secretary going to jail should only stoke the fire.
"If the secretary were put in handcuffs or put behind bars, it would not create more beds," DCF spokesman Al Zimmerman said after Farnell issued his order. "But I can tell you that if it would create more beds ... she would do it in a heartbeat."
When told of that comment, Farnell responded: "Well, good. Let's let her try that, because that would certainly get the governor's attention."
Farnell's order already apparently has.
"We in no way think this latest order is a constructive way to effectively address the issue," said Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for Gov. Jeb Bush.
But Dillinger, whose office has acted on behalf of many of the 30 or so mentally ill Pinellas inmates, called Farnell's actions courageous.
Calling DCF arrogant, Farnell has issued court orders over the last five weeks requiring the agency to remove mentally sick inmates from the jail within 15 days or face a $1,000 fine per inmate per day.
But the agency hasn't removed all those inmates and intends to appeal the ruling.
"You just can't ignore court orders," Dillinger said. "And when citizens ignore court orders, they often go to jail. And with government, you can't have two sets of rules."
Other Florida counties also have taken DCF to task over the issue. Hillsborough County sued the agency, as did inmates in some South Florida jails. A judge in North Florida threatened to have a mentally sick inmate dropped off at Hadi's office if the agency didn't remove him from jail.
DCF officials have said they don't have the money to create more beds and haven't been able to keep up with a burgeoning population of mentally ill inmates.
But Zimmerman announced Tuesday that DCF had found about $5-million in administrative funds that the agency plans to use for more beds.
He said it was unclear Tuesday how many beds that money would create, how fast it would happen or where the beds would be.
Those beds will be in addition to 87 beds added last month, which brought the number of beds statewide to about 1,400.
"If this doesn't do it, then we'll have to look under even more couch cushions to find more spare change," Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman said DCF was looking for funding options long before it was taken to court.
"All the court hearings have created a lot of attention, but for months now we have been working to find a way to increase the number of beds," Zimmerman said. "This was not a problem brought to our attention by any court."
DCF officials say judges statewide are declaring inmates mentally incompetent for trial nearly twice as often as they were eight years ago, creating the logjam. Last year, about 1,483 inmates were declared incompetent, up from 863 commitments in 1998-99.
To meet the need, Dillinger speculated that DCF might have to rent beds at private facilities. He said those beds can cost up to $800 per day. He said DCF should have secured funding for more beds long ago.
Farnell said he doesn't empathize with DCF's predicament.
"I can't empathize with them because those people who are suffering are their responsibility," the judge said.
The 15-day rule kicks in once a judge issues an incompetency order, but the average stay in jail has been about three months as the waiting list has ballooned. The list of mentally ill inmates waiting for beds in mental health facilities in Florida was at 298 this week, Zimmerman said.
This creates problems for local jails, which have trouble handling mentally ill inmates, many of whom committed simple misdemeanors and can't afford bail.
At least two inmates, including one in Pinellas, poked out their eyes during their long waits.
Farnell said he also was distressed that DCF wasn't offering to help the jails provide mental health services to these inmates.
"They're not doing anything. That's the bottom line," Farnell said. "All I'm doing is trying to get somebody's attention."
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/11/22/State/DCF_chief_may_go_to_j.shtml
Chris Tisch can be reached at tisch@sptimes.com or 727-892-2359.
Posted by lois at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
Despite Fewer Lockups, NYC Has Seen Big Drop in Crime
Despite Fewer Lockups, NYC Has Seen Big Drop in Crime
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 24, 2006; A03
NEW YORK -- The correction commissioner walks down a long row of cells painted blue, his footsteps echoing inside the massive Rikers Island jail block.
Every cell is empty, and he couldn't be happier.
"What we've seen in New York is the fastest drop in crime in the nation, and we did it while locking up a lot less people," says Commissioner Martin F. Horn, who oversees the city lockups, including barbed-wire-ringed Rikers Island. "The only people using these cells now are the directors and actors from 'Law and Order.' "
It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time.
Nearly 2.2 million Americans now live behind bars, about eight times as many as in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world. For three decades, Congress and dozens of legislatures have worked to write tougher anti-crime measures. Often the only controversy has centered on how to finance the construction of prison cells.
New York City officials, by contrast, are debating whether to turn some old cells in downtown Brooklyn into luxury shops.
"If you want to drive down crime, the experience of New York shows that it's ridiculous to spend your first dollar building more prison cells," said Michael Jacobson, who served as New York's correction commissioner for former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and now is president of the Vera Institute of Justice, which studies crime-fighting trends worldwide.
"I can't tell you exactly why violent crime in New York declined by twice the national rate," he said. "But I can tell you this: It wasn't because we locked up more people."
Perhaps as intriguing is the experience in states where officials spent billions of dollars to build prisons. From 1992 to 2002, Idaho's prison population grew by 174 percent. the largest percentage increase in the nation. Yet violent crime in that state rose by 14 percent. In West Virginia, the prison population increased by 171 percent, and violent crime rose 10 percent. In Texas, the prison population jumped by 168 percent, and crime dropped by 11 percent.
The debate about the degree to which the United States' record rate of imprisonment has driven down crime is more than a dance on the head of a statistical pin. FBI data released in September showed that violent crime -- rape, homicide and robbery -- edged up by 2.2 percent last year. That is far from the violent heights of the early 1990s, but Jacobson and other criminologists are concerned that a resurgence in crime could cast a shadow on an intriguing cultural moment.
In the past few years, legislators in such conservative states as Louisiana and Mississippi have passed sentencing reforms. Kansas and Nebraska are reconsidering prison expansion in favor of far less expensive drug treatment. The United States annually spends about $60 billion on prisons.
"Crime is down and people realize, sure, we can lock up more people, but that's why your kid's pre-K class has 35 kids -- all the money is going to prisons," Jacobson says. "There's a sense of urgency that for the first time in two decades, we can talk about whether it makes sense to lock up even more people."
No one, not even reformers, doubts that locking up enough people can drive down crime. Nor does anyone question that many felonious types belong behind bars. Alfred Blumenstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, cites a study that found that the growth in imprisonment during the 1990s accounted for about 25 percent of the national decline in crime.
David Muhlhausen, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation -- which is an influential voice within the Bush administration -- goes further. He says prison is a fine crime-fighting method. "Putting citizens behind bars works because they can't commit crimes," he said. "It's one of the best tools we have against crime."
But there are powerful counter examples, criminologists say. The nation's prison population rose between 1985 and 1993 -- even as crime spiked sharply. New York was not the only city in which crime and imprisonment fell in tandem during the 1990s. From 1993 to 2001, homicides in San Diego declined by 62 percent while prison sentences dropped by 25 percent.
Casting an eye north of the border, Canada experienced a sharp drop in crime as its prison population fell. "There are several examples of crime crashing without imprisonment rising, but we treat these as outliers," says Franklin E. Zimring, author of "The Great American Crime Decline" and a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "For most of the nation, the 1990s were the era of 'throw away the key.' "
Such heavy reliance on prison, epidemiologists note, carries a considerable social price tag. Hundreds of thousands of released felons cannot vote, cannot obtain driver's licenses and have trouble finding jobs -- a toll that falls disproportionately on blacks, Latinos and poor whites.
Barry Campbell, who works at the Fortune Society, a prison reform organization in Manhattan, did 15 years behind bars on sundry charges. He attributes many of his troubles to a drug addiction that he has kicked. Ask him about New York's experience in driving down imprisonment and crime, and he is not surprised.
"Prison is a place where someone heading down a path of destruction is propelled at 90 miles an hour," he says.
Approximately 60 percent of U.S. convicts serve time for charges related to drug peddling and addiction. In California, 65,000 parolees fail drug tests each year and are recycled back to prison each year. They serve, on average, an additional four months, at a cost of $1 billion.
No public official set out to drive down New York's prison and jail population in the early 1990s. Quite the opposite; crack-fueled homicides had topped 2,000, the middle class was fleeing and Giuliani was elected on a crime-fighting platform.
"If I told Rudy we needed to lock up 40,000, 50,000 people, he would have said fine," Jacobson said. "Rudy can say now that he's a genius, but the drop in prison population was entirely unintentional."
William J. Bratton, Giuliani's police commissioner in the mid-1990s -- now chief of the Los Angeles Police Department -- directed his officers to make swarms of misdemeanor arrests for fare beating, pot smoking, gun possession and the like, charges that result in much shorter incarcerations. Felony arrests, by contrast, dropped sharply, which meant far fewer city residents were sent to the high-security Upstate prisons.
City and state prisons in New York also turned aggressively to drug treatment and mental health counseling. They did so as a matter of enlightened self-interest. The city prison system is the second-largest mental health provider in the nation; only the Los Angeles County system surpasses it.
Commissioner Horn got his start decades ago as a prison guard. Now he occupies the executive office at Rikers Island and is a national expert on what is recognized as an American specialty: mass incarceration.
"I leave it to the economists and the moralists to decide if we've paid too high a cost to imprison," Horn said as he walked out of a shadowed prison block. "But New York proves you can lock up a lot fewer people and get a pretty big impact."
Staff writer Robin Shulman contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR2006112301015.html
Posted by lois at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)
A Border Watcher Finds Himself Under Scrutiny
November 24, 2006
A Border Watcher Finds Himself Under Scrutiny
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD, NY Times
For years, Roger Barnett has holstered a pistol to his hip, tucked an assault rifle in his truck and set out over the scrub brush on his thousands of acres of ranchland near the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona to hunt.
Hunt illegal immigrants, that is, often chronicled in the news.
"They're flooding across, invading the place," Mr. Barnett told the ABC program "Nightline" this spring. "They're going to bring their families, their wives, and they're going to bring their kids. We don't need them."
But now, after boasting of having captured 12,000 illegal crossers on land he owns or leases from the state and emerging as one of the earliest and most prominent of the self-appointed border watchers, Mr. Barnett finds himself the prey.
Immigrant rights groups have filed lawsuits, accusing him of harassing and unlawfully imprisoning people he has confronted on his ranch near Douglas. One suit pending in federal court accuses him, his wife and his brother of pointing guns at 16 illegal immigrants they intercepted, threatening them with dogs and kicking one woman in the group.
Another suit, accusing Mr. Barnett of threatening two Mexican-American hunters and three young children with an assault rifle and insulting them with racial epithets, ended Wednesday night in Bisbee with a jury awarding the hunters $98,750 in damages.
The court actions are the latest example of attempts by immigrant rights groups to curb armed border-monitoring groups by going after their money, if not their guns. They have won civil judgments in Texas, and this year two illegal Salvadoran immigrants who had been held against their will took possession of a 70-acre ranch in southern Arizona after winning a case last year.
The Salvadorans had accused the property owner, Casey Nethercott, a former leader of the Ranch Rescue group, of menacing them with a gun in 2003. Mr. Nethercott was convicted of illegal gun possession; the Salvadorans plan to sell the property, their lawyer has said.
But Mr. Barnett, known for dressing in military garb and caps with insignia resembling the United States Border Patrol's, represents a special prize to the immigrant rights groups. He is ubiquitous on Web sites, mailings and brochures put out by groups monitoring the Mexican border and, with family members, was an inspiration for efforts like the Minutemen civilian border patrols.
"The Barnetts, probably more than any people in this country, are responsible for the vigilante movement as it now exists," said Mark Potok, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the groups. "They were the recipients of so much press coverage and they kept boasting, and it was out of those boasts that the modern vigilante movement sprang up."
Jesus Romo Vejar, the lawyer for the hunting party, said their court victory Wednesday would serve notice that mistreating immigrants would not pass unpunished. Although the hunters were not in the United States illegally, they contended that Mr. Barnett's treatment of them reflected his attitude and practices toward Latinos crossing his land, no matter what their legal status.
"We have really, truly breached their defense," Mr. Vejar said, "and this opens up the Barnetts to other attorneys to come in and sue him whenever he does some wrong with people."
Mr. Vejar said he would ask the state attorney general and the county attorney, who had cited a lack of evidence in declining to prosecute Mr. Barnett, to take another look at the case. He also said he would ask the state to revoke Mr. Barnett's leases on its land.
Mr. Barnett had denied threatening anyone. He left the courtroom after the verdict without commenting, and his lawyer, John Kelliher, would not comment either.
In a brief interview during a court break last week, Mr. Barnett denied harming anyone and said that the legal action would not deter his efforts. He said that the number of illegal immigrants crossing his land had declined recently but that he thought it was only a temporary trend.
"For your children, for our future, that's why we need to stop them," Mr. Barnett said. "If we don't step in for your children, I don't know who is expected to step in."
Mr. Barnett prevailed in a suit in the summer when a jury ruled against a fellow rancher who had sued, accusing him of trespassing on his property as he pursued immigrants. Another suit last year was dropped when the plaintiff, who had returned to Mexico, decided not to return to press the case.
Still, the threat of liability has discouraged ranchers from allowing the more militant civilian patrol groups on their land, and accusations of abuse seem to be on the wane, said Jennifer Allen of the Border Action Network, an immigrant rights group.
But David H. Urias, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund who is representing the 16 immigrants suing Mr. Barnett, said fewer complaints did not necessarily mean less activity. Immigrants from Mexico are returned to their country often within hours and often under the impression that their deportation - and chance to try to return again - will go quicker without their complaints.
"It took us months to find these 16 people," Mr. Urias said.
People who tend ranches on the border said that even if they did not agree with Mr. Barnett's tactics they sympathized with his rationale, and that putting him out of business would not resolve the problems they believe the crossers cause.
"The illegals think they have carte blanche on his ranch," said Al Garza, the executive director of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps in Arizona, a civilian patrol group that, Mr. Garza says, does not detain illegal immigrants but calls in their movements to the Border Patrol. "The man has had it."
Mr. Barnett, a retired Cochise County sheriff's deputy and the owner of a towing business, acquired his ranch in the mid-1990s, buying or leasing from the state more than 22,000 acres.
Almost from the start he took up a campaign against the people crossing the border from Mexico, sometimes detaining large groups and radioing for the Border Patrol to pick them up.
Chuy Rodriguez, a spokesman for the agency's Tucson office, said the Border Patrol maintained no formal relationship with Mr. Barnett or other civilian groups. Agency commanders, concerned about potential altercations, have warned the groups not to take the law into their hands.
"If they see something, we ask them to call us, like we would ask of any citizen," Mr. Rodriguez said.
Mr. Barnett's lawyers have suggested he has acted out of a right to protect his property.
"A lease holder doesn't have the right to protect his cattle?" Mr. Kelliher asked one of the men in the hunting party, Arturo Morales, at the trial.
"I guess so, maybe," Mr. Morales replied.
Mr. Barnett has had several encounters with local law enforcement officials over detaining illegal immigrants, some of whom complained that he pointed guns at them. The local authorities have declined to prosecute him, citing a lack of evidence or ambiguity about whether he had violated any laws.
A few years ago, however, the Border Action Network and its allied groups began collecting testimony from illegal immigrants and others who had had confrontations with Mr. Barnett.
They included the hunters, who sued Mr. Barnett for unlawful detention, emotional distress and other claims, and sought at least $200,000. Ronald Morales; his father, Arturo; Ronald Morales's two daughters, ages 9 and 11; and an 11-year-old friend said Mr. Barnett, his brother Donald and his wife, Barbara, confronted them Oct. 30, 2004.
Ronald Morales testified that Mr. Barnett used expletives and ethnically derogatory remarks as he sought to kick them off state-owned property he leases. Then, Mr. Morales said, Mr. Barnett pulled an AR-15 assault rifle from his truck and pointed it at them as they drove off, traumatizing the girls.
Mr. Kelliher conceded that there was a heated confrontation. But he denied that Mr. Barnett used slurs and said Ronald Morales was as much an instigator. He said Morales family members had previously trespassed on Mr. Barnett's land and knew that Mr. Barnett required written permission to hunt there.
Even as the trial proceeded, the Border Patrol reported a 45 percent drop in arrests in the Douglas area in the last year. The agency credits scores of new agents, the National Guard deployment there this summer and improved technology in detecting crossers.
But Ms. Allen of the Border Action Network and other immigrant rights supporters suspect that people are simply crossing elsewhere.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/us/24border.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Posted by lois at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2006
Repression and Resistance in Oaxaca
from Counterpunch:
November 21, 2006
Lessons from the Teachers
Repression and Resistance in Oaxaca
By LUIS HERNÁNDEZ NAVARRO
(Luis Hernández Navarro is Opinion Editor at La Jornada in Mexico,where parts of this text were published. He is a collaborator with the Americas Program online at www.americaspolicy.org)
Translated by Katherine Kohlstedt.
A profound political crisis is shaking up Mexico. The rules thatregulate the balance of power between elites have been violated. From above, there is no agreement or any possibility for one in the short term.
A severe crisis in the model of control has eroded relationships of
domination in many parts of Mexican national territory. People accustomed to obeying have refused to do so. People who think they are destined to rule have been unable to impose their command. Those from below have become disobedient. When those on the top want to impose their opinion from above, in the name of the law, they are ignored from below. Nowhere is the breakdown in control and the effervescence of rebellion as obvious as in the state of Oaxaca.
Oaxaca is a state plagued with social problems. It is a Mexican tourist enclave, surrounded by poverty where people survive on remittances sent by migrant workers abroad. Within its territory one finds land struggles, confrontations between caciques(local bosses ) and coyotes (migrant smugglers), local government conflicts, ethnic revenge, fights for better prices for agricultural products, and resistance against the authoritarian state.
Since May 15, Oaxaca has been in the throes of its most massive and
significant social movement in recent history. The protest begun by Section 22 of the national teachers' union (SNTE, for its initials in Spanish) soon became the expression of the social contradictions in the state. It is not at all unusual that teachers mobilize for pay raises around the time of the contract negotiation. This time it has gone well beyond a union struggle to fuse protests of many groups. Oaxacan society has come out in force to show its solidarity with the teachers and add in other demands and grievances.
Around 350 organizations, indigenous communities, unions, and non-profits have jointed to form the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO).
Lessons from the Teachers
The teachers' movement is the only democratic force with a presence
throughout the state. It's the only organization capable of making their political presence felt simultaneously in every municipality of the state.
Oaxacan teachers work in precarious conditions. Their students arrive at school with empty stomachs and drop out so they can help their families work in the fields. Their classrooms are entirely unequipped. In order to get to the communities they work in, they often have to invest their own time and money in transportation, using roads that only exist in official reports. Teachers have come to identify closely with the precarious conditions of
their communities they work in and become not only fighters within their union, but the voices of the community's demands as well.
The protest in Oaxaca started as an expression of the union's struggle for a pay raise based on rezoning cost of living scales. This is nothing new with respect to struggles in years past. Their protest began on the same symbolic and traditional date as it has for many years: May 15, Teacher's Day. It is also common to use the presidential succession, to increase pressure on the government to negotiate.
The protest radicalized as a result of the state government's refusal to respond to their demands. Instead of sitting down to negotiate, the governor threatened the teachers, and then sent police to forcefully evacuate education workers camped out in downtown Oaxaca. The outrageous repression of June 14 radicalized the teachers, and from then on they demanded the resignation of the state governor. Instead of seeking solutions, the federal government pretended not to notice and said that it was a local issue over which it had no authority.
This explosive political situation was further polarized as a result of the last Oaxacan gubernatorial election. Gabino Cué, backed by the ex governor Diódoro Carrasco and a coalition of the majority of opposition parties, confronted Ulises Ruiz, one of the main operators of Madrazo, at that time candidate of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) for the presidency. The tight win by the PRI was seriously questioned by Cué supporters, who claimed election fraud against him.
The teachers feel such responsibility to their communities that the majority of them left the capital occupation for a few weeks to end the school year with their communities. Since classes are out they have returned to the city to carry out their plan of action. The city of Oaxaca is theirs.
The Movement Grows
The claims of the teachers quickly found an echo in a broad cross-section of Oaxacan society. Bothered by the electoral fraud that brought Ulises Ruiz to power, as well as governmental violence against the group of community and regional organizations, thousands of Oaxacans took the streets and more than 30 town halls.
Since that time a large part of the society does not recognize Ulises Ruiz as governor. Since a May 25 meeting between Ruiz and the Negotiation Commission, they have not seen him. July 11 the APPO began, successfully, a round of pacific civil disobedience that seeks to make obvious the lack of governance and authority that exists in the state.
The movement took political control of the city of Oaxaca. Since the
occupation by federal police that retook the center on Oct. 29, the movement has blocked the entrances to expensive downtown hotels and the local airport; it obstructs traffic and impedes the entrance to public buildings and the state congress.
Ruiz, desperate to keep power, betrayed his boss, PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, proposing at a meeting of PRI state governors that they recognize PAN candidate Felipe Calderón as the winner of the presidential contest. The federal government, needing allies to confront the protests over presidential election fraud, has responded by maintaining the teetering governor.
As time passes the situation worsens. On July 22 a group of 20 unknown people fired high-powered weapons at the Radio Universidad facilities. The university radio station, run by the movement, has been converted into a formidable instrument of information and social mobilization. The same day Molotov cocktails were thrown at several movement leaders.
Dirty War
Physical violence against protesters is not new to Oaxaca. In the '80s Amnesty International published a broad report documenting human rights violations in rural areas of Oaxaca and Chiapas. Taking power by force, murders of political dissidents, forced disappearances, and arbitrary detentions have been common instruments used by a succession of state governments to maintain control in the state.
The list of atrocities committed by the government of Ulises Ruiz against the teachers movement and the APPO grows day by day. Combined with the lack of governance and stability in the state a serious human rights crisis has emerged.
The assassination of dissenting citizens at the hands of hired hit men and plainclothes police, open fire against newspapers and independent radio stations, kidnapping and torture of social leaders by paramilitaries, death threats, underground detention centers, arson of buses by groups affiliated with PRI authorities, and random detention without warrant of movement leaders are some of the aggressions committed against the civic movement that demands the resignation of the governor.
The novel aspects of the violence against resisters is that it seeks to dispel and intimidate the broadest and most vigorous social movement the state has seen in decades, and-with the exception of the October police offensive-it is done "unofficially." This means that the majority of the repressive acts are executed by state police and paramilitaries dressed as civilians.
The state government does not usually admit to responsibility for these incidents, although it has admitted that it his holding some of the individuals originally "disappeared" in high-security prisons. In Oaxaca a new episode is being played out of the dirty war that shook the country in the '70s and '80s and resulted in the disappearance of 1,200 people.
To "justify" the dirty war, the government and part of the media have spread the message that the Oaxacan popular movement has been "infiltrated" by leftist, politically militant organizations that have radicalized the protest. But the movement for the resignation of the governor has been explicitly framed as an act of civil disobedience, and has followed clearly pacifistic paths. At no time has the APPO used firearms in their actions.
The radicalism comes from the governmental authoritarianism. The violence is originating from the other side.
An Organized Society
Oaxacan society is highly organized into ethnopolitical groups, communities, farms, producers, unions, and environmental and immigrant defense groups. It has built solid, permanent transnational networks. The traditional methods of governmental domination, based on a combination of co-opting, negotiation, division, manipulation of demands and repression, have run out.
The new dirty war has become the last resort of a cornered political class to recover the chain of command.
In Mexico there is a long history of social struggles that precipitate larger scale conflicts. They are an alarm bell that alerts a country to serious political problems that have not been resolved. For example, the workers' strikes at Cananea and Rio Blanco are recognized as predecessors to the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. The popular movement that has shaken Oaxaca since May is an expression of this type of protests. It has revealed
the end of the old forms of domination, the crisis between the political class and society, and the path that the people's discontent could take throughout the country.
The movement has ceased to be a traditional struggle or protest and begun to
transform itself into an embryo of an alternative government. The
governmental institutions are increasingly empty shells without authority or
public confidence, while the people's assemblies have become the site of
construction of a new political mandate.
Federal Police Force Arrives
When the federal government finally sends the federal police, in the streets
of Oaxaca the people confront them with peaceful protests. They hold up
handwritten banners that state simply: "leave, you're not welcome."
Thousands of people use their bodies as their only weapon to resist the
political aggression. Through their actions, they convert fear into anger,
humiliation into dignity.
At three of the barricades the tension is higher. People throw sticks and
stones. A few decide to toss Molotov cocktails. Others launch bottle
rockets. From Radio Universidad, the voice of the movement against Ulises
Ruiz, announcers urge protesters repeatedly to use pacific means to confront
the incursion of federal troops. Be patience, be calm, be smart, they warn.
Don't let yourself be provoked, they insist.
The government's offer to carry out a clean dissuasion operation with no
physical contact goes up in smoke in the first moments. Empty words. The
police throw tear gas, wave their clubs around, shoot off firearms, ransack
private homes, detain individuals, confront journalists, and seize their
materials. Their byword is advance with all you've got. They take over
public buildings, erase evidence of their mistakes and excesses, and make
their strength felt.
Fighting Fire with Gasoline
As in Atenco, the government launches a huge media campaign to cover up the
atrocities of its henchmen. Fox declares there are no deaths, that the
results are "a clean record." But the voice of the dead exposes the truth.
More than 50 detainees refute him. The wounded deny his words.
The battle of Oaxaca is the most important popular revolt in many years and
could mark the future of social protest in Mexico. Although the powerful say
that the police incursion was to guarantee public safety, what is really
behind the repression is the destruction of the newly woven grassroots
social consciousness and the decision to support Ulises Ruiz.
While federal forces act like an occupying army swollen by the positions it
has managed to retake, Oaxacans fly hundreds of Mexican flags and sing the
national anthem. In the fight for patriotic symbols, the government loses
the first round. A short time after the federal forces took the center of
the city and strategic positions, citizens put up new barricades behind
their backs. People from highland communities come down to the capital to
support the movement. They didn't just come to march in a demonstration. A
human fence has arisen that surrounds the aggressors.
There is no way to return to normalcy through violence. No way to knit the
social fabric through police occupation. Governing requires that the
governed recognize the legitimacy of their leaders. This acceptance does not
exist in Oaxaca and will never be attained with clubs and boots. Quite the
opposite, the fermenting inconformity has spread all over the country
because of the new aggressions. If until now some sectors of society had
remained neutral, the federal offensive has obliged them to take part.
The images on the seven o'clock news of confrontations between
made-in-Mexico robocops and the students and Oaxacan neighbors that defended
the university on Day of the Dead made it around the world. The Mexican
police were defeated by a popular uprising and the media bore witness.
The battle for Oaxaca is not over yet. On the contrary, the solution to this
conflict is more complicated now than ever and the resolution even further
away. As the unavoidable saying goes: they tried to put out the fire with
gasoline.
The latest move of the people's movement has been to convert their protest
into a central item on the national agenda. The following months will be
marked by the conflict. The federal government has got itself into a
quagmire that it can't get out of.
Oaxaca is today, more than ever, Mexico. The civil disobedience there is
close to becoming a popular uprising that, far from wearing out, grows and
becomes more radical every day. The establishment of forms of
self-government is reminiscent of the Paris Commune of 1871. The way things
are going, the example set by the nascent Oaxaca Commune is far from being
limited to that state. It could be a taste of what may sweep the country due
to the governmental refusal to clear up and clean up the presidential
elections of July 2.
Posted by lois at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2006
Great Britain: "Crystal Meth: Britain's Deadliest Drug Problem"
Crystal meth: Britain's deadliest drug problem
By Jason Bennetto and Maxine Frith
Published: 21 November 2006 (Great Britain, The Independent) http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2001530.ece
Britain is under threat from a highly addictive drug, known as crystal meth or "ice", which has the potential to rival crack cocaine as the country's most dangerous drug, police chiefs are warning.
The stimulant, methamphetamine, also k