The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: November 2006 Archives

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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.

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.

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.

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."

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"

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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PA%20National%20Correspondent&date=November%2027%2C%202006> talkback

Posted by lois at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)

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
1250341

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

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

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.

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 known as "Nazi crank", has begun to spread throughout the UK and is available in almost every city in Britain, according to police intelligence. It is becoming increasingly popular among clubbers and is starting to enter mainstream drug use.

Police chiefs have been alarmed by its rapid growth in the United States - where 12 million people are thought to have tried it - Australia and New Zealand, and fear that Britain will be next.

The growth in British laboratories making the drug puts people at risk of death or injury from explosions and toxic fumes, a police conference will hear today.

While the number of seizures of the drug are currently low, police are starting to uncover a growing number of makeshift laboratories manufacturing it. Last month a crystal meth factory was discovered on an industrial unit in a Derbyshire village, Stoney Middleton. Laboratories have also been found in London and the Isle of Wight.

The threat posed by crystal meth, a synthetic drug that can be smoked, swallowed, snorted or injected, will be highlighted at the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) drugs conference in Manchester today.

Commander Simon Bray, an Acpo spokesman, said: "It could become as popular as crack unless we recognise the potential danger is poses and take action to prevent its spread. There is increasing intelligence about methamphetamine which shows its presence in this country is growing. You can find it in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, London - in almost every county. If people want to get hold of the drug they can find it."

He added: "We have not had many incidents yet, but if you look at the experience in the United States, New Zealand and Australia it started out with one or two laboratories which rapidly turned to hundreds. It is a bit like crack cocaine which suddenly appeared to take off - we want to make sure it does not get to that stage."

The number of illegal laboratories producing it grew in the US from 3,800 in 1998 to 8,500 in 2001, peaking at 10,200 in 2003. An estimated 12.3 million Americans had tried the drug by 2003. It is now more popular than cocaine or heroin in parts of America, and is considered by some to be more dangerous.

The American singer Rufus Wainwight is among several celebrities who have admitted overcoming an addiction to crystal meth, which increases sexual arousal.

Earlier this year the United Nations drug control agency warned that crystal meth was becoming a global problem and called for tougher restrictions on chemicals used to make it.

Police intelligence has shown that although still relatively rare in the UK, the drug is becoming increasingly popular among clubbers, and is being used by heroin addicts and rough sleepers.

Police are also concerned that the manufacture of the drug - the chemicals and instructions on how to use them are readily available on the internet - will lead to deaths and injuries from explosions and poisonous fumes produced during the cooking process. Mr Bray said: "The chemicals used to make the drug include iodine and drain cleaner - the substances are akin to nerve agents. They can result in explosions and toxic waste.

"In America quite a lot of children have been affected by the chemicals, and anyone responding to an incident [such as a fire] can be in danger. It can take months to decontaminate a site."

A gram of meth costs about £50, enough for several "hits". Its effects include psychosis and paranoia, and it has a particularly addictive nature that can be compared to crack cocaine and heroin.

The police believe that as well as being manufactured in Britain it is also being imported into the UK by a Filipino criminal network.

The police and Home Office are so concerned about the potential growth in the drug that in January they are due to upgrade the drug from a Class B to a Class A substance. This would mean those caught dealing it could receive a life sentence while those in possession could face up to seven years.

Key facts
by Geneviève Roberts

* Crystal meth (methamphetamine) is a class A drug, reclassified from class B in June this year.

* When smoked, snorted or injected it gives a "rush" similar to that produced by crack cocaine and is highly addictive.

* 10 per cent of gay men in London have used crystal meth. In London, half a gram costs £25.

* It causes cardiovascular problems and increased blood pressure. An overdose can cause overheating and convulsions.

How 'crank' laid waste to small-town America (Great Britain, The
Independent)
By Andrew Buncombe
Published: 21 November 2006 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2001538.ece

It had been several months since Shaden had last taken methamphetamine and yet her body still twitched or "tweaked" as she recounted her fight to kick the habit.

"The worst thing is that you are so blind in your reality. You know in the back of your head not to take it," said the mother, her eyes dark and sullen, as she sat in a women's treatment centre. "In the end, I had no self worth, no self-esteem. I knew nothing was going to get better. I had to get away from my family. I was praying and crying."

Methamphetamine has become the scourge of small-town America, a drug whose ease of manufacture and affordability has allowed it to penetrate deep into the US heartland. The drug first drew the attention of experts and law enforcement in the West but steadily its reach has moved eastwards, often trafficked by Hispanic gangs and produced in labs south of the border.

In rural areas - such as Missoula, Montana, where Shaden talked to The Independent earlier this year, it is eating up the lion's share of resources of the local authorities. The problem has become so great that the Department of Justice has designated 30 November as National Methamphetamine Awareness Day.

Michael Walther, director of the National Drug Intelligence Centre, said earlier this year: "Over the past 10 years, methamphetamine trafficking and abuse has devastated individuals, families, and communities in western and Midwestern states and has now spread eastward to nearly every area of the country. Addressing the challenges presented by this highly addictive drug, including laboratory clean-up,and addict treatment has greatly depleted state and local resources."

It had been several months since Shaden had last taken methamphetamine and yet her body still twitched or "tweaked" as she recounted her fight to kick the habit.

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

CO: Editorial: "Building Prisons at a Rate of One A Year

Denver Post 11/19/2006
Editorial
Building prisons at a rate of one a year

Colo. has built 16 prisons since 1990, and the governor is urging another spending increase. Lawmakers should update sentencing guidelines instead.

Outgoing Gov. Bill Owens presented his fiscal swan song to the legislature's Joint Budget Committee last week, urging Colorado's money mavens to pour extra dollars into his favorite programs of highways and prisons.

The emphasis on bolstering highway funding makes perfect sense, given Colorado's ill-maintained and inadequate transportation network. But prison expansion is a broken record. We'd rather see lawmakers restore funding for higher education.

Colorado's approach to building new prisons resembles an unsuccessful dieter's approach to eating peanuts: The state can't stop at just one. The state now has about 18,300 men and 2,100 women in prison, and their ranks are rising much faster than our population. Since 1990, Colorado has built 16 new prisons (not a typo), including four private prisons. Corrections officials estimate we'll need to build a new 800-bed prison each year into the indefinite future just to warehouse all the new inmates. It costs taxpayers about $26,082 a year for each man in prison and $27,900 per female inmate.

In contrast to the rapid expansion of prison space, our higher education network, from community colleges through research universities, has been on a starvation diet since the TABOR amendment was passed in 1992. The result of that long neglect became clear Thursday when an independent study found Colorado's colleges and universities would need $832 million just to meet the average funding levels enjoyed by their peer institutions in other states.

Those numbers will surprise no one who has followed higher education's declining fortunes in Colorado for the last dozen years. Yet, Owens urged an 8.7 percent hike in the upcoming budget for prisons and just a 7.2 percent increase in higher education.

Owens warned the legislators not to try to trim his proposed $51 million increase in the corrections budget by reforming any of the state's sometimes draconian mandatory minimum-sentencing laws. We don't agree.

Instead of a prison-a-year building program, we need to review our laws, especially for drug-related offenses. It's time to put more emphasis on rehabilitation and treatment and less on incarceration. A good example of such an approach came in 2003, when Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, and Rep. Lynn Hefley, R-Colorado Springs, passed SB 318. The bill slightly shortened sentences for possession of one gram or less of drugs and used the savings to treat prisoners with substance-abuse problems.

Sentencing reform, where appropropriate, can free up money now spent on evergrowing prison costs to bolster education.

As parents, we'd much rather have our kids go to college than to prison. We feel the same way about our money.
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_4689064

Posted by lois at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

CO: Building prisons at a rate of one a year

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_4689064
Denver Post 11/19/2006
Editorial
Building prisons at a rate of one a year
Colo. has built 16 prisons since 1990, and the governor is urging another spending increase. Lawmakers should update sentencing guidelines instead.

Outgoing Gov. Bill Owens presented his fiscal swan song to the legislature's Joint Budget Committee last week, urging Colorado's money mavens to pour extra dollars into his favorite programs of highways and prisons.

Sentencing reform, where appropropriate, can free up money now spent on evergrowing prison costs to bolster education.

As parents, we'd much rather have our kids go to college than to prison. We feel the same way about our money.

Posted by lois at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

NY: Michele Maxian, 55, Dies; Won Shorter Lockup Times

November 21, 2006, NY Times
Michele Maxian, 55, Dies; Won Shorter Lockup Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Michele Maxian, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who successfully battled to require New York State courts to arraign a suspect within 24 hours of being arrested, helping to spur reform in the New York City justice system, died last Tuesday in Union City, N.J. She was 55.

The cause was ovarian cancer, the society said. Ms. Maxian lived in Hoboken.

In January 1990, Ms. Maxian began filing petitions against New York City police and correction officials questioning why people were being imprisoned for minor offenses for more than 24 hours without being formally charged. In April 1990, Justice Brenda S. Soloff of State Supreme Court consolidated the 900 petitions Ms. Maxian had filed on one day into a single case.

Ms. Maxian attributed the delays to inefficiency, not malevolence. The city ultimately responded by streamlining procedures.

At the time of the suit, people were typically being kept for 39 or 40 hours while they were being booked and fingerprinted, going through other police procedures and then waiting to appear before a judge to be charged and make a plea. Many of those being held faced minor charges: for example, one person involved in the suit had been arrested for selling umbrellas without a license and then detained for 95 hours.

Justice Soloff ruled that delays of longer than 24 hours were “unnecessary” under a state law requiring expeditious judicial proceedings.

The Legal Aid Society had previously tried but failed to get a federal ruling that any time period longer than 24 hours represented “cruel and unusual punishment” under the United States Constitution. Although the society won a 1987 federal case, the decision was overturned on appeal in 1988, with the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holding that 24 hours was “unrealistic” for the crowded New York City court system and instead allowing 72 hours between arrest and arraignment.

The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the society’s appeal.

So Ms. Maxian, who had been involved in the first suit, turned to the state courts. She won by convincing Justice Soloff that the city was wasting time at the expense of people who had been arrested but not charged with any crime. She convinced the judge that 24 hours was, indeed, the most reasonable time limit. The judge required the city to justify periods longer than that on an individual basis.

The 1990 decision was based entirely on language in a state law, so broader Constitutional issues did not come into play. It was upheld on appeal to the highest state court.

Ms. Maxian monitored compliance with the ruling and filed grievances when the time limit was exceeded in the mid-1990s. In recent years, with crime down and the criminal justice system less crowded, the city has usually met the 24-hour guideline.

But in 2004, she used the 24-hour guideline as the basis for a suit against the city, charging that it was illegally detaining protesters at the Republican National Convention. She won a settlement in 2005 under which the city paid the arrested people and their lawyers $231,200.

Ms. Maxian graduated from Douglass College and the Rutgers University Law School. She began as a trial lawyer in Legal Aid’s Manhattan office from 1976 to 1982 and was twice director of the special litigation unit, from 1988 to 1998 and from 2002 until her death.

She is survived by her partner of 32 years, Marianne Ardito, and her brother, Richard Maxian, who lives in Georgia.

Another of her legal victories was persuading courts, including the highest one in New York State in 1988, to strike down a ban on loitering in subway, train or bus stations. She persuaded judges that police questioning of apparent loiterers violated their right to remain silent.

“Police are still going to be able to arrest people for doing crimes, but they can’t just arrest people for being suspicious,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Posted by lois at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2006

Holla to Hood (H2H) radio

Resource Information Help for the Disadvantaged
RIHD - PO Box 55 - Highland Springs, Virginia 23075
(804) 562-2123 - Web Site: www.rihd.org
Every Monday Night from 8pm to 11pm send love, shout-out, jokes, poetry, spiritual, religious messages, sing a brief song on live radio Appalshop's Holla to Hood (H2H) radio to Virginia Prisoners housed at Keen Mountain, Red Onion & Wallens Ridge. Call in's from all over the world.
Toll-free 1-888-396-1208 To listen to radio broadcast go to www.appalshop.org
Click on "radio" click on "live radio" sit back and listen. What a wonderful way to surprise an incarcerated love one. Please be brief and respectful (children, grandmothers, censorship's are all listening in).
Special Holiday Call In To H2H in addition to the regular Monday call in's on
December 12, 2006 from 6pm to 11pm Holla to the Hood (H2H) will record for the prisoners their annual HOLIDAY call-in/shout outs. This radio recording by H2H will be aired to all the prisoners at a later date.

Posted by lois at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2006

AL: Should Alabama Use Private Prisons?

Should Alabama use private prisons?
Sunday, November 19, 2006
By MICHAEL CIAMARRA
For The Huntsville Times

The state can save money and alleviate crowded conditions

BIRMINGHAM - Can the use private prisons save money and relieve overcrowding in Alabama's jails? A new report says it can.

A new report from the Alabama Policy Institute finds that private prison contracting can save money and relieve the persistent overcrowding of Alabama's jails.

The primary function of government is to protect the lives, liberty and property of its citizens. Public safety depends on a reliable and effective criminal justice system, and central to the administration of justice is a humane, secure and efficient corrections system.

Given Alabama's ongoing General Fund budget instability and growing concerns about the safety and conditions of its prison system, now may be a good time for innovation and looking at best practices working in other states.

As a result of financial constraints and years of mismanagement, Alabama's corrections system is operating at nearly 200 percent capacity. Many of Alabama's prisons are outdated and more often than not one officer has to supervise a prison dorm of 250 to 300 inmates.

Gov. Bob Riley has promised to reform Alabama's prison system over the next four years. Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Richard Allen has done a remarkable job in asking the right questions regarding what can be done to address the prison overcrowding problem, corrections staff shortages, aging facilities and cost effective solutions for inmate health care.

With the right questions being asked, opportunities to reduce prison overcrowding and save tax money with private contracting are serious options for lawmakers to consider.

The traditional corrections model based on government-run prisons is having difficulty keeping up with the growing needs of public safety. A thoughtful, well-planned privatization program would expand options for state lawmakers, enhance public safety and put the benefits of competition to work for taxpayers.

The study "What to Do about the Prison Problem: The Pros and Cons of Privatized Prisons in Alabama" by Dr. Kirk A. Johnson examines the possibilities of private prison construction that would create more prisoner bed space faster, thereby reliving overcrowding. Johnson projects that privately constructed prisons can be completed in half the time, with costs savings to taxpayers ranging from between 15 and 25 percent.

Numerous states have contracted out prison construction and management. All four states bordering Alabama have contracted with one or more private companies for prison services.

Johnson reviews the cost/benefit analysis of private prisons versus public prisons and provides substantive answers to the common arguments against private prisons.

Private construction would create more prisoner bed space faster, thereby relieving overcrowding. Private construction could replace many aging facilities in Alabama with more efficient, state-of-the-art prisons.

As Alabama's prison population grows by about 100 new inmates a month, Johnson affirms that private prisons construction could be structured in phases, to account for growth over time.

Johnson notes, "A private solution should be seriously considered as the legislature takes up the issue (prison reform) in earnest." API's Legislative Agenda recommends a proposal that would begin the process of implementing private prisons and their management.

Alabama law could be amended (Section 14-1-1.2, Code of Alabama 1975) to authorize a pilot program allowing for the contracting out of state prison services to a private company.

Following successful completion of the pilot program, competitive contracting could be used to expand competition throughout the state and county corrections system.

By tapping into the competitive advantages of private prison management, state and local governments can provide safe incarceration of convicted prisoners without raising taxes.

Michael Ciamarra is vice president of the Alabama Policy Institute. He can be reached at michaelc@alabamapolicy.org.

http://www.al.com/opinion/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1163931488112220.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

Prisoners in CA to be sent to CCA's Florence AZ Prison

Packed prisons get some relief; critics want reforms
By Steve Schmidt
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

November 19, 2006

FLORENCE, Ariz. – Tom Rankin has no beef with Californians moving to this former mining town – as long as they mind their manners and stay behind bars.

EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune
Inmates waited for a gate to be opened at Arizona's Florence Correctional Center, where nearly 450 prisoners from California will be moved next month under one of two contracts the state signed with private prison operators to ease overcrowding. Rankin is the mayor of Florence, and Florence has long been known as the land of razor wire and guard towers.

About 21,000 people live in this desert town along the Gila River. Nearly 70 percent of them are doing time in one of eight prisons. Some inmates are shipped in from as far away as Hawaii and Washington state.

Starting next month, 440 more convicts will be bused in – this time from California.

“Good,” says the mayor, grinning. The more prisoners his town houses, the more Arizona tax revenue it receives based on population. “We have no problem with it at all.”

Faced with packed prisons, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is transferring inmates to out-of-state facilities for the first time. About 2,200 inmates, all volunteers, will be moved to private, medium-security prisons in four states, including the Florence Correctional Center in Arizona.

The Schwarzenegger administration recently signed three-year contracts with the nation's two biggest, publicly traded private prison operators: Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group.

The contracts' projected cost to California taxpayers: at least $155 million, or $63 per inmate, per day. That's cheaper than the average cost of imprisonment in California.

Three lawsuits have been filed to stop the transfers, so far.

Critics say the exporting of inmates underscores the governor's failure to reform the state prison system, where 173,000 convicts are crowded into 33 adult facilities designed to hold 81,000.

“Housing inmates is a government responsibility,” argues state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles. “I don't believe in incarceration for profit.”

While debate continues, California convicts will soon land in Florence, about 60 miles southeast of Phoenix.

Walking its fluorescent-lighted halls, it's unlikely anyone would confuse it with a California lockup.

For one thing, the Florence facility isn't a fixer-upper. Short of money, many California prisons have peeling paint, bad wiring and antiquated plumbing.

For another, the mood in the Florence lockup seems mellow, as prisons go. In California prison yards, there's a tension that comes, in part, from packing too many hard-core convicts into too small a space.

The Florence prison has 1,824 beds and 1,300 inmates. They spend most of their time in 7-by-14-foot cells, boxed in by concrete and razor wire.

At some California prisons, including the Donovan facility in Otay Mesa, space is so tight that hundreds of inmates sleep in gyms and former classrooms. “I think people forget how dire the situation is,” said John Dovey, director of the department's adult prisons division.

William Shinyama has been inside Florence Correctional for six years. The Hawaiian convict is allowed to have a small TV and an Xbox video-game system in his two-man cell.

He even has a cat, a black lump of fur named Anela. The prison let him keep it after an animal-behavior program at the facility closed.

Anela curls up on Shinyama's metal bunk bed.

“This place is beautiful,” he said. “Where else are you going to get an Xbox and a TV?”

Inmate Todd Raines has a different take.

The convicted murderer and former Escondido resident believes Florence's operators frequently cut corners with food and medical care to bolster the bottom line.

“That's a myth,” responded Louise Grant, a Corrections Corp. vice president. “If that were true, our customers would not do business with us.” She said her firm was contractually obligated to provide adequate medical care and nutrition, and that even the caloric intake of each inmate was regulated.

The outfit runs more than 60 correctional facilities across the nation, including a 1,200-bed federal prison in Otay Mesa. It has contracts with three federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and 20 states.

Grant said public agencies monitored each facility. “The accountability we have is typically much higher than the state puts on itself,” she said.

California prison officials say the transfers will provide some relief for a correctional system beset by problems.

Many facilities are short-staffed, due partly to the low pay for some jobs. The level of medical care is considered grossly inadequate. And 2 out of 3 paroled California convicts are in prison again within two years, one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation.

Corrections authorities say the severe crowding undercuts efforts to address these issues.

Critics, however, say California should lower its population of inmates through key reforms, instead of shipping them out of the state.

Romero said she would continue to push for more funding for rehabilitation programs, along with an easing of state parole and sentencing rules.

“I'm not talking about opening the gates and letting everybody go. Public safety is paramount,” she said. But, she added, “we've got to look at alternatives.”

Prison expert Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA law professor, agreed. “The assumption of this move is that there's nothing else California can do,” she said. “But in fact we have a lot of people incarcerated who shouldn't be incarcerated.”

Like Romero and other critics, Dolovich believes California's parole and sentencing policies are overly stringent.

Dolovich studies both private and public prisons. She says one type is not necessarily better than the other, and that both operate under financial pressures and often lack adequate oversight.

California prison officials say they plan to make frequent visits to the out-of-state lockups to ensure that each lives up to its contract.

The state will pay Corrections Corp. and GEO nearly $23,000 a year for each inmate. The average annual cost of housing an inmate in California is $34,000. That figure includes the costs of caring for tens of thousands of inmates with chronic medical and mental health problems.

Under its California contract, Corrections Corp. will house up to 1,000 inmates in four prisons: two in Oklahoma, one in Tennessee and the lockdown in Florence.

GEO will house 1,260 California inmates at a facility in Indiana. Repeated attempts to talk with GEO executives for this story were unsuccessful.

Wall Street likes the companies' prospects. Corrections Corp. has seen its stock rise more than 50 percent since the start of the year, to $46 a share last week. The price of Florida-based GEO Group's stock has more than doubled over the same period, closing at $38 Friday.

An executive with the 34,000-member state prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, says the contracts are a bad deal for taxpayers.

“They were hastily thrown together and were certainly weighted to the advantage of the privateers,” said spokesman Lance Corcoran. “(The state) just gave away the farm.”

He said, for example, that the $63-per-day rate for each inmate was high compared with what some public agencies pay private operators.

Corrections Corp. charges other agencies an average of $53 per inmate. Executives with the firm emphasize, however, that this average figure includes a wide range of facilities, including county jails with fewer operating costs.

The guards union recently filed a lawsuit over the transfers, arguing that the contracts violate state civil service rules and contracting procedures.

State officials say the agreements are legally sound. They emphasize that if California had done nothing, the prisons would have run out of room by next June.

Under the contracts, the policies and procedures at each private prison will mirror those found in California.

Told about the cat inside William Shinyama's cell in Florence, California officials said their inmates would not be allowed to have pets. There'll be no Xboxes either, they said.

Florence has been a prison hub for several decades, and is the home of one of the West's oldest penitentiaries – the Arizona State Prison.

Mayor Rankin wants outsiders to know his town isn't just a giant lockup. Merchants are working to revive a downtown historic district. Thousands of homes in planned suburbs are being built, attracting young families and Phoenix commuters.

And probably California transplants as well, Rankin said.

He complains that many Californians try to push their more liberal, free-thinking values when they move in.

The mayor, smiling, said that's why he prefers them behind razor wire.

“Give me the inmates anytime.”

CALIFORNIA PRISONS

Population: California has 33 adult prisons, housing 173,000 inmates. The prisons were designed to hold 81,000.

Capacity: The state expects to run out of room for new prisoners by June.

Budget: The corrections budget for 2006-07 is $8.75 billion. That is 8.6 percent of the state's $101 billion general fund budget.

Cost: The state spends an average of $34,000 per year to incarcerate a single adult prisoner. Medical and mental health problems may increase the cost of housing some prisoners.

Employees: The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has 56,500 workers, 34,000 of whom are represented by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

Medical care: Alarmed by the poor level of medical care for inmates, a federal judge earlier this year appointed a receiver to overhaul the prison medical system.

SOURCES: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the state Department of Finance. Eight separate prisons – five public, three private – crowd the east side of the town, employing some 4,100 people. Arizona's death row is here, next to a desert wash. So is a federal prison for illegal immigrants. Nashville-based Corrections Corp. opened its medium-security Florence Correctional Center in 1999.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20061119-9999-1n19ariz.html

Posted by lois at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times: New Olreans: Architecture "All Fall Down"

November 19, 2006, NY Times
Architecture
All Fall Down
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

NEW ORLEANS

The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s plan to demolish four of the city’s biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.

Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city’s urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city’s public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

So it’s not surprising that many of its residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here. Locked out of the planning process, they fear the planned demolitions are part of a broad effort to prevent displaced poor people from returning to New Orleans.

This demolition strategy is not new. It is part of a long-standing campaign to dismantle the nation’s public housing system that began in the 1970s. That campaign was based on the valid belief that the concentration of the poor into segregated ghettos condemned them to a permanent cycle of poverty, crime and drugs. Specifically, it was directed at the large-scale postwar housing developments that became a fixture of American cities in the 1960s — anonymous blocks of concrete housing, like Chicago’s recently partially demolished Cabrini-Green, whose deadening uniformity seemed to strip the poor of their identity, reducing them to repetitive numbers in a vast bureaucratic machine.

The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of a new model for public housing: mixed-income developments whose designs are largely based on New Urbanist town-planning principles. Nostalgic visions of Middle America, they are marked by narrow pedestrian streets and quaint two-story houses with pitched roofs and covered porches. For HUD, they have become the default mode for rebuilding in New Orleans.

But if the sight of workers dynamiting an abandoned housing complex was a cause for celebration in Chicago’s North Side, the notion is stupefying in New Orleans, whose public housing embodies many of those same New Urbanist ideals: pedestrian friendly environments whose pitched roofs, shallow porches and wrought iron rails have as much to do with 19th-century historical precedents as with late Modernism.

More specifically, they were inspired by local developments such as the 1850s Pontalba Apartments and late-19th “Garden City” proposals, whose winding tree-lined streets and open green spaces were seen as an antidote to the filth and congestion of the industrial city.

The low red-brick housing blocks of the Lafitte Avenue project, in the historically black neighborhood of Treme, for example, are scaled to fit within the surrounding neighborhood of Creole cottages and shotgun houses. To lessen the sense of isolation, the architects extended the surrounding street grid through the site with a mix of roadways and pedestrian paths. As you move deeper into the complex, the buildings frame a series of communal courtyards sheltered by the canopies of enormous oak trees. Nature, here, was intended to foster spiritual as well as physical well being.

That care was reflected in the quality of construction as well. Solidly built, the buildings’ detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary public housing complex.

They would be almost impossible to reproduce in the kind of bottom-line developments that have become the norm.

In truth, the collapse of New Orleans’ public housing system had less to do with bad design than with cynical government policies, which were rooted in the city’s divisive racial politics. Up through the 1950s, residents of Lafitte were supported by a network of social services, from nursery schools financed by the Works Progress Administration to onsite medical care, adult education programs, Boy Scout groups and gardening clubs.

But as the middle class fled to the suburbs in the 1960s, these services were gradually stripped away, transforming entire areas of the inner city into ghettos for the black underclass.

By 2002, conditions had worsened to the point that the city of New Orleans agreed to turn control of its public housing over to HUD. Today, the richly landscaped gardens are gone. Many of the lawns have been paved over and replaced by basketball courts. Huge garbage bins, some with fading paintings of balloons, are scattered across decaying lots. Towering floodlights illuminate forbidding concrete pathways.

That neglect has now touched bottom in post-Katrina New Orleans. Most of the city’s public housing was boarded up a few months after the storm — long before most residents were able to claim their possessions or clean out their refrigerators. Many are now rat-infested. And while HUD has promised that anyone who comes back will be provided housing in the same neighborhood, those residents that have managed to return have had little voice about what their housing will be. (By comparison, the city has set up numerous town meetings to help homeowners decide how to rebuild their neighborhoods.)

The point is not that projects like Lafitte should be painstakingly restored to their original condition; nor are we likely to return to the same spirit of social optimism that created them any time soon. None of the projects rise to the level, say, of the best Modernist workers housing built in Europe in the 1920s, some of which were such refined architectural compositions that their apartments are now occupied by upper-middle-class sophisticates.

But they certainly rank above the level of much of the conventional middle-class housing being churned out today. And it is not difficult to imagine how a number of thoughtful modifications — the addition of new buildings, extensive landscaping, extending the existing street grid to anchor the project more firmly into the city — could transform the project into model housing.

Yet HUD has never seriously considered such a plan. And although HUD says it has studied what it would cost to restore the projects, it has not released any figures. Finally, it has been unwilling to acknowledge the psychic damage of ripping out more of the city’s fabric at a time when New Orleans has yet to heal the wounds of Hurricane Katrina.

HUD officials say they have not yet set a date for demolition, but they have already selected a team of developers — Enterprise Community Partners and Providence Community Housing, an arm of the Catholic church — which are working on plans for the site. Meanwhile, HUD’s vision of the future is already visible several miles away at the New Fischer development in Algiers. Built to replace a decaying 1960s-era housing complex, part of which is still under demolition, the neighborhood’s rows of two-story houses, painted in cheery pastel colors, will be occupied by a mix of low- and middle-income families. Its porch-lined streets are straight from a Norman Rockwell painting of small-town America.

But in many ways, the development is also an illusion. Conceived as an internalized world, with the majority of its narrow streets dead-ending into nowhere, the development is virtually cut off from the lifeblood of the surrounding city — the shops, streets, parks and freeways that weave the city into an urban whole. And its uniform rows of houses represent a vision of conformity that has little to do with urban life. Instead, it replaces one vision of social isolation with another.

In its broadest sense, that approach is part of the continued assault against cities as places of contact and friction, where life is embraced in its full range. By smoothing over differences, it seeks to make the city safe for returning suburbanites and tourists.

This is a fool’s game. The challenge in New Orleans is to piece together the fragments of a shattered culture.

Sadly, HUD’s plan manages to trivialize the past without engaging the painful realities that have shorn this city apart.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/weekinreview/19ouroussoff.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (photos here)

Posted by lois at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2006

CO: Ault Citizens Get Their Say on Prison

Ault citizens get their say on prison
Board requires voter OK; residents differ on facility's merit By John Ingold
Denver Post Staff Writer
11/16/2006

If a prison ever comes to Ault and provides what some local leaders hope is an economic boost, residents of the small northern Colorado town will have to approve it first.

Ault's town board passed an ordinance earlier this week requiring voter approval before the town board could give the OK for a prison. The board's decision came after 297 people - nearly half of Ault's registered voters - signed petitions demanding residents have direct a voice on the matter.

"We looked at this as an opportunity to listen to what the people were saying," said Ault Mayor Brad Bayne. "The amount of signatures spoke loudly to us."

Ault leaders first considered bringing a private prison to town around the beginning of the year. The prison would be run by the GEO Group Inc., a Florida-based prison operator.

Officials have said the prison could mean 350 new jobs and a $1 million a year investment in the local economy.

The new-found growth and prosperity of other northern Colorado towns has not found Ault. At 1,500 beds, the proposed prison would double Ault's population.

Bayne said discussions are still in the earliest stages. Any vote on the prison, he said, could be months away, if it comes at all.

"A lot of people in the city have the cart way in front of the horse," he said.

Nonetheless, a group of residents opposing the prison has gone door-to-door passing out fliers. In July, about 300 residents attended a town board meeting to debate the merits of a prison, forcing the board to move the meeting to a bigger facility.

Resident Larry Hosier said he worries a prison would ruin Ault's smalltown charm. Many residents moved to Ault for a quieter life away from bigger-city commotion, Hosier said. Boosting the economy is important, he said, but not at the expense of the town's character.

"You wave to your neighbors here," he said. "You put in a prison, you can't pick up hitchhikers. You're going to be on lockdown if there's an escape."

One study by the Washington, D.C.-based group, the Sentencing Project, which promotes reduced reliance on incarceration as a means of dealing with crime, has found that prisons located in rural areas generally have had little impact on the local economy.

But some in Ault believe a new prison would bring brighter days to the town.

"I think it's good for the community," said resident Barbara Emmert. "I'm not afraid of the prison."

Georglyn Diehl said she grew tired of the constant fliers from the group opposing the prison and said much of the information in them was inaccurate.

"I am not against the prison, if that's what the town board thinks we need," she said. "If it brings jobs to Ault, we need jobs."
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4674596

Posted by lois at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)

RI: Prisons Need $13 Million More This Year

The Associated Press
Administrator: prisons need $13M more this year

November 18, 2006. Boston Globe

CRANSTON, R.I. --As the state prison population hits historic highs, the corrections system needs $13 million more this year to pay for increased security and the basic needs of inmates, according to a top Adult Correctional Institutions administrator.

During the last four months, the inmate population has averaged 3,700, highest in the history of the ACI complex in Cranston, according to Ellen Evans Alexander, the ACI's assistant director of administration.

More inmates means increased demands for correctional officers, food, health care and other essential services, Alexander said.

"You have a population that is not incredibly patient," she told The Providence Journal. "Right now, we are holding our own, but we remain concerned."

The need for an extra $12.7 million for the Department of Corrections this fiscal year -- which ends June 30 -- was announced Thursday when state budget analysts revealed an overall $104.8 million budget deficit.

Prison officials had already been allocated $162 million for the fiscal year, an amount based on an average inmate population of 3,370. The daily average for November has been 3,768.

The reasons for the inmate increase are unclear.

Alexander said ACI statistics show a slight rise in the length of sentences imposed in state courts from 1998 to 2006, but nothing that accounts for the recent increase in inmates.

She said the increase can be partly explained by the arrests of ex-convicts who are on probation -- whom judges usually send back to prison for violating probation. About 40 percent of ACI inmates are probation violators and another 18 percent are awaiting court hearings for the violations, Alexander said.

Richard Ferruccio, president of the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Correctional Officers, said prison officials need the $13 million because of their own mismanagement, not the prisoner increase.

He said the ACI administration has wasted about $9 million on "expensive experimental programs," such as outside health care for inmates.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/rhode_island/articles/2006/11/18/administrator_prisons_need_13m_more_this_year/
Information from: The Providence Journal, http://www.projo.com/

Posted by lois at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

CA: Bold View On Health of People Who Are Incarcerated

"Something you must realize about money," he said, "is I do not need legislative appropriations to fund this. The power of the court includes calling the federal marshals, going to the controller or treasurer -- we've already worked out the arrangement -- and taking the money, seizing the money, through a writ of execution. And if we have to do that, we will."

sacbee.com - The online division of The Sacramento Bee

Bold vow on inmate health
By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 12:00 am PST Friday, November 17, 2006

California's prison health care czar used his first appearance in front of a governmental body Thursday to say there will be no fooling around when it comes to fixing what he termed a "horrid" system that is in "an utter state of disrepair."

Robert Sillen, the court-appointed prison health care receiver, said he's willing to back up the truck to raid the state treasury if need be, waive whatever civil service protections and state laws that get in his way and seek contempt-of-court citations against any state employee who tries to thwart his efforts to renovate California's $1.5 billion prison medical system.

"We're on our way," Sillen said, at the conclusion of his 1 1/2-hour testimony before the Little Hoover Commission. "We'll get medical care where medical care has to be, because I think we have the authority to do that over time. It's just a monstrous path to get there."

To illustrate the difficulties that Sillen said remain in his path, he recounted an inmate death that took place in August -- four months after he had been installed in his position by U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson -- in which a quadriplegic inmate died of heat exhaustion after being transported in the middle of the summer from a Central Valley prison to another institution near the Mexican border.

The van had no medical personnel on board, and its air conditioning unit broke down during the course of an 11-hour trip -- made longer by six hours when the driver got lost, according to corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton.

When the van arrived at the Centinela State Prison on Aug. 21 after driving from the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Kings County, the unidentified inmate had a body temperature of 109 degrees.

"That's the kind of thing I'm talking about," Sillen said. "There has to be a massive change of culture within the (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) in general and with medical care. Inmate patients have to be viewed as patients in addition to being inmates.

"Not everybody in prison is a pedophile or murderer or a rapist."

Thornton said the inmate died Sept. 5 and that the case is under internal investigation.

Altogether, Sillen said, some 65 inmates die needlessly in the prison system every year.

"Those are inmates who perished because of either lack of access to care or, more horrifically, access to care," Sillen said.

Oscar Hidalgo, the prison system's communications director, echoed Sillen's testimony in saying that the problems in California's correctional health care are decades in the making and "will take time to correct."

"The department continues to work hand in hand with the receiver in order to remedy all the problems in the medical system," Hidalgo said.

Sillen told the state government watchdog commission during Thursday's hearing on prison management that he won't be shy in exercising his receiver's authority, especially when it comes to making sure he has enough money to get the job done.

Sillen has told the state that he and the special master overseeing mental health services need six new medical facilities. He told reporters Thursday he wants them located on prison property in San Luis Obispo, San Diego, Lancaster, Sacramento, Stockton and Whittier.

Hidalgo said the department will work with Sillen on the budget request during the next fiscal year. The Schwarzenegger administration proposed financing two prisons last year with lease revenue bonds, but later said it was willing to build medical facilities instead of big new lockups. Sillen said the bond funding sounded prudent to him.

"I'm going to do it in any case," he said of the six facilities. "If you want me to just reach into your general fund for a billion or a billion two, that's fine with me."

Sillen said he is prepared to seek court authority to circumvent civil service rules, the State Personnel Board and union contracts to get rid of incompetent doctors who administrators have failed to successfully fire.

"People are being reinstated who never should be practicing," Sillen told reporters after his testimony. "I won't have it."

Gary Robinson, executive director of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, the union that represents prison doctors, said his members will appeal any attempt by Sillen to eliminate their employee rights.

"This is a kind of classic case that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court," Robinson said.

Sillen said it is not just incompetent doctors he has in his sights.

"Anybody in state employ is under threat of contempt of court for thwarting my efforts, impeding my efforts, getting in the way, slowing it down," he told the commission.

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

VA: Rural Prisons Therapeutic Effect on Prisoners says VA DOC

"And the rural setting seems to have a therapeutic effect on the offenders. As Kline said, "The only grass some of these guys have ever seen is what they've smoked." But at the detention center, they can work in the agribusiness program where they work with livestock and both organic and hydroponics greenhouses where they grow their own vegetables which reduces the cost of incarceration to the commonwealth."
Clark Times-Courier

Friday 17 November, 2006

Kline leads detention center near White Post
By: Scott Wallace
11/15/2006

Robert A. Kline is a man with a mission. And that mission is taking place in a bucolic rural setting not far from the village of White Post. The location of Kline's calling includes a facility surrounded by a tall fence topped with razor wire. Kline happens to be the superintendent of the White Post Detention Center, which opened in 1958 and is part of the Virginia Department of Corrections.

Virginia's DOC has four detention centers, three for adult males and one for adult females, and White Post is home to one of the male detention centers. Kline has been superintendent of the White Post Detention Center since 1996, but his career in corrections goes back 40 years to when he was a dispatcher for the Winchester City Police Department and its five-cell jail. He joined the Virginia DOC more than 31 years ago and has been with that department ever since.

Kline is blunt about the men in his care; he and his staff cannot "correct" his offenders. They have to want to change; it's their decision. Most of the offenders at the detention center are on intensive probation having been sentenced by a circuit court judge to prison and then having the prison sentence suspended pending successful completion of their program at White Post.

The 20-week program is rigorous. The first two weeks spent by an offender include a military-style environment emphasizing drill, strict hygienic practices and physical exertion. This program is not as physically intense as the DOC's boot camp program though, because older offenders are sent to the detention centers.

The offenders sentenced to the White Post Detention Center are, for the most part, men who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to non-violent crimes. And they must be physically and mentally able to work. Once in the program, they are provided with the tools needed to succeed upon release.

Superintendent Kline says the offenders get substance abuse counseling, cognitive restructuring, anger management and parenting classes, GED classes and life skills training such as interviewing for a job. Not all of the programming is done inside the detention center. Offenders also have the opportunity to leave the center for public works projects in the community under the supervision of correctional officers.

Kline's enthusiasm with community corrections comes from what he calls "evidence-based practices," a progressive plan that has been used in some European countries for the past 30 years. This means motivating the offender to want to change his ways, "to work on the offender's thinking as well as his behavior," Kline said.

An offender's behavior is not all that hard to change in a locked, secure environment, according to the superintendent. After all, if you're locked up, you're locked up. But changing a man's thinking to prepare him for release is not so simple. That's why Kline and his staff "uses what works" in motivating offenders to change their way of thinking prior to release.

When one deals with convicted criminals, there is no such thing as total success across the board. But Kline said that the recidivism rate for offenders in Virginia's community corrections program is about 30 percent statewide. That is about half the recidivism rate of parolees released from prison on the national level. And he said he was proud of the fact that White Post's offenders lead the commonwealth's detention centers in the completion of their GED program.

The White Post Detention Center has a rated capacity of 104 beds, and the superintendent said that, unlike many prisons, that capacity is not exceeded. He said that the average offender population at White Post is 90-95 at any given time. When asked about problems with violence, Kline said the occasional fistfight between offenders does occur, but not assaults on staff, and inmate-on-inmate violence is infrequent.

The DOC's detention centers are a necessary component in the supervision of probationers who are simply not ready to be on the street. The security of the community, after all, is the commonwealth's highest priority. But the use of evidence-based practices that have worked in the past also is a "high priority" in the detention centers, Kline said.

Kline said his staff has worked very hard in using these practices, even though Virginia's correctional officers were not originally trained in this vein. In fact, he says his C.O.s have really taken to this process of working with the offenders in their charge. And the rural setting seems to have a therapeutic effect on the offenders.

As Kline said, "The only grass some of these guys have ever seen is what they've smoked." But at the detention center, they can work in the agribusiness program where they work with livestock and both organic and hydroponics greenhouses where they grow their own vegetables which reduces the cost of incarceration to the commonwealth.

It should come as no surprise then to note that Ray of Hope Lane leading to the White Post Detention Center was named by Kline himself. That is the outlook he has for providing the programming to the offenders in his charge.
http://www.timescommunity.com/site/tab3.cfm?newsid=17472011&BRD=2553&PAG=461
&dept_id=506078&rfi=6

Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

Queens NY: As Protests Persist, Prison Remains

11/16/2006, Queens Chronicle
As Protests Persist, Prison Remains
by Sitara Nieves , Chronicle Correspondent

(Sitara Nieves) Councilman James Sanders (D Laurelton), right, continues to lead periodic protests against the federal prison in Springfield Gardens. State Sen. Malcolm Smith (D St. Albans), left, attended last weekend’s rally.
With cries of “Educate, don’t incarcerate,” dozens of Springfield Gardens residents marched from Springfield Park to the Queens Private Correctional Facility on Saturday, calling for the prison to be shut down.

Protesters, led by Councilman James Sanders (D Laurelton), have repeatedly marched the same route to the small, windowless prison at 182 22 150th Ave. for almost a year. The prison is run by Boca Raton, Fla. based GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut), which is the second largest private prison corporation in the world.
Along the way in this extended battle over the prison, accusations have flown back and forth about the main parties involved: GEO Group, Sanders, Congressman Gregory Meeks (D St. Albans), and even the neighbors who participate in the periodic rallies.
Sanders, who, as a city legislator would have little sway over the prison’s federal contract, has been repeatedly accused of organizing the rallies as a means of pursuing Meeks’ congressional seat.
“It’s the same people who come every time,” said GEO spokesman Martin McLaughlin, who described the rallies as politically motivated and stale. “This is not a new thing. As long as you papers keep covering Sanders, he’ll keep going out and protesting. He’ll keep having a good time getting in the paper.”
Sanders bristled at the accusations, describing his involvement as one of moral and community obligation. “How long are they going to run around with that one?” he asked of GEO. “They accused me of running for office last year. Well, November has come and gone, but they’re still saying the same thing.”
Sanders added: “I refuse to believe that people can’t do things without having ulterior motives. We can do things just because they’re right.”
Sanders said the protests were targeted mainly at the federal government, and that frequent protests were necessary to ensure that both GEO and the U.S. Marshals Service—which holds the contract—know that the community continues to be dissatisfied. He added that the fact that GEO was not able to expand the prison last April showed that mobilizations were effective.
Meeks, who as the congressman representing the area is in the best position to negotiate with GEO and the marshals about the contract, has also come under fire. “This is my sixth march, and I haven’t seen (Meeks), he hasn’t been to any of these,” said resident Joann McCants, flanked by her four children. “He should be here.”
Meeks’ spokesman Brian Simon said that the congressman’s schedule was too full to attend the protests, but emphasized that the rallies are important. “It really strengthens the congressman’s voice when the rallies continue,” he said.
Simon also strongly denied allegations that Meeks was not working hard enough to shut down the prison after receiving a $1,000 campaign contribution from GEO last year. “That was an unsolicited contribution to the congressman,” Simon said. “That has not influenced the congressman’s position on this issue … he’s still against the prison, and he has never wavered from his position (against GEO): ‘I don’t want you here.’”
GEO and its predecessor company have operated the prison in Springfield Gardens since 1997. It previously held immigrants awaiting deportation, but now holds up to 216 federal prisoners awaiting trials or transfers.
The company’s contract expires at the end of June, and protesters want to make sure that the contract isn’t renewed. Opponents worry that the prison is decreasing their property values, that it is unsafe, that the neighborhood needs schools far more than a prison, and that GEO is a poor community partner.
“That company has not done one thing to contribute or reach out to the community,” said Barbara Brown, who chairs the Eastern Queens Alliance and has been working with Meeks to stop the prison. “GEO is making money off the misfortunes of other people.”
GEO maintains that it contributes to the neighborhood’s vitality. “We spend a lot of money in this community,” said McLaughlin, noting that the prison has an annual payroll of $6.5 million, and has hired 35 percent of its employees from Southeast Queens. “We hire from the area. We make a big contribution to the community.”
Brown disagreed, as did many at Saturday’s protest.. “Don’t dangle jobs in front of me to say that’s why you should be here,” Brown said. “This area is a middle class community where most people are already gainfully employed.”
Some residents fear that GEO will use the time before its contract expires to influence government officials to let them stay and expand. “They want to make this whole area around here into a prison complex,” charged former Assembly candidate Michael Duvalle, angrily pointing to GEO’s recent purchase. “And people are going to start moving away from here.”
Despite McLaughlin’s charge that the rallies were stale, it did not seem that way to the 40 participants in Saturday’s defiant and hopeful rally.
Chanting “GEO must go!” as they walked back to their cars, neighbors vowed to continue marching every few weeks until the prison is removed from the barren stretch of 150th Avenue, only a few blocks from Springfield Gardens’ bustling park and tidy homes.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17475312&BRD=2731&PAG=461&dept_id=

Posted by lois at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2006

FL Officials Clash of Mentally Ill People in Florida jails

New York Times
Officials Clash Over Mentally Ill in Florida Jails

By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: November 15, 2006

MIAMI, Nov. 14 ‹ For years, circuit judges here have ordered state officials to obey Florida law and promptly transfer severely mentally ill inmates from jails to state hospitals. But with few hospital beds available, Gov. Jeb Bush¹s administration began flouting those court orders in August.

Now, in a growing standoff between the government of Florida and its judges, the state is being threatened with steep daily fines if it does not comply. And at least one judge has raised the possibility that the secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families could go to jail for contempt of court.

³This type of arrogant activity cannot be tolerated in an orderly society,² Judge Crockett Farnell of Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court wrote in an Oct. 11 ruling.

State law requires that inmates found incompetent to stand trial be moved from county jails to psychiatric hospitals within 15 days of the state¹s receiving the commitment orders. Florida has broken that law for years, provoking some public defenders to seek court orders forcing swift compliance.

With the state now rebuffing even those orders, a rising number of mentally ill inmates, now more than 300, have been left without treatment in crowded jails because the state¹s 1,416 psychiatric beds are full.

Two mentally ill inmates in the Escambia County Jail in Pensacola died over the last year and a half after being subdued by guards, according to news reports. And in the Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, a schizophrenic inmate gouged out his eye after waiting weeks for a hospital bed, his lawyer said.

Public defenders in Miami-Dade County describe psychotic clients who have hallucinated, mutilated themselves and attempted suicide while awaiting transfer to hospitals. The state says that shortages of beds and financing have made compliance impossible, and that court orders forcing the transfer of certain inmates are unfair to those who have waited longer.

Most judges have responded skeptically, asking why the Department of Children and Families has not sought more state money as the number of committed inmates has soared. The agency cut its budget by $53 million this year, which public defenders say makes no sense given the inmate crisis and the state¹s $8 billion budget surplus.

In one of the toughest rulings to date on the subject, Judge Farnell said last month that he would start fining the department $1,000 a day for each mentally ill inmate who stayed in the Pinellas County Jail longer than 15 days. The judge, based in Clearwater, expressed outrage about the agency¹s ³conscious decision² to ignore court orders.

Judges in Broward, Hillsborough and Miami-Dade Counties are also weighing motions to force the department to comply with the law or to hold it in contempt for letting the mentally ill pile up in unsuitable jails. The department appealed after three state judges in Miami ordered it to take custody of several inmates last month, but a panel of the Third District Court of Appeal indicated last week that it might rule against the department and its secretary, Lucy D. Hadi.

³It strikes me that ultimately you¹ve got contempt issues,² Judge Frank A. Shepherd said during oral arguments, ³and Ms. Hadi may be going to jail.²

The problem is not unique to Florida, although it is especially severe in Miami-Dade County, which has one of the nation¹s largest percentages of mentally ill residents, according to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, an advocacy group.

A Justice Department study released in September found that 64 percent of inmates in county jails around the nation reported mental health problems within the last year. Many are arrested for petty crimes, advocates say, yet remain in jail an inordinately long time because there is nowhere else for them to go.

Only 40,000 beds remain in state psychiatric hospitals around the nation, down from 69,000 in 1995. Advocates for the mentally ill say that community-based treatment programs, which were supposed to replace psychiatric hospitals after the deinstitutionalization movement of the ¹60s and ¹70s, have not begun to make up for the loss.

Long waits for beds are especially common in the nation¹s urban areas. Last week, 307 mentally ill inmates were waiting for one of Florida¹s 1,416 psychiatric beds, and 72 percent had waited longer than 15 days. The state has three psychiatric hospitals with secure beds.

³This is a national problem, and it¹s a direct reflection of the lack of adequate beds and coordination between the criminal justice and mental health systems,² said Ronald S. Honberg, legal director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

In Miami, an average of 25 to 40 acutely psychotic people live in a unit of the main county jail that a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, Jennifer Daskal, described as squalid after visiting last month. Seventeen such inmates are currently waiting for state hospital beds, said Valerie Jonas, a county public defender, adding that the number has been as high as 30 in recent weeks.

Ms. Daskal said that some of the unit¹s 14 ³suicide cells² ‹ dim, bare and designed for one inmate ‹ were holding two or three at a time, and that the inmates were kept in their cells 24 hours a day except to shower. None of the mentally ill inmates receive group or individual therapy, she said in an affidavit.

Officials with the Department of Children and Families have argued that the agency cannot be held in contempt when it simply has no more beds, and that it could not have anticipated this year¹s sharp rise in commitments. In June 2005, they said, only 125 inmates were waiting for hospital beds, of which 38 percent had waited longer than 15 days.

³We are at the moment on a daily basis trying to find a short-term solution to the bed shortage,² said Al Zimmerman, a spokesman for the department. ³We are trying to find ways to pay for additional space, pay for additional beds.²

The department requested and received money for about two dozen new secure beds this year, and it has asked for 38 next year. Each bed costs $100,000 a year, Mr. Zimmerman said.

Ms. Jonas, the public defender, said it was unconscionable that the department would not ask for more. ³Given they¹ve got a wait list of over 300 and they¹re running all over the state claiming inability to comply,² she said, ³where do they get off requesting only 38 new beds?²

Yet Mr. Honberg said that putting more mentally ill inmates in state hospitals should not be the ultimate goal. The treatment they get there often skims the surface, he said, and many end up deteriorating when they return to jail, only to end up on the wait list for a hospital bed again.

³You have large numbers of people sent to state hospitals not for therapeutic purposes, but for purposes of making them competent to proceed to trial,² Mr. Honberg said. ³We¹re not going to solve these problems until we invest adequate resources into services that work for people before they get to jail.²

Posted by lois at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Prisoners Sue to Limit State Prison Populations

Inmates sue to limit state prison populations
A federal cap would ease the violence and health issues linked to crowding, lawyers say.
By Jenifer Warren
Times Staff Writer

November 14, 2006

SACRAMENTO - Five weeks after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in California's jampacked prison system, inmates went to court Monday to limit new admissions until the population declines.

In legal papers filed in Sacramento and San Francisco, lawyers for the convicts said only a population cap imposed by a federal court would remedy prison conditions that amount to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the symptoms revealing a prison system in distress, the lawyers said, are a "skyrocketing" number of inmates seeking treatment for mental disorders and an inmate suicide rate that is twice the national average, with 37 convicts taking their lives behind bars this year."

"Court intervention is necessary because this state has simply been unable to take any meaningful action to resolve the prison overcrowding crisis," said Donald Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, which filed one of the motions.

The Legislature's failure to act during a recent special session on prison crowding, Specter added, was final proof of government's refusal to address a teeming, violent system packed to twice its intended capacity.

Attorneys said that for now, they are not pushing for a court-ordered release of inmates to thin the population. Instead, they suggest diverting certain low-risk convicts, especially parole violators, away from prison and sanctioning them in the community.

Nearly 21,000 parole violators are in state lockups, serving terms rarely lasting more than six months. Many, Specter argued, are imprisoned on relatively minor violations and could be punished through home detention or electronic monitoring or sent to residential drug treatment programs.

The legal action follows Schwarzenegger's declaration that conditions in California's $8.6-billion correctional system have created a health risk and "extreme peril" for officers and inmates.

Crowding is so severe, the governor said, that it has overwhelmed water, sewer and electrical systems at some prisons and fueled hundreds of riots, melees and smaller disturbances in the last year.

Schwarzenegger issued his emergency decree in part to give him legal authority to ship thousands of inmates to prisons in other states. That process began earlier this month, when 80 inmates were flown to a private facility in Tennessee.

Contracts to house 2,200 more convicts in other states have been signed, and corrections officials are canvassing the population for more volunteers. If they do not reach their target of 5,000 felons who volunteer to be transferred, officials said, the moves would become mandatory.

Bill Sessa, spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, acknowledged Monday that overcrowding is a problem but said prison leaders are addressing it. Sessa said officials would return to the Legislature in January with plans to add beds at existing prisons, build community reentry facilities and take other measures to create space.

Sessa expressed skepticism about any proposal to divert parole violators away from prison to cut the incoming population: "These people don't go back to prison for a trivial reason, contrary to popular myth," he said.

The legal motions were filed Monday before two federal judges handling ongoing class-action lawsuits over prison medical care and mental health treatment. The motions ask that a three-judge panel be convened to weigh the proposed population cap, a step mandated under the Prison Litigation Reform Act passed by Congress in 1995.

Although county jails have often been subject to court-imposed caps, it is rare for an entire prison system to be subject to such a limit, experts said. The legal papers suggest the population should range from 111,300 to 138,000. It numbers 173,000.

"Ideally, you want to see the executive branch bring this under control on their own steam," said Michael Jacobson, author of the book "Downsizing Prisons" and the former commissioner of corrections and probation in New York City. "But this could be a catalyst to spur California to undertake some serious, systemic reform, which it clearly needs to do."

Lawyers seeking the action say the governor's declaration of an emergency lays out a solid foundation for a population cap.

They also note that the federal receiver appointed this year to take over the disgraced prison healthcare system, Robert Sillen, has said overcrowding may make his court-ordered task of improving medical care to constitutional standards impossible. That statement could further influence judges evaluating the request, the lawyers said.

Over the last 25 years, the California prison population has grown by more than 500% and the system has expanded from 12 penitentiaries to 33. Projections show that 23,000 more convicts will be added within five years, bringing the incarcerated total to 193,000. More than 15,000 inmates are housed in areas not designed as sleeping quarters, including hallways and gymnasiums. About 1,500 are sleeping in triple-decker bunks.

In their legal papers, lawyers said the crowding has caused many prisons to operate on continual "lockdown" status, meaning that a "shockingly high" percentage of inmates are confined to their cells around the clock. While on lockdown, prisoners do not receive therapy, recreation time, educational programs or other services and are released only for an occasional shower.

Concerns about crowding are not limited to California and are not new. In 2004, an independent review panel appointed by Schwarzenegger and led by former Gov. George Deukmejian concluded that crowding was at the root of the system's myriad problems.

"The key to reforming the system," the commission wrote, "lies in reducing the numbers."

Since then, the population has increased by nearly 10,000 prisoners. And new laws toughening criminal penalties - including Proposition 83, which passed last week and lengthens prison terms for sex offenders - will intensify the growth.

On Monday, a second lawsuit was filed to block enforcement of Proposition 83. Filed in federal court in Los Angeles by a sex offender on parole, the suit says the measure is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy because it requires ex-offenders to undergo electronic monitoring for life.

Forcing sex offenders to wear tracking bracelets on their ankles equates to "a badge of shame, a scarlet letter, that guarantees a life as a pariah," said the lawsuit, filed anonymously to protect the plaintiff's safety.

A separate suit, filed last week in San Francisco, has temporarily blocked enforcement of another provision of the initiative that bans ex-offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park. A federal court hearing on that suit is scheduled for the end of the month.

jenifer.warren@latimes.com

*************

sacbee.com - The online division of The Sacramento Bee

This story is taken from Sacbee / Politics.
State inmate limit sought
Prisoner rights lawyers ask U.S. judges to reduce overcrowding.
By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 12:00 am PST Tuesday, November 14, 2006

With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature coming up empty on relieving prison overcrowding, inmate rights lawyers Monday petitioned federal courts in Sacramento and San Francisco to impose a population cap as the fastest and surest way to stem the system's burgeoning crisis.

The attorneys insisted that their motion for the population limit, if it is approved, would not amount to an early release program. But a spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation characterized it as such and said the prison agency will contest the action.

Coming in the middle of a program to ship inmates to private, out-of-state prisons, the attorneys said the legal actions amounted to a last resort on their part to force the state to comply with a federal court order to fix medical care in California's 33 prisons and to meet its mandate in another class- action case to better treat and classify mentally ill inmates.

The only way to get right with the courts on mental health and medical care, the lawyers said in interviews and in court papers, is to reduce the prison population.

"My clients are suffering and dying under these conditions," said Michael Bien, the plaintiffs' lawyer in the mental health suit. "We can't wait any longer." His motion said 37 inmates committed suicide in California prisons this year.

Corrections spokesman Bill Sessa said that problems in mental health and medical delivery in the prisons go way beyond population. He acknowledged, however, that prison overcrowding "has a number of detrimental consequences" and "that's why we've been taking so many steps to relieve it," including the out-of-state transfer program in which 80 inmates have already been shipped to Tennessee. The state is seeking more than 2,200 such transfers, with the next ones scheduled to take place as soon as next week.

One thing the administration is not interested in is lawsuits that propose population caps, and Sessa said he fully expects the state's attorneys to contest the motions sought by the inmate rights lawyers.

"I'm sure we will," Sessa said. "We've never endorsed the early release of criminals."

The motions filed in the courtrooms of U.S. District Judges Lawrence Karlton in Sacramento and Thelton Henderson in San Francisco are asking for the appointment of a three-judge panel that would take up the issue of the population cap under the federal Prison Litigation and Reform Act. The motions are expected to be heard on Dec. 11.

Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, called the population cap a "temporary emergency measure." He said the most likely reduction strategy would focus on cutting down the number of technical parole violators being reincarcerated. Increasing good behavior credits and shortening prison terms by a month on the least serious offenders scheduled for release are other potential means for the state to get under a cap, he said.

"Until such time that we roll up our sleeves and reform the parole and sentencing systems, this might return a modicum of safety to prisons and the people who have to work in them," said Krisberg, a court-appointed expert on correctional issues who has studied population caps.

Schwarzenegger sought to propel prison overcrowding to the top of the Legislature's agenda over the summer when he called for a special session to tackle the issue. But his proposals to stem the problem -- including more prison construction -- were first heavily modified and then outright rejected.

The governor then issued a proclamation declaring a prison overcrowding emergency on Oct. 4, saying there were 4,313 inmate assaults and batteries in the prisons last year, including 1,671 on the staff. The proclamation set the table for his out-of-state transfer plan.

In their papers filed Monday, the plaintiffs' lawyers did not spell out a firm population cap figure. California's prison population, stood at 173,462 as of midnight Nov. 1 -- and, since Oct. 25, has officially exceeded 200 percent of capacity in the 33 institutions.

One of their motions, however, quoted from a 2004 report issued by the Schwarzenegger- appointed California Independent Review Panel that said the "maximum safe and reasonable capacity" for male prisoners in the state is 137,764.

With 161,652 men in the system as of Nov. 1, the panel's figures would appear to suggest a reduction of about 24,000 male inmates is in order.

But Donald Specter, the head of the Prison Law Office, which filed the suit that led to the appointment last year of a receiver to oversee the prison health care system, said the motions are not designed to act as an early- release mechanism.

"The main culprit in the equation is the parole violators," Specter said. "That's the thing you could do the quickest, safest and easiest, without even a change of law."

Monday's filings gained support from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, whose vice president, Chuck Alexander, said "we can't get the mission accomplished" with the current population and that the plaintiffs' actions would mean "relief for my members."

State Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a longtime legislative prison oversight specialist, said the population cap "affords us an immediate and real opportunity to evaluate who belongs in the prison system and to jump-start parole reform."

Posted by lois at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Federal Judge Orders State Prisons to Reform Mental Health Care

Detroit Free Press
Judge orders state prisons to clean up act
He says system has failed inmates
November 13, 2006

By DAVID ASHENFELTER

A federal judge on Monday ordered sweeping mental health care reforms for Michigan's prisons in Jackson to prevent the mistreatment and death of inmates.

U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen suggested a prayer be said for those who have already died in custody.

"Any earthly help comes far too late for them," he said in a scathing opinion in that he chastised health-care providers in the prison for collecting their pay while ignoring the needs of those in their care.

"Here is the basic message: You are valuable providers of life-saving services and medicines. You are not coat racks who collect government paychecks while your work is taken to the sexton for burial," he wrote.

Coming after a series of articles in the Free Press that examined the worsening state of care in Michigan's prisons, including the death of a mentally ill 21-year-old who had been left strapped naked to a concrete table for most of four days before he died, Enslen banned the use of non-medical punishment restraints in the prison complex in Jackson. The American Civil Liberties Union said it was the first time a judge anywhere in the nation had banned such restraints.

Enslen also ordered state prison officials to develop a staffing plan to ensure there are enough psychiatrists and psychologists to care for prisoners with mental problems at the four Jackson prisons. From his Kalamazoo court, Enslen said psychiatrists and psychologists must begin to make daily rounds to ensure that prisoners are adequately cared for.

Enslen also ordered corrections officials to develop a plan to improve coordination between mental health and medical staff at the prisons. Referring to Timothy Joe Souders, the 21-year-old who died in August in a segregated prison cell in Jackson as "T.S.", the judge wrote: "God bless T.S. and the others. There (sic) lives were short, but their legacies may be long."

Enslen is enforcing federal oversight of the Jackson facilities established under the Hadix case, a class-action, civil rights lawsuit brought by prisoners in 1980 to correct conditions that ultimately led to prison disturbances. It is named after one of the plaintiffs, Everett Hadix. "This is an extraordinarily important decision," Elizabeth Alexander, of the ACLU National Prison Project, said of Enslen's 39-page opinion. She is one of three lawyers who represented prisoners in the long-running lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Corrections for allegedly abusing prisoners constitutional rights.

Corrections spokesman Leo Lalonde said the department would defer comment until officials have had a chance to review Enslen's decision. If the ruling stands, changes will be made at other state prisons, said Patricia Streeter, an Ann Arbor lawyer who also represents prisoners in the case.

Free Press Editorial Writer Jeff Gerritt examined the worsening state of health care in Michigan's nearly 50 prisons for months, including the death of Souders and the case of Lloyd Byron Martell, whose cancerous polyp had gone untreated, who was sent home to die at age 41.

Medical and mental health care in prisons costs taxpayers $280 million a year, but misdiagnoses, delayed treatment and a host of other problems plague the system, in some cases turning prison stays into death sentences, Gerritt's reporting showed.

In an Oct. 26 column, Gerritt revealed that prison employees and inmates who use the health care system won't speak freely to investigators, fearing retaliation.

"If someone in the bureaucracy, including CMS (Correctional Medical Services, the for-profit contractor that provides health care to inmates), is stopping you from providing necessary services in a timely way, or stopping the patient from obtaining necessary specialist care of medicine, you should pester the malefactors until they respond and the services are provided," Enslen wrote.

"If they still won't relent, you are to relay their names, including correct spellings and addresses at which they may be arrested, to the medical monitor so those persons may be held in contempt and jailed, if necessary. "The days of dead wood in the Department of Corrections are over, as are the days of CMS intentionally delaying referrals and care for craven profit motives."

Since the Free Press series began, Gov. Jennifer Granholm has ordered an independent review and pledged to fix problems in the prison health system; the Department of Corrections has revised its four-point restraint system; and legislators have talked about reviving the Prison Ombudsman's Office to give prisoners someone to hear their complaints.

Contact DAVID ASHENFELTER at 313-223-4490 or ashenf@freepress.com.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200661113045

Posted by lois at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Prisons Make Unhealthy Cuts in Hepatitis Testing

JEFF GERRITT: Prisons make unhealthy cuts on hepatitis testing November 13, 2006 Randy Rodgers

Free Press editorial writer and columnist Jeff Gerritt has been examining the worsening state of health care in Michigan's nearly 50 prisons for months. Medical and mental health care in prisons costs taxpayers $280 million a year, but misdiagnoses, delayed treatment and a host of other problems plague the system, in some cases turning prison stays into death sentences.

Depending whether you believe the state or outside experts, Michigan prisons hold 7,000 to 18,000 inmates infected with hepatitis C. That's 14-40% -- and most of them don't even know they have the disease.

Contagious and potentially fatal, hepatitis C attacks the liver. The prison epidemic affects everyone. Practically all of those infected -- more than 95% -- will go home, carrying their infections and health problems with them, and in some cases spreading them. As a public health problem, the level of hepatitis C in the prison system demands the attention of not only the Department of Corrections but also the Department of Community Health and the Legislature.

Lawmakers, however, have made a bad problem even worse. They cut most of the $5.9 million that Gov. Jennifer Granholm requested in 2004 to test and treat hepatitis C in prisons, and this year whacked the funding altogether. By not routinely testing for hepatitis C, the state is failing to meet U.S. Centers for Disease Control guidelines.

"They don't test regularly enough to find people before they have a permanently damaged liver," said David Santacroce, a University of Michigan law professor who filed a class action suit in 2003 on behalf of infected inmates. "We're seeing more and more cases of people who are too sick to be treated, and they're going to die.

"It's a death sentence."

Up to 40% of the nation's prisoners have hepatitis C, compared to 2% of the general population. The infection is spread through blood, and can be passed by needles shared to inject drugs or in tattooing, through unprotected sex and, before blood screenings began in 1992, by transfusions.

Truth be told, prison administrators don't want to know everyone who has hepatitis C, because that would pressure them to treat more inmates. Drug therapies with interferon and ribavirin cost more than $10,000 for each patient, though not every infected prisoner needs them. Still, the number of inmates getting drug therapies in Michigan prisons is ridiculously low -- only 125 inmates enrolled this year. Hundreds, possibly thousands, more need it. Left untreated, the only option is a liver transplant, which costs about $250,000 and is not done in Michigan prisons.

Prison officials say they treat everyone identified as needing it. The department regularly evaluates 2,500 inmates known to have hepatitis C, said spokesman Russ Marlan. Still, medical records and lawsuits show dozens of cases where inmates were denied testing or treatment or not even notified that they had the disease.

In one case handled by Santacroce, inmate Jeffrey Muller, now dead, was taken off a liver transplant list in 2001, after he supposedly tested positive for marijuana. But law students tracked down Muller's urine sample and, using DNA, found that the sample was not Muller's.

Inmate Lionel Stewart, 54, serving 35-75 years for armed robbery, is another example of the oke-doke inmates say they get when trying to get treated. A college graduate, Stewart never made it to law school because he got hooked on heroin and robbed to feed his habit. He's up for parole in two years.

Stewart said that his levels of ALT -- an enzyme produced in higher amounts when the liver is inflamed -- were high enough early this year to qualify for drug therapies, but then the department stopped testing him. Another prison doctor, he said, is trying to get him in treatment.

"She said that, if I don't get it, I'll die," Stewart told me last week in the visiting room of Deerfield Correctional Facility in Ionia.

Another Ionia inmate, Randy Rodgers, 46, who's serving 7 to 20 years for home invasion and breaking and entering, said doctors predict he will die in two years from hepatitis C, which he may have contracted from injecting drugs or tattooing more than 20 years ago. Rodgers has been in and out of jail and prison six times, all for nonviolent offenses related to alcohol and drug abuse.

Rodgers has undergone two unsuccessful treatments in Michigan prisons for hepatitis C and wants to try a low-dosage drug therapy, but he said prison administrators wouldn't permit it.

"I've got nothing to lose," Rodgers said. "If I die, I die."

Rodgers is also trying to get a medical parole and ought to get it, especially considering his nonviolent record.

No doubt, prison medical administrators have a tough job, trying to contain an epidemic without enough money. Still, Michigan's prison system should at least routinely test all high-risk inmates, especially injection drug users, and treat those with life-threatening symptoms. Blood tests for hepatitis C cost only $35.

"Thousands of people in prisons are left to die without treatment," said Dr. Bennett Cecil of Louisville, Ky., a national expert on hepatitis C in prisons. "Cirrhosis of the liver is just as deadly as breast cancer, and we don't say we're not going to pay for that."

The prison system could be the spot where the state starts to get a handle on hepatitis C by testing and treating inmates before they get out and return to their communities. But that's not going to happen with policies that are more focused on hiding than healing.

JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.

Copyright C 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc. /www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061113/OPINION01/611130305/1068/
opinion

Posted by lois at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2006

“Let’s be realistic; let’s do the impossible.” Che Guevara

Great quote....an even better idea.

Posted by lois at 10:46 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Prisons make unhealthy cuts on hepatitis testing

JEFF GERRITT: Prisons make unhealthy cuts on hepatitis testing
November 13, 2006
Randy Rodgers, Detroit Free Press

"It's a death sentence."

"She said that, if I don't get it, I'll die," Stewart told me last week in the visiting room of Deerfield Correctional Facility in Ionia.

Rodgers has undergone two unsuccessful treatments in Michigan prisons for hepatitis C and wants to try a low-dosage drug therapy, but he said prison administrators wouldn't permit it.

"I've got nothing to lose," Rodgers said. "If I die, I die."

Rodgers is also trying to get a medical parole and ought to get it, especially considering his nonviolent record.

JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.

Posted by lois at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

SB 105 Bill in VAand other upcoming legislation

SB 105 BILL
GOOD CONDUCT, MANDATORY LITERACY
VIRGINIA LITERACY EDUCATION REHABILITATION ACT
(VaLERA) - (50%/65%)
Henry L. Marsh, Patron
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
422 East Franklin Street, Suite 201
Richmond, VA 23219
(804) 648- 9073

Please support RIHD, Inc. and it's mission for public safety in all communities; an "earned" second chance (prisoner rehabilitation and prisoner reentry programs) for prisoners & their families, through smart & responsible legislation.
We call upon everyone receiving this email to contact the above and below listed Legislators on the Committee of Rehabilitation and Social Service (email, call, write, fax) requesting the following three (3) Bills are voted, passed into law during the upcoming 2007 Virginia General Assembly Session. You donot have to reside in the State of Virginia to write, email, fax or call. If you know or have an incarcerated love in the VDOC, then your voice & concerns count!!!

RIHD, Inc. Bills of Interest
1. SB 105 Good Conduct, Mandatory Literacy Bill aka Virginia Literacy, Education & Rehabilitation Act (VaLERA), the education and rehabilitation bill for Virginia state prisoner under the non-parole sentencing law who seek an "earned" second chance in society.

2. SB 249 Parole Board Guideline Bill for the over 9,000 Virginia prisoners eligible for parole (old law) and no longer a threat to society.

3. 618 Child Friendly Visitation Bill for Virginia prisoners and their families.

RIHD, Inc. will be holding a Planning for 2007 Virginia General Assembly Think Tank Meeting. Please come out and lend your voice to help heal all communities. SB105 Good Conduct, Mandatory Literacy Bill (VaLERA) offering education and rehabililtation for prisoners from day one of incarceration is in serious trouble of failing or being passed with discriminations to exclude your incarcerated love one from returning back into our communities as productive citizens. SB 105 isn't the solution, however it is the start towards resolution.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 & November 30, 2006
5PM to 7PM
Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church
1720 Mechanicsville Turpike
Richmond, VA 23223
I-64 Mechanicsville Turnpike West Exit

In addition take the below information and walk the walk. Please ensure that every incarcerated person you know receive this information as well. Reminder: VA prisoners can only receive 4 pages to an envelope with one stamp only, so it may require 2 envelope. Prisoners it is your duty to help yourself, by sharing this information with every prisoner and your families.

Listed below are the following:
1. Senate Committee on Rehabilitation and Social Service
2. Virginia General Assembly How to Become Involve List
3. A Sample Letter to assist writing the Legislators.
(feel free to write one letter and email to all the legislators)
Sincerely,
Lillie (Ms. K) Branch-Kennedy
RIHD, Inc.
Web Site: www.rihd.org
(804) 562-2123

VIRGINIA COMMITTEE REHABILITATION AND SOCIAL SERVICE
Hanger (Chair); Miller; Marsh; Lucas; Williams; Ticer; Puller; Wagner;
Cuccinelli; O'Brien; Deeds; Devolites Davis; Locke; McDougle; and Herring.

Senator Emmett Hanger, Chairman
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
P.O. Box 396
Richmond, VA 23218
Email: district24@sov.state.va.us
Legislative Assistant: Holly Herman
Phone: (804) 698-7524 Fax: (804) 698-7651
Constituent Hotline: 800- 889-0229

Senator Yvonne B. Miller
Rehabiltation & Social Service Committee
555 Fenchurch Street Sutie 403
Norfolk, VA 23510
(757) 627-4212

Senator Henry L. Marsh, III
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
422 East Franklin Street, Suite 201
Richmond, VA 23219
(804) 648- 9073

Senator Louise L. Lucas
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 700
Portsmouth, VA 23705
(757) 397-8209

Senator Marty E. Williams
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 1096
Newport News, VA 23601
(757) 599-8683

Senator Patricia Smith Ticer
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
City Hall, 301 King Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
(703) 549-5770

Senator Linda T. Toddy Puller
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 73
Mount Vernon, VA 22121
(703) 765-1150

Senator Frank W. Wagner
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 68008
Virginia Beach, VA 23471
(757) 671-2250

Senator Kenneth Ken Thomas Cucciinelli
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 606
Centreville, VA 20122
(703) 766-0635

Senator Jeannemarie A. Devolites
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 936
Vienna, VA 22183
(703) 938-7972

Senator Robert Creigh Deeds
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 5462
Charlottesville, VA 22905
(434) 296-5491

Senator Mark Herring
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
1 West Market Street
Leesburg, VA 20176
(703) 669-9090

Senator Mamie E. Locke
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 3006
Hampton, VA 23663
(757) 825-5880

Senator Ryan McDoughle
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 187
Mechanicsville, VA 23111
(804) 730-1026

Senator Jay O'Brien
Rehabilitation & Social Service Committee
PO Box 5
Clifton, VA 20124
(703) 750-0936

HOW TO HELP AND GET INVOLVED
Get Involved!
Find out who your representatives are and what they stand for, read the newspaper, volunteer in your community, be aware of issues and how they affect you; realize that you can initiate change and remember that every vote counts. Your vote and your voice can always make a difference! Send thank you support to Senator Henry Marsh for all the work he has and continues to do to bring about truth in public safety! Without him, there would be no Bill.

By Web
The Virginia General Assembly website, which you are currently on, contains a wealth of information. To learn who represents your district, visit our Who's My Legislator site. For additional information on the members, visit the House of Delegates and the Senate of Virginia membership pages.

Committee(s) for Prison, Prisoner & Ex-offenders Affairs:
Senate: Committee on Rehabilitation & Social Service
Delegate: Police, Militia, Public Safety
Contact Each and Every Legislator on these two (2) committees

By Phone
When the General Assembly is in session, the House of Delegates and Senate of Virginia jointly operate a toll-free, intrastate telephone message center to accept calls from citizens of the Commonwealth wishing to express an opinion on legislation. The messages are received by the center and will be relayed to the members' offices as requested. You may call the Constituent Viewpoint operators at (800) 889-0229 (outside Richmond) or 698-1990 (Richmond area) to express your opinion on a legislative issue.

When the General Assembly is not in session, you may call (804) 698-1500 for the House of Delegates Legislative Information Office and (804) 698-7410 for the Senate Legislative Information Office.
By Mail
During the General Assembly session, Delegates and Senators can be reached at their offices in the General Assembly Building in Richmond. When the General Assembly is not in session, Delegates and Senators can be reached at their district offices.

SAMPLE LETTER
Below is a sample letter that may be used to share your opinion with your legislators.

Mrs. Terry Smith
100 Main Street
Anytown, VA 23222

January 1, 2002

Dear Senator or Mr. or Mrs. (for Delegate)____________:

I am writing to you because I am concerned about ____________ (issue you would like to talk about). I think____________.

Please vote for/against this measure when it comes before the Senate/House because ____________.

Sincerely,
Terry
Mrs. Terry Smith

The Honorable (Delegate/Senator's First and Last Name)
910 Capitol Square
Richmond, Virginia 23219
_________________
"Do a Little and a Little at a Time Eventually Makes a BIG Difference"

Posted by lois at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)

Angola 3: Herman Wallace's Conviciton Reversed

November 9, 2006

Dear Friends and Supporters of the Angola 3,

With great joy, we can announce that we have just received an opinion from Commissioner Rachel Morgan of the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge recommending that Herman Wallace's 1974 murder conviction be reversed. The opinion is the result of an evidentiary hearing held inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary on September 19, and gives us new hope that Herman, who is 65 years old and has now been in solitary confinement for 34 years, may soon win his freedom. There are, however, still struggles ahead.

The Commissioner found that the prosecution violated Herman's due process rights by hiding from the jury and defense lawyers the fact that it had provided prison informant Hezekiah Brown, their key witness, with the promise of a pardon from a life sentence as well as a carton of cigarettes per week and a private room with a television on prison grounds. Under the law, this constitutional violation requires that Herman's conviction for the 1972 murder of a correctional officer be overturned. This case, like so many others, involves an incompetent and biased investigation focusing on innocent men and prosecutors who lied and cheated to win convictions.

We are still several steps away from this decision resulting in Herman's release. The Commissioner's recommended ruling will now be presented to the district judge, who has the power to adopt it as is (which routinely happens), amend it, or order further hearings. We are hopeful, given the strength of Herman's case and the reasoning of the opinion, that the court will adopt the Commissioner's recommendation as it is written and overturn Herman's conviction.

If the court overturns Herman's conviction, it is likely that the Baton Rouge district attorney's office will appeal that decision to the Louisiana Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, a process that could take as long as two years. It is also possible that the state could seek to retry Herman, but we would vigorously challenge a retrial at this late stage as a violation of Herman's constitutional rights. Moreover, considering the weakness of the state's evidence, it is difficult to envision a retrial resulting in any verdict other than acquittal.

We spoke at length with Herman and his codefendant Albert Woodfox today. They are both overjoyed. Herman was able to personally notify several of his family members and friends, and he asked us to thank all of the dozens, if not hundreds, of people who have contributed to this cause over the years. Albert is hopeful that success in Herman's case will help him, as he is just beginning the process of litigating a federal habeas corpus petition.

We still have a long way to go before Herman and Albert are freed. We will keep everyone informed of developments in the case.

Best to all,

Nick Trenticosta and Scott Fleming
Attorneys for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox

Posted by lois at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Protesters decry planned prison site

The Roanoke Times
Friday, November 10, 2006
Protesters decry planned prison site
Some Grayson County residents oppose a prison on the New River.

By Paul Dellinger and Laurence Hammack
The Roanoke Times

INDEPENDENCE -- Plans for a state prison in Grayson County got off to a rocky start Thursday, with some 50 sign-carrying protestors greeting the announcement with jeers and slams at local and state officials.

State Sen. William Wampler, R-Bristol, and Del. Bill Carrico, R-Grayson County, touted the 1,024-bed medium-security prison as a boost to economic development with a $6-million-plus annual payroll.

But the crowd that showed up for the announcement was having none of it. Most were upset that the Cox's Chapel site being considered is on New River, a tourist attraction.

"If they needed new prisons in Arizona, do you think they would put them on the Grand Canyon?" said Charlotte Reynolds, who frequently canoes on the river.

Others spoke of farms that have been in their families for a century or more, investments in vacation homes and the potential for river-related tourism as a reason for the prison to go somewhere else.

The board of supervisors asked the state to consider Grayson County sites in 2004, said Chairman Ralph Tuggle. He said its members visited other communities with prisons and renewed its request.

He said Grayson needs the 375 jobs the prison would bring. The county would also benefit from state payments in lieu of taxes on the prison land, and the prison would buy enough water to make a planned regional water authority affordable for residents in and around Independence, which is experiencing water problems.

Harold Ellis, president of Public-Private Infrastructure, which will do the site work, said an engineering study will determine if the site will work. The prison needs about 80 acres, he said, and the site under consideration is in a depression that would hide the prison from people fishing or boating on the river.

He said a bridge across the river would reduce traffic in the Cox's Chapel community and be handy for conveying utilities to the prison. "It just seems to make sense."

Some in the room were veterans of a successful fight some 30 years ago to keep a hydroelectric impoundment off the river. The battle cry then was "The New River, like it is" and that same sentiment was on some of the signs being waved at officials Thursday.

Wampler said there would be many public meetings on the project as it progressed. He said a prison somewhere in the Mount Rogers Planning District must be open by 2010 to help handle Virginia's increasing number of prisoners.

State officials say the need for more prisons has been clear since 2004, when the General Assembly approved funding for two medium-security facilities -- now under construction in Tazewell and Pittsylvania counties
-- and money to study a third one in Southwest Virginia.

Although crime has decreased in Virginia over the past decade, the number of people being sent to prison continues to grow.

Currently numbering about 36,000 inmates, the prison population is expected to reach 42,000 by 2012, according to a recent forecast by the office of the Secretary of Public Safety.

Virginia's incarceration rate ranks 15th in the nation, according to the office.

"We have more people coming in the front door and staying longer, so it doesn't take much of a mathematician" to conclude that more prisons are needed, said Clyde Cristman, deputy secretary of public safety.

Since the legislature abolished parole in 1995, the Department of Corrections has been experiencing what's called the "stacking effect," or the backlog of more inmates serving longer sentences, that has grown cumulatively.

At the same time, inmates who were in the system before 1995 and remain eligible for parole are being released at a lower rate, generally because their crimes were what Cristman called "the worst of the worst."

Following a surge of prison building after parole was abolished, the state went through a period of having empty prison cells that were rented out to other states. But the surplus proved to be short-lived, and now the Department of Corrections says its worst overcrowding problems are in medium-security prisons.

paul.dellinger@roanoke.com (276) 228-4752
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/wb/xp-90891

Posted by lois at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

Justice Mapping Center: What N.Y. owes ex-cons- and their neighbors

What N.Y. owes ex-cons- and their neighbors

By Errol Louis
NY Daily News, November 10, 2006

With a new regime about to take charge in Albany, now would be a good time to develop a fresh approach to what criminologists call the "reentry" issue: what to do about the 127,000 people released from prisons and jails around the state every year.

On average, 55% of state prisoners come home within 48 months, while those sent to Rikers Island to await trial or serve less than a year for less-serious crimes get out, on average, within a few weeks. Of all ex-offenders statewide, most are from New York City - and of these, the majority hail from, and return to, a handful of our neighborhoods.

At present, New York doesn't do enough to prepare this army of returning ex-inmates for basic challenges like finding housing, securing employment, kicking addiction and catching up on child support, according to a new report on reentry and employment commissioned by director Chauncy Parker of the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.

To make matters worse, the communities where most of the ex-prisoners will end up - upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, central Brooklyn and southeast Queens - are already overwhelmed by poverty and other problems. That's why so many former inmates slip through the cracks and end up jobless and homeless - and why two-thirds of them get rearrested within three years.

"We are funding a large-scale migration in and out of neighborhoods," says Eric Cadora, a scholar who runs the nonprofit Justice Mapping Center.

This revolving door system is expensive: It costs $32,400 a year to keep a man in prison, not counting the cost of prosecutors or the injuries and property loss suffered by victims.

According to Cadora, New York City and State Correction departments spend $359 million every year to lock up people from just one Brooklyn neighborhood, Brownsville - more than a billion dollars every three years - knowing full well that most of those being jailed will return and end up rearrested.

The sensible alternative to this costly futility would be to carve out a slice of the city and state Correction budgets - 5% or about $18 million a year would be a good start - and invest it in housing, jobs, education and addiction treatment right there in Brownsville. The savings, in human and economic terms, would be profound and immediate.

Parker and a few other forward-looking New York officials - notably, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs and city Correction Commissioner Martin Horn - have spent the last few years laying the groundwork for a new approach to reentry.

They have lately joined forces with thinkers like Jeremy Travis, the new president of John Jay College, and Susan Tucker of the Open Society Institute to push for radical changes in how New York spends its jail and prison dollars.

"We overuse incarceration," says Horn, who now spends $10 million a year on reentry programs for inmates leaving Rikers - more than any city or county in America.

"At the moment, the stars are aligned to do something different in New York City," says Tucker.

But only if more city and state officials start thinking outside the cell when it comes to keeping our neighborhoods safe.

Originally published on November 10, 2006

Posted by lois at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)

Prometa Founder's Spotty Background Explored

Prometa Founder's Spotty Background Explored
November 3, 2006, Join Together Now

Some observers say they see a familiar pattern in the aggressive marketing of an unproved addiction treatment regimen called Prometa: founder Terren Peizer similarly hyped an anti-AIDS drug, Immunitin, in the 1990s, but the drug never made it to market.

MSNBC reported Nov. 1 that Peizer's Hythiam Corp. is marketing the $12,000-$15,000 Prometa regimen to governments and insurers as a treatment for methamphetamine, cocaine, and alcohol addiction. Small communities hard-hit by meth are seen as an especially ripe market.

Critics, however, say that Prometa's claimed effectiveness is backed by little other than anecdotes. "The marketing is way ahead of the science," said Lori Karan, a researcher at the Drug Dependence Research Laboratory at the University of California San Francisco. "It preys on the needs of desperate patients, sets unreasonable hopes and expectations and takes advantage of scarce economic resources."

Peter Banys, director of addiction programs at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco, added, "I would never recommend that someone spend $15,000 on this with the current state of data (and) I think it's improper to spend public money on this product at this time."

The Prometa regimen consists of administration of three prescription drugs, none of which have been approved for addiction treatment by the FDA. The company is now conducting clinical research on the mix, but has gone ahead with marketing Prometa -- including with ads featuring the late comedian Chris Farley, who died of an overdose.

Study results may not be ready until 2008. "Counties don't care about double-blind placebo-controlled data," said Peizer. "What's interesting about Prometa is that out in the field -- in the counties, justice systems, private centers -- the clinical relevance is being shown daily." Hythiam claims that Prometa produces an abstinence rate of 60-80 percent among the 1,000-plus people who have undergone the treatment.

Fulton County, Ga., Pierce County, Wash., and Gary, Ind., are among the local communities that have adopted or tested Prometa. Hythiam is marketing the treatment at anti-drug conferences in communities where meth has become a major problem. Terree Schmidt-Whelan, director of the Pierce County Alliance, a nonprofit treatment center in Tacoma, Wash., called the results of Prometa with hardcore meth addicts "phenomenal."

"I've been in this field for 30 years, and to see people change their lives in a week, and so dramatically, it's just wonderful," she said.

Peizer is a former junk-bond salesman who worked for Michael Milken; his past investments included the company that makes Candie's shoes, a firm that went bankrupt after marketing a automobile tire it claimed would not go flat, and a successful computer company that bought the assets of Cray Research, the famous supercomputer company.

Peizer's past statements about Immunitin, the ill-fated anti-AIDS drug, sound similar to his claims about Prometa. "This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. We have something special," he told reporters in 1998.

Peizer owns 35 percent of Hythiam, where stock prices have risen more than 60 percent in three months.

* NIDA and SAMHSA to Expedite Transfer of Findings from Treatment Research into Clinical Practice

* Company Seeks $40 Million to Develop Addiction Drug

* New Website on Pain Management for Healthcare Professionals

* Buprenorphine Legislation Hailed as Treatment Breakthrough

Related Resources

* Treatment Research Institute

* Medical Management Treatment Manual: A Clinical Research Guide for Medically Trained Clinicians Providing Pharmacotherapy as Part of the Treatment for Alcohol Dependence, Volume 2

http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2006/prometa-founders-spotty.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=30960902

Posted by lois at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2006

CO: Private Prisons- Being tough on crime a double edged sword

Here are parts two and three...sorry to not locate part 1.

Publish Date: 10/28/2006 http://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/Top-Story.asp?ID=5217

Canon City Daily Record
The Colorado State Penitentiary is the newest facility in the complex east of Cañon City. State lawmakers have grown more concerned with shortages of beds and staff at state and federal prisons.

Being tough on crime a double-edged sword

Vic Vela
The Daily Record
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a three-part series on the state of the prison industry. The final part will focus on private prisons and will appear in the Nov. 4 edition.

With prison sentences becoming longer and the number of offenders increasing, the Colorado Department of Corrections continues to search for ways to accommodate beds, staff and overall funding necessary to house inmates.

But, solutions to the problem, such as the furtherance of private prisons and out-of-state transfers of in-mates, concern some observers. However, recent industry trends indicate there is no reason to believe changes are to come any time soon. State legislatures, following the federal government’s lead, have leaned toward “for-profit” prisons to atone for bed shortages, rather than promote more state facilities.

Meanwhile state lawmakers are caught between the need to lock-up dangerous offenders and overcowding prisons.

“Colorado citizens have told me to be tough on crime,” said State Sen. Ken Kester. “But, if we don’t build prisons or do something about sentencing, we’re going to have big problems.”

While solutions to DOC problems are debated, one thing about state-run facilities seems to be certain for prison officials.

“There’s no room,” said Brent Park, DOC public information officer. “If we had a no-vacancy sign, it would be blinking.”

Overcrowding and appearing tough on Crime

As the state population grows, so too does the DOC inmate population.

According to DOC’s Web site, inmate admissions have risen every fiscal year since at least 1995. At the same time, the number of prisoner releases has failed to match those numbers. In 1992, the average daily inmate jurisdictional population was 8,474. About 14 years later, that number is now 21,438. According to DOC records, the current inmate population has increased 443 percent since 1985. DOC projects the total number of inmates to surpass 26,000 in June 2010.

The overwhelming inmate numbers seem to set Colorado apart from other states. Calling inmate growth “unprecedented”, a 2004 fiscal year DOC statistical report states that, “The growth experienced by the Colorado Department of Corrections in recent years has exceeded the national trends where population trends have shown little or no growth.”

And while inmate numbers continue to rise, it’s important to note DOC has no role in determining who gets in and who gets to leave.

“We don’t control the front door, and we don’t control the back door,” said Parker.

Judges determine offenders’ sentencing, but the length of sentencing for each crime is guided by minimum and maximum sentences determined by state lawmakers. If an offender is sentenced to the care of DOC, that offender will serve time, regardless of whether there is room for them or not. Parole boards determine if and when offenders are released, once their jail time is served.

Elected lawmakers, while well intended, can exacerbate the problem.

“In recent years, the Legislature has passed some new, tough sentencing laws,” Parker said. “It’s tough to get lawmakers to look at the big picture because they get votes for being tough on crime.”

The 2004 fiscal report points to specific areas of legislation that have led to the exploding inmate popula-tions:

— 1985: House Bill (H.B.) 1320 doubled the maximum penalties for felony cases. This caused the average length of stay for offenders to triple from 1980 to 1989.

— 1987: H.B. 1005 allowed juveniles as young as 12 to be charged as adults in certain felony cases.

— 1998: H.B. 98-1156 was referred to as “Colorado Sex Offender Lifetime Supervision act of 1998.” This requires sex offenders to serve minimum sentences, without early release. Tough parole board requirements make it difficult to be released.

Gary Golder, DOC prison operations director, said longer sentences could be expected.

“This last legislative session, six bills were introduced that enhanced sentences or were new laws,” he said. “It’s not that they’re not good bills, but each of those carry with them a cost.”

General Assembly members admit this can be a problem.

“We probably need to look at some of our sentencing laws,” Kester said.

Kester said the Legislature has recently taken some steps toward elevating prison overcrowding, pointing to recent legislation that loosened penalties for Class V and Class IV felony offenders.

But, Kester said any changes in legislation need to proceed with caution.

“I’m not for turning people out of prisons just because we don’t have room for them,” he said.

State Rep. Tom Massey agrees.

“We tend to hear that people want us to revisit sentencing laws,” he said. “But, we never get a good handle on who to put back on the street.”

Drug offenders

By far, drug convictions lead to the highest percentage of incarcerations. Almost 30 percent of female offenders and 18 percent of male offenders were convicted of drug related crimes, according to DOC.

However, DOC says those numbers can be misleading.

“In Colorado, it’s very hard to get to prison on a first time drug offense,” said DOC prison operations director Gary Golder.

Golder is responsible for operations of 23 state facilities and six private facilities in the state. He refers to first-time drug offender sentences as being “a myth.”

“Typically, people see prison time on their third-, fourth- and fifth-time offenses,” he said.

Parker agrees.

“For drug users, judges are typically looking for treatment first,” he said, adding that most drug crimes that lead to incarceration are coupled with more serious offenses, such as theft or assault.

And while the state legislature attempts to relax sentencing for drug offenders, members say distinctions need to be made when looking at drug crimes.

“We can’t let those people making meth around children go free,” said Kester.

Looking ahead

In 2002, the Legislature authorized DOC funding in the form of certificates of participation, a form of lease revenue bond, for the new Colorado State Penitentiary, CSP II. However, a court challenge set back pro-gress. Still, DOC officials plan to proceed with designing and may begin the bidding process this spring, with occupation of the facility aimed for August 2009.

But even once CSP II is built, it will only bring with it another 700 beds. And, while the certificates of deposit finance over $100 million toward construction of the prison, it is not known if there have been additional costs incurred due to the delay in the project.

“We’re still working on that,” said DOC official Richard Weems.

Legislative members continue to search for options.

“We’re asking for a five-to-10 year plan for DOC to show the Joint Budget Committee,” said State Rep. Buffie McFadyen. “This is so we have a realistic plan for how much this will cost us so we can be honest to voters.”

Kester points to elderly inmates with physical ailments who require fuller staff. He would like to see more of these offenders housed at Fort Lyon, a former VA hospital that now serves as a prison for special needs.

http://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/Top-Story.asp?id=5287

Publish Date: 11/4/2006, Canon City Daily Record

Private prisons a quick fix

Vic Vela
The Daily Record
Editor’s Note: This is the final part of a three-part series on the prison industry.

As prison beds grow sparse and the number of inmates increases at a significant rate, the Colorado Department of Corrections has, in recent years, continued to search for ways of accommodating its desperate need to house offenders.

About 1,000 offenders are being sentenced to Colorado prisons each year, a rate that, percentage-wise, surpasses Colorado’s robust population growth.

Meanwhile, the State Legislature, citing tighter budgets and constituencies who balk at the idea of prisons “in their backyards”, has not approved funding to alleviate the problem for DOC state-run facilities since it allocated certificates of deposit funds for the construction of the new Colorado State Penitentiary in 2002. However, construction has not even begun on that facility.

The apparent current solution to the problem: the privatization of prisons. Private prisons have provided a quick fix to the prison overcrowding problems.

Roughly six percent of the country’s inmates are being housed at for-profit prisons. In Colorado, that number is much higher. And, with state budgets across the country becoming less flexible, this number should continue to rise for years to come.

But, private prisons continue to be a source for controversy. Opponents of private-run facilities site con-cerns that for-profit prisons see inmates as nothing more than commodities, compromising ethics. Critics also claim private facilities employ fewer staff than does state facilities, leading to safety concerns for guards and other prison employees.

Proponents of privatization scoff at the notion that private facilities cut costs and risk safety for the sake of profit. They say they are regulated, just like other prisons, and are less expensive alternatives to state-run prisons.

The debate surrounding private prisons will only grow larger as the need for prison space is needed.

The Numbers:

Right now, one in five DOC inmates are housed in private prisons in Colorado, or 4,400 offenders. In mid-2008, that ratio is expected to increase to one in three. DOC pays private facilities $51.90 a day to house inmates.

Meanwhile, the cost of housing inmates at state-run facilities is higher, though the comparison is apples to oranges.

The per-day cost to house an inmate at state-run facilities range from $59-$75, depending on the level of high-custody inmate in question.

The cost of inmates at private prisons in Colorado is less expensive, mainly because they are not housing the worst offenders.

“They take the lower custody, minimum-to-medium custody offenders,” said Parker. “They also don’t take high-medical needs inmates or high-psychological needs inmates.”

Colorado currently has six different state-level private prisons: Crowley County Correctional Facility, Kit Carson Correctional Center, Bent County Correctional Facility, Brush Correctional Facility, Huerfano County Correctional Center and Cheyenne Mountain Re-Entry Center — which is a program-driven, short term facility. In May, two new bids for new private prisons were presented and deemed “potentially acceptable” by DOC.

The state legislature has placed limits as to which inmates private prisons hold. Several years ago, lawmakers passed legislation that prohibits high-custody inmates from being housed at private facilities. Lawmak-ers also capped the total number of private prison inmates at 30% of all offenders statewide.

Even thought these institutions are for-profit, private prisons, they still fall under the DOC umbrella of administration.

“They are administered using our regulations,” said Brent Parker, DOC public information officer.

Alison Morgan, head of the DOC private prison-monitoring unit, says private institutions agree to the components of a 50-page “very detailed” contract that specifies regulations for their facilities. In addition, the unit regularly monitors these prisons.

“There are 18 people in the unit, all working toward holding prisons accountable,” she said. “We’re there to enforce a contract, but we’re also there to show staff how we want things done and how we expect things to be done.”

The Concerns:

Private prisons have not done themselves any favors in recent years when it comes to public relations problems that have fueled criticism of how they are run.

In 1999, a convicted murderer at a private-run facility in Tennessee escaped by scaling the outside all in broad daylight. In 2004, private facilities experienced riots in Oklahoma (where one death occurred), Kentucky and a hostage-taking riot in Florida.

The most significant event in recent Colorado history was that of the Crowley County Correctional Facility riot in July 2004, where 13 inmates were injured. Investigations into the riot found staff was inexperienced and shortages of staff led to problems. The Crowley riot led to heightened supervision by DOC.

Recently, DOC leveled “liquid damages” against all six private facilities in Colorado, citing staffing shortages as the biggest problem. In Kit Carson alone, 567 positions were unfilled, leading to damages of $83,000 paid to the state.

These strings of bad press for private facilities have led many to question their effectiveness, even ethics.

“I’m wondering if they’re OK with paying the fines because they’re cheaper than providing more staff,” said State. Rep. Buffie McFadyen.

Nonsense says a private prison official.

“That is outrageously false,” said Louise Gilchrist, spokesperson for the Tennessee-based Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prisons operator which operates four private facilities in Colorado, including Crowley.

“We would never advocate having fewer staff than we’d like,” she continued. “If we cut corners, there would be consequences. Our customers would terminate our contract.”

Gilchrist says it’s unfair to blame these problems solely on private facilities.

“Incidents occur in every facility in the country,” she said. “The problem is, if it’s a private prison, the media attention is so heightened, there is much more public scrutiny.”

The CCA spokesperson says that recent “damages” assessed by DOC were aimed at “less-than critical positions,” and that her company will not hire someone just for the sake of doing so.

“We’re not going to do that just to fill a post,” she said. “We would much rather find the right people because safety is our number one priority.”

But, finding the right people can be a daunting task for operators like CCA. National numbers show the pay rate for private prison officers is less than state-run facilities.

“They typically get paid according the area’s market,” said DOC official Gary Golder. “Whereas the sate pays the same no matter the area.”

This can lead to the conclusion that more experienced, qualified applicants may prefer opportunities outside private prisons. DOC admits that private facilities are often a job center for DOC. Critics say this leads to higher turnover rates at such prisons.

Part of the problem with staffing is due to older facilities that were placed in rural areas. CCA says it acknowledges staffing can be at a premium in many cases, but the group says they are working on solutions.

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

November 03, 2006

Bush Planetary Lock Up

Tomgram: Nick Turse on the Bush Planetary Lock Up

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=135352

The evil nature of our enemies has, it turns out, certain advantages -- at least when secret imprisonment and torture are at stake. The Bush administration has proved adamantly unwilling to talk to, or deal with, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, except when it came to parking terror suspects we wanted tortured on his lot. In fact, the Syrians proved so handy and so eager to be good allies in the shadow world of global incarceration that U.S. officials turned over at least 7 of their prisoners to Syrian ministrations, according to a recent piece in the British Guardian.

There was nothing unique about administration reliance on the Syrians for this. From Uzbekistan to Egypt, autocratic regimes willing to torture have been destinations for CIA secret prisoner "rendering" operations. Following kidnappings or captures elsewhere on Earth, the Agency has sent planes hopscotching -- sometimes thousands of miles -- across the globe to our jailors of choice. Though the aircraft used were posh indeed, such assignments proved so rigorous for CIA handlers that they evidently regularly repaired to five-star hotels in Italy, on the Spanish island of Majorca, and possibly elsewhere for a little of the recuperative good life. In places like the Marriott Son Antem, a golfing resort in the Majorcan city of Palma, they could "journey to deep inner peace" (as the hotel spa advertised) at American taxpayer expense, even while on "extraordinary rendition" trips.

In fact, when it comes to what Nick Turse calls the Bush administration's "prison planet," little bits of news about further horrors seep out almost daily. Just in the last week, for instance, thanks to the Israeli paper Haaretz, we learned for the first time that at least some CIA rendition flights stopped at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on their way to and from Cyprus, Jordan, Morocco, and other spots east and west, north and south -- and that the first case "of the United States handing Israel a world jihadi suspect" in a rendition operation has been confirmed.

At the same time, if you happened to be checking the South African press, you might have noticed a report that, a year ago, 10 unidentified men in several "luxury vehicles" -- luxury being a good sign that the CIA is probably involved -- pulled up in front of a home in the medium-sized town of Estcourt, ransacked it at gunpoint, shooed away the police, and then hooded and dragged off two Muslim men, one of whom was later released (thanks to the intercession of a South African lawyer). The other, Rashid Khalid, a Pakistani national, is suspected of being somewhere in the system of American secret global detention centers, but his fate remains a mystery twelve months later.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the International Red Cross, it was reported, had "its first opportunity in more than 20 months" to see hundreds of former Abu Ghraib prisoners now rehoused in a state-of-the-art multimillion dollar prison, Camp Cropper, that the Bush administration has built, almost without notice, near Baghdad International Airport. Finally (but not exhaustively), back in our growing homeland security state, "in a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law." The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, according to Frank Morales, "allows the President to declare a ‘public emergency' and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to ‘suppress public disorder.'"

And that's just a modest grab bag of recent Bush administration global incarceration news, another humdrum week on what's increasingly coming to look like an American prison planet. These bits and pieces of information seeping out are undoubtedly merely suggestive of what we don't yet know. Now, let Nick Turse, in his usual vivid, well researched fashion, make a little sense of all this for you. Tom

American Prison Planet
The Bush Administration as Global Jailor
By Nick Turse

Today, the United States presides over a burgeoning empire -- not only the "empire of bases" first described by Chalmers Johnson, but a far-flung new network of maximum security penitentiaries, detention centers, jail cells, cages, and razor wire-topped pens. From supermax-type isolation prisons in 40 of the 50 states to shadowy ghost jails at remote sites across the globe, this new network of detention facilities is quite unlike the gulags, concentration-camps, or prison nations of the past.

Even with a couple million prisoners under its control, the U.S. prison network lacks the infrastructure or manpower of the Soviet gulag or the orderly planning of the Nazi concentration-camp system. However, where it bests both, and breaks new incarceration ground, is in its planet-ranging scope, with sites scattered the world over -- from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the Caribbean. Unlike colonial prison systems of the past, the new U.S. prison network seems to have floated almost free of surrounding colonies. Right now, it has only four major centers -- the "homeland," Afghanistan, Iraq, and a postage-stamp-sized parcel of Cuba. As such, it already hovers at the edge of its own imperial existence, bringing to mind the unprecedented possibility of a prison planet. In a remarkably few years, the Bush administration has been able to construct a global detention system, already of near epic proportions, both on the fly and on the cheap.

Sizing Up a Prison Planet

Soon after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the U.S. began the process of creating what has been termed "an offshore archipelago of injustice." In addition to using "the Charleston Navy Brig" and locking up "one prisoner of war in Miami, Florida," according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Bush administration detained people from around the world in sweeps, imprisoned them without charges and kept them incommunicado at U.S. detention facilities at a CIA prison outside Kabul, Afghanistan (code-named the "Salt Pit"), at Bagram military airbase in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba, among other sites.

Since it was set up in 2002, the detainment complex at Guantanamo Bay has been the public face of the Bush administration's semi-secret foreign prison network -- a collection of camps, cells, and cages that today holds 437 prisoners. But "Gitmo" has always been the tiny showpiece, the jewel in a very dark crown, for a much larger, less visible foreign network of military detention facilities, CIA "black" sites, and outsourced foreign prisons. It is a prison camp that rightly attracts opprobrium, but it also serves to focus attention away from shadowy ghost jails, borrowed third-nation facilities, much larger prisons holding thousands in Iraq, and a full-scale network of detention centers and prisons in Afghanistan.

We may never know how many secret prisons exist (or, for a time, existed) in the shape-shifting American mini-gulag, but according to the Washington Post, some locations for these black sites include itinerant CIA detention centers "on ships at sea," a site in Thailand, and another on "Britain's Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean." Uzbekistan has been reported as one possible location, Algeria another. Denials were issued about ghost jails being located in Russia and Bulgaria. The British Guardian named "a US airbase in the Gulf state of Qatar" as another suspected site. And while proposed prisons on "virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia" were evidently nixed, various black sites located in "several democracies in Eastern Europe" apparently did come into being.

ABC News reported that the "CIA established secret prisons in Romania and Poland in 2002-2003" before shutting them down in early 2006 and moving the disappeared prisoners on to "a facility in North Africa." Following this report, Tomdispatch contacted Major General Timothy Ghormley, then the commander of the Combined Task Force Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) for U. S. Central Command, to inquire about the prisoner transfer. Ghormley stated: "There are no other U.S. bases in the Horn of Africa besides Camp Lemonier [in Djibouti]." He went on to assert, "There are no prisons under CJTF-HOA's command, and Camp Lemonier does not do prisoner transfers." When asked about CIA operations at the camp, he said he was barred from talking about "any security operations worldwide" and could not speak for the CIA. It is, however, worth noting that Amnesty International reported earlier this year on a Yemeni man who was "disappeared" and "flown on a small US plane to a site probably in Djibouti, where he was questioned by officials who told him they were from the FBI."

While these illegal sites, mainly run by the CIA, were intermittently identified in the U.S. or foreign press, it was only this September that President George W. Bush finally acknowledged the existence of the CIA's secret prisons. Still, it's unknown how many CIA black sites are still active and how many clandestine military prisons are still in operation.

What little we do know, however, indicates that the "archipelago of injustice" has grown to world-spanning proportions. For example, in an investigative article in the British Guardian in March 2005, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark reported that a network of over 20 U.S. prisons was believed to exist in Afghanistan, including "an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed ‘Camp Slappy' by former prisoners." Just recently, Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson, authors of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights, confirmed this, reporting that "the U.S. military has erected some 20 detention centers [in Afghanistan]… which all operate in near total secrecy. These are facilities that the U.N., the Afghan government, journalists, and human rights groups can't get into."

We know as well that suspects, swept up around the world, have been outsourced to the prisons and torture chambers of third countries in "extraordinary rendition" operations. The number of prisons operated by other countries is shadowy, but certainly geographically wide-ranging. Foreign facilities available for Bush administration use evidently have included the al-Tamara interrogation center, located in "a forest five miles outside [Morocco's] capital, Rabat"; sites in Jordan including "prisons in the capital, Amman, and in desert locations in the east of the country"; facilities in Saudi Arabia; "a series of jails in Damascus," Syria; "the interrogation centre in the general intelligence directorate in Lazoughli and in Mulhaq al-Mazra prison" in Egypt; "facilities in Baku, Azerbaijan"; and "unidentified locations in Thailand," among others.

The treatment given in 2002 to Canadian Maher Arar, recently the recipient of the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award, offers a glimpse into the American prison planet in action in its early stages of formation. Arar has described how he was detained and then held incommunicado -- shackled and chained -- in a terminal in New York's JFK Airport before being transported to Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center. At that Federal prison, Arar recalls an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agent telling him, "The INS is not the body or the agency that signed the Geneva Convention… against torture."

"For me," said Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, "what that really meant is we will send you to torture and we don't care." He was, in fact, soon flown to Jordan, where he was beaten, and then driven to Syria. There, he was locked in a filthy, dark cell "about three feet wide, six feet deep and about seven feet high" where he was kept in isolation for 10 months and 10 days when not being physically assaulted. Despite being tortured into a false confession, Arar was found to have no links to terrorism and was never charged with crimes of any sort by the United States, Canada, Jordan, or Syria. Instead, he was sent back to Canada without so much as an apology or explanation by the Bush administration. His is the archetypal tale of the American prison planet that has been under construction these last years -- a torture tour of the globe's most dismal hell holes. How many others have suffered variations of this treatment remains unknown. The few useful figures we do have, such as the European parliament's April 2006 findings of over 1,000 secret CIA flights over European Union territory alone since 2001, suggest a large number of "extraordinary renditions" have been carried out.

When President Bush finally came (somewhat) clean about the CIA's illegal prisons (even turning them, along with his torture policies, into a proud election issue), a senior State Department official also asserted that there were "no detainees" still in them. Within days, however, newspapers began to point to evidence that people presumed to have been disappeared by the U.S. were still unaccounted for. In mid-October, a specific case hit the press when it was disclosed that "a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency."

Operation Iraqi Freedom?

The war in Iraq boosted the profile of the American prison planet immeasurably, especially after the Abu Ghraib prison revelations burst into public view in the spring of 2004. At that time, approximately 20,000 Iraqis were imprisoned by U.S. forces, including -- a report that year disclosed -- more than 100 children as young as 10 years of age.

Over two years later, there are still many thousands of Iraqis held by U.S. forces in that country -- including about 3,550 in a brand new "$60-million state-of-the-art detention center" at Camp Cropper near Baghdad's airport and another almost 9,500 in somewhat more primitive prison conditions at Camp Bucca in the south and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

Meanwhile, the number of prisoners and detainees held by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government and allied militias and death squads is murky at best, but probably sizeable. Secret prisons -- where the grimmest kinds of torture are performed, often with power drills -- are reputed to be scattered around Baghdad, the capital. In November 2005, then-Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari admitted receiving word on conditions in just one of these. According to the BBC, "173 detainees had been held [in an Interior Ministry building], that they appeared malnourished, and may have been 'subjected to some kind of torture.'" The next month, the Washington Post reported the discovery of a "second Interior Ministry detention center where cases of prisoner abuse have been confirmed by U.S. and Iraqi officials."

By June of this year, it was reported that the Iraqi Interior Ministry was still holding 1,797 prisoners; the Defense Ministry a smaller undisclosed number; and the Justice Ministry, at least 7,426.

Lockdown, USA

The offshore archipelago of injustice garners the headlines, but it's the homeland prison network that locks up far more people and provides at least one possible model for what the foreign network could morph into given the time and funds to expand and harden into a permanent supermax system. Comprised of federal and state prisons, territorial prisons, local jails, "facilities operated by or exclusively for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement," military prisons, "jails in Indian country," and juvenile detention facilities, the homeland prison system is a truly massive apparatus.

Just as the global network has expanded in the years since 9/11, so has incarceration in the U.S. In fact, it has climbed steadily in recent years. Today, the U.S. stands preeminent among all nations in treating people like caged animals. According to statistics provided to the BBC by the International Centre for Prison Studies, 724 people per 100,000 are imprisoned in the U.S., overwhelmingly trumping even increasingly authoritarian Russia, the world's second-ranked prison power, who's rate of caging humans is only 581 per 100,000.

All told, the U.S. now has 2,135,901 prisoners in domestic detention facilities, alone -- several hundred thousand more than are imprisoned in both China and India, the world's two most populous countries, combined. Of these people, 192,198 are imprisoned in federal facilities -- though just 5.3% of them for the violent crimes of most people's nightmares: homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and sex offenses. Instead, most -- 53.6 % -- are locked up on (often small-time) drug charges.

Of the federal prison population, the government classifies about 0.1 % (100 people) as having committed "national security" offenses. There's no category in the U.S. system for political prisoners, which doesn't mean they don't exist. According to a 2002 Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal article by J. Soffiyah Elijah, there were, prior to September 11, 2001, "nearly 100 political prisoners and prisoners of war incarcerated in the United States" -- many of them the surviving victims of Vietnam-era government campaigns against activists.

There is also another group of political prisoners of indeterminate number not listed on the rolls -- war resisters. Just recently Iraq War veteran turned resister Kevin Benderman was released from a military prison where he had been held for over a year for refusing to redeploy to Iraq due to his conscientious objection to the war. While Army Lieutenant Ehren Watada is currently facing an eight-year prison sentence, if convicted, for similar opposition to Iraq. One website lists 27 war resisters "presently in legal jeopardy, or currently incarcerated" who have gone public with their stories.

Additionally, in the immediate wake of 9/11, the government conducted sweeps of Muslim immigrants (and Muslim-Americans) reminiscent of the detentions of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II, "locking up large numbers of Middle Eastern men, using whatever legal tools they can." There was never any full accounting of these mass roundups, codenamed PENTTBOM, or what happened to all the people who were rousted from beds or yanked out of places of work by federal agents. What little is known suggests that "762 of the 1,200 PENTTBOM arrestees were charged with immigration violations at the behest of the FBI because agents thought they might be associated with terrorism... [but] almost every one was either deported or released within a few months." Only a small percentage of the 1,200 are thought to have even been processed through the federal criminal justice system.

This summer the Washington Post announced that, after 5 years of captivity, Benamar Benatta, "believed to be the last remaining domestic detainee from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was released." In mid-October, however, word surfaced that Ali Partovi, also caught in the dragnet, was still being held captive although he "is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, [and] not considered a danger to society."

Preemptive Incarceration

From time to time, certain people in the U.S. also find themselves tossed into special kinds of detention facilities. For example, during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, protesters (and also bystanders) swept up in indiscriminate mass arrests or illegal acts of preemptive incarceration were temporarily locked up in "Marine and Aviation Pier 57," a filthy facility of razor-wire topped chain-link cages that was soon dubbed "Guantanamo on the Hudson." While being imprisoned in New York City's own Gitmo didn't begin to compare to being tossed in the real McCoy or any other secret offshore site, there was one striking similarity. U.S. intelligence officials estimated that 70-90% of prisoners detained in Iraq "had been arrested by mistake." That was also 2004. The next year, it was revealed that, of the large majority of RNC arrest cases that had run their course, 91% of the arrests were dismissed or ended in acquittals.

On the American prison planet, not only has the principle of habeas corpus been formally abolished and torture proudly added to the mix, but that crucial tenet of the legal system, the presumption of innocence, has been cast aside. Whether at home or abroad, the solution for U.S. security forces is a simple one, identify the likely suspects, conduct sweeps, and preemptively lock them up.

Concentration Camp, USA?

According to recent statements by the Department Homeland Security 's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, some time in the future undocumented economic migrants may be imprisoned on "old cruise ships." Other illegals may even find themselves in a KBR concentration camp.

Earlier this year, news broke that Halliburton subsidiary, KBR -- the firm infamous for building prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay and for scandals stemming from work in the Iraq war zone -- received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build detention centers, according to the New York Times, "for an unexpected influx of immigrants" or "new programs that require additional detention space." For anyone who remembers the First World War-era proposal by four state governors to imprison members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for the duration of the conflict, or the 1939 Hobbs ("Concentration Camp") Bill that sought the detention of aliens, or the forcible relocation and imprisonment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the 1950 McCarran Act's provisions for setting up concentration camps for subversives, or the Vietnam-era plans to round up and jail radicals in the event of a national emergency and conduct mass detentions in the face of possible urban insurrections, the announcement may have seemed less than startling. But thought of in the context of prison-planet planning, it nonetheless strikes an ominous note indeed.

One Vietnam-era radical, former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, grasped the implications immediately. "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," he said. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

Fear of a Prison Planet

In 2005, Irene Khan, Amnesty International's general secretary, described Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our time." But the American gulag is so much more than Guantanamo and so much worse. The combination of U.S. "homeland" prisons, where "one in 140 Americans, or as many people as live in Namibia, or nearly five Luxembourgs" are locked away, the offshore imperial detention facilities, the shadowy CIA black sites, and the ever-shifting outsourced detention facilities operated by other nations adds up to something new in history -- the makings of a veritable American prison planet.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. Articles from his recent Los Angeles Times series, "The War Crimes Files" can be found here.

posted November 2, 2006 at 3:56 pm

Posted by lois at 03:34 PM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2006

NY Times Editorial: Building Better Citizens

October 28, 2006
Editorial, NY Times
Building Better Citizens

Rhode Island voters will have a chance on Nov. 7 to do the right thing and amend their state Constitution to restore voting rights to felons who have completed their prison sentences. Allowing former convicts to vote strengthens democracy, and helps them to integrate into society and move beyond a life of crime.

Rhode Island, like many states, restores felons’ voting rights only after they have completed not only their prison sentences, but parole and probation. This policy keeps thousands of citizens, many of whom were in for nonviolent crimes, from voting, sometimes for decades. Andres Idarraga, a Brown University student who served more than six years in prison on drug and gun charges, is disqualified from voting for the next 30 years.

Ex-felons go to school, work and pay taxes. Their views about who should represent them should be respected in a democracy. Restoring their right to vote will also help with the critical issue of “re-entry,” helping them fit into society so they do not return to crime. The chief of the Providence police wrote in The Providence Journal that denying released prisoners the vote “weakens the long-term prospects for sustainable rehabilitation.”

If the amendment passes, a new state statute would also take effect requiring the prison system to help former prisoners register when they are released. Across the country, far too little is done to inform ex-prisoners of when their right to vote is restored, and how to go about qualifying to vote. Election officials often do not know the intricacies of the law, and give out incorrect advice. The combination of the constitutional amendment and the statute would make Rhode Island a model for the nation.

Felon disenfranchisement is a relic of another America. It was often done to keep blacks from voting, or to stigmatize ex-offenders. Rhode Island, which was founded by religious dissenters, can strike an important blow for inclusion by allowing people who have paid their debt to society to participate in democracy.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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New Proposal from the FBI seeks to include non-serious offenses in database

For Links Go to: National Employment Law Project
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We are writing to ask your help opposing a troubling new proposal by the FBI which would, for the first time, authorize the agency to report "non-serious" offenses in response to a criminal background check conducted for employment purposes. We very much need your help to spread the word about the proposal and generate public comments to the FBI. Please act fast because the deadline for comments is Monday, November 6th (see the attached sample letter and fact sheet prepared by the National Employment Law Project).

As you may know, the FBI's rap sheets, generated by the state criminal records, are used more and more by employers and the states in screening workers for employment and occupational licenses Currently, the federal law limits the rap sheets to serious misdemeanors and felonies. But if the FBI has its way, that could all change. The rap sheets will also include non-serious offenses, which means juvenile arrests and convictions and minor adult crimes like vagrancy and pubilc drunkenness. If adopted, the proposal will be devastating to the millions of workers who have a criminal record, and it will seriously undermine the growing movement to protect public safety by removing unnecessary barriers to employment based on a criminal record.

The more letters received by the FBI with the compelling stories of the communities where you live and work, the better chance the FBI will think twice before implementing this misguided policy. Please spread the word to your networks and communities. For more information on the FBI's proposal, see the attached fact sheet, or contact either Laura Moskowitz (lmoskowitz@nelp.org) or Maurice Emsellem (emsellem@nelp.org) at NELP. Your comments can be e-mailed directly to the FBI at enexreg@leo.gov, and indicate "FBI Docket No. 111P" in the subject box. Thanks for your help!

Posted by lois at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)