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December 31, 2006
Book Review of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's: "Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing CA"
Crime and punishment -- California's conundrum
Behind the state's prison boom
- Reviewed by Tony Platt
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Golden Gulag
Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California
By Ruth Wilson Gilmore
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS; 388 Pages; $19.95 PAPERBACK
California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation rates, welfare benefits and investment in public health, but when it comes to punishment, we rank at or near the top. We've crammed 173,000 convicts into the nation's largest prison system, designed to house at least one-third less. Our prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average. And we have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the country, costing taxpayers about the same as the state spends on higher education.
In the mid-1970s, under pressure from Ronald Reagan and the Board of Regents, the University of California closed Berkeley's School of Criminology. Several colleagues and I lost our jobs, but more important, California lost an opportunity to hear voices of opposition to the unregulated police-industrial complex launched during the Nixon presidency (1969-1974). By 1977, as public spending on policing peaked, national and local priorities shifted to incarceration, with California in the vanguard.
Today, 90 penitentiaries, small prisons and camps stretch across 900 miles of the fifth-largest economy in the world. It hasn't always been this way. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only 12 prisons. Since 1984, the state has erected 43 penal institutions, making it a global leader in prison construction.
Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the way rural areas, making it easier to lose sight of the humanity of the people we warehouse: mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (60 percent from Los Angeles) and mostly unemployed or the working poor.
Before the Clinton presidency, we used to hear national leaders debate the merits of punishment versus rehabilitation. But after the Democratic Party joined its Republican counterpart on the low road, politicians of both parties now churn out the same law-and-order platitudes. Occasionally a major scandal will appear in the headlines, such as the recent receivership imposed by a San Francisco federal judge on a prison health care system that violates the U.S. Constitution. But you wouldn't have known from California's gubernatorial race that the prison system is the shame of our state, testimony to the persistence of institutionalized racism, the widening economic divide and the gutting of social programs.
How and why this happened in California is the simple question explored in complex ways in the long-awaited "Golden Gulag." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a geographer and professor at the University of Southern California, is an experienced activist in the anti-prison movement, and she has written an impressive first book that stands as a model of politically engaged scholarship and an indictment of California's "archipelago of concrete and steel cages."
Gilmore begins by swatting away the usual cliches about crime and punishment. The right claims that prisons reduce crime, but California's crime rate was decreasing before the prison boom took off. The left argues that prisons are the "new slavery," designed to provide cheap labor to mercenary corporations, but, Gilmore notes, "very few prisoners work for anybody while they're locked up." Others have suggested that the 54,000-strong California Correctional Peace Officers' Association, with its hefty political war chest, calls the shots in Sacramento. But the guards' union didn't have enough clout even to stop the governor from recently deciding to transfer 5,000 prisoners to private prisons as far away as Tennessee to alleviate the crowding crisis.
Having dispatched the prevailing common wisdom, "Golden Gulag" digs deeply into the issues. In this sophisticated, interdisciplinary study, brimming with new ideas, political savvy and moral urgency, Gilmore takes us on a demanding intellectual exploration of California's economic, political, spatial and cultural history. To understand the prison situation, she tells us, we need to understand four interconnected developments, none of which has made people feel more secure in their everyday lives.
First, most of the new prisons were built on formerly irrigated agricultural lands and in regions seeking to resuscitate their depressed economies. Second, the state benefited landowners, construction and utility companies by borrowing from public funds to finance the prison boom. The small towns that hoped for a bonanza, Gilmore says, have been victimized by a boondoggle. Third, changes in California's economy, combined with cuts in social programs, have aggravated chronic unemployment among urban low-wage workers, most of whom are Latino and African American. Finally, the majority of California's politicians jumped on the law-and-order bandwagon to promote "sentence-enhancing legislation" in the 1980s, followed in 1994 by public endorsement of the "three strikes" policy. It wasn't hard to quickly fill up the new concrete cages until they were overflowing in 2006.
This damning portrait would be depressing indeed if not for the voices of opposition and resistance permeating "Golden Gulag" from the first to last page. Drawing upon her own experiences in this movement, Gilmore provides us with a richly textured account of how working-class women of color and rural and urban activists have begun to challenge California's penal colony. She introduces us to the unsung heroes of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, who, like their counterparts in Argentina, represent a public conscience. "A principled sense of mortal urgency," Gilmore writes, "inspires hope."
There are a few disappointments. Gilmore's history begins in the late 20th century; we would have benefited from learning about how California's original 19th century prisons overflowed with Chinese prisoners and other working-class convicts, all of whom were forced to work under grueling conditions for agricultural employers or build the state's infrastructure. Stylistically, some of "Golden Gulag's" denser theoretical passages could be thinned, and some readers might need a map to guide them on a journey that takes many important detours.
But these concerns in no way diminish the originality of this groundbreaking book. In the past century there were only a handful of innovative writers who prodded us to think deeply and imaginatively about crime and punishment in the modern world. Topping my list are Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer's "Punishment and Social Structure" (1939), Erving Goffman's "Asylums" (1961), Michel Foucault's "Discipline & Punish" (1977), Stuart Hall's "Policing the Crisis" (1978) and Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" (1990). Now, if you want to understand why progressive California leads the Western world with its regressive system of punishment, Gilmore's "Golden Gulag" is the first must-read book of the 21st century.
Tony Platt is professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento. His latest book is "Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial" (Paradigm Publishers, 2006).
Page M - 1
URL:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/31/RVGNG-SN44B71.DTL
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
Posted by lois at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
December 30, 2006
Legislative bumbling is to blame for much of the prison problems
Letter published in Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, CO
Regarding The Daily Sentinel's story about exporting of 240 prisoners to Sayre, Oklahoma, this crisis is the direct result of malfeasance by Colorado legislators and officials.
A lack of nerve plus pandering to the fears of the public have resulted in increased sentences for Colorado prisoners and backward parole policies that keep many minor, non-dangerous offenders in prison for so long.
Along with TABOR, a deficit of DOC ethics and professionalism have kept Colorado from building its own prisons and the failure to properly monitor the performance of the for-profit lockups that were built in their place.
I predicted a riot would occur at the Crowley private prison months before it exploded in flames on July 20, 2004. Colorado officials blithely looked the other way, ignoring the same whistleblowers to which I’d been speaking for a year.
That riot cost taxpayers over $700,000, less than half of which the DOC recovered after it was finally forced to assess damages. It was the second such Crowley riot. The first required intervention of law enforcement from four states.
Recently, the Pueblo Chieftain editorialized, "Private prison plans for Pueblo have been declared dead as the result of a scathing state audit and other serious questions involving the proposed operator, Florida-based GEO Group. We say good riddance."
State Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo requested the audit, which found that a former state director of prisons, for $1 million, was helping GEO to get a contract for a private prison in Weld County while he still was employed by the state.
The Crowley warden went to Sayre, Okla., the destination of the Colorado inmates. It was closed for years after Wisconsin withdrew its prisoners because they were deprived family contact.
FRANK SMITH, National Field Director Private Corrections Institute Bluff City, Kan.
http://www.gjsentinel.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2006/12/24/12_24_06_letters.html
Posted by lois at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
NY Times Editorial: Sex Offenders in Exile
December 30, 2006
Editorial, NY Times
Sex Offenders in Exile
Of all the places that sexual predators could end up after prison, the worst is out of sight, away from the scrutiny and treatment that could prevent them from committing new crimes. But communities around the country are taking that risk, with zoning laws that banish pedophiles to the literal edges of society.
There is a powerful and wholly understandable impulse behind laws that forbid sex offenders to live within certain distances of schools, day care centers and other places that children gather. Scores of states and municipalities have created such buffer zones, then continued adding layer upon layer to the enforcement blanket.
This has placed a heavy burden on law enforcement agencies, which already must struggle to meet exacting federal and state requirements for registering and monitoring the ever-growing population of released sex offenders, many of whom must be tracked for life. Lawmakers have shown no hesitation in piling on the administrative load, but frequently are less quick to pay for additional people to do the work.
As the areas off limits to sex offenders expand to encompass entire towns and cities, if not states, the places where they can live and work are shrinking fast. The unintended consequence is that offenders have been dispersed to rural nowhere zones, where they are much harder to track. In confined regions like Long Island, they have become concentrated in a handful of low-rent, few-questions-asked areas — an unintended and unfair imposition on their wary neighbors.
Many offenders respond by going underground. In Iowa, the number of registered sex offenders who went missing soared after the state passed a law forbidding offenders to live within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center. The county prosecutors’ association has urged that the law be repealed, for the simple reasons that it drives offenders out of sight, requires “the huge draining of scant law enforcement resources” and doesn’t provide the protection intended.
The prosecutors are right that any sense of security that such laws provide is vague at best and probably false. Just as it would feel foolish to forbid muggers to live near A.T.M.’s, it is hard to imagine how a 1,000-foot buffer zone around a bus stop, say, would keep a determined pedophile at bay. If children feel secure enough to drop their wariness of strangers, that would be a dangerous outcome. And of course, no buffer against a faceless predator will be any help to the overwhelming majority of child victims — those secretly abused by stepfathers, uncles and other people they know.
The problem with residency restrictions is that they fulfill an emotional need but not a rational one. It’s in everyone’s interest for registered sex offenders to lead stable lives, near the watchful eyes of family and law enforcement and regular psychiatric treatment. Exile by zoning threatens to create just the opposite phenomenon — a subpopulation of unhinged nomads off their meds with no fixed address and no one keeping tabs on them. This may satisfy many a town’s thirst for retributive justice, but as a sensible law enforcement policy designed to make children safer, it smacks of thoughtlessness and failure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/opinion/30sat1.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Posted by lois at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)
DE: Justice Dept. Finds Civil Rights Violations at 4 Del. Prisons
Justice Dept. finds civil rights violations at 4 Del. prisons—
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) -
The Justice Department announced today that the federal government has reached an agreement with Delaware aimed at improving medical conditions at four prison facilities where investigators found substantial civil rights violations.
Investigators reported problems at the Delores J- Baylor Women's Correctional Institution in New Castle, the Howard R- Young Correctional Institution in Wilmington, the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna and the Sussex Correctional Institution in Georgetown. The investigation didn't find constitutional violations at a fifth facility, John L- Webb Correctional Facility in Wilmington.
In the other four facilities, federal officials reported inadequate intake screening and health assessments to identify acute and chronic health conditions of inmates. They also found inadequate treatment of inmates with infectious diseases and serious mental illness. Investigators noted deficiencies in the state's suicide prevention measures.
http://www.wmdt.com/wires/displaystory.asp?id=57107709
Posted by lois at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
December 29, 2006
VA: No More Prisons in VA--Grayson County
NO MORE PRISONS IN VIRGINIA - GRAYSON COUNTY
For More Information: http://www.coxchapelgrange.org/
SUGGESTED COMMENTS
Phone calls, letters, e-mails and chance meetings or discussions will be helpful and promote understanding of the issue. Please use any resource or opportunity to share information with County and State officials.
The issue statement will serve as a base of information and the following statements are suggested for your use. Please feel free to use any and all information as you communicate in your own style and words.
A. Please help my neighbors and me in defeating the proposed site for a prison. Locating a prison on the New River and in Grayson County will be a devastating way to provide jobs, most of which will not go to present residents, but to those experienced in prison management.
B. A correctional facility on the New River will diminish the recreational experience of visitors and residents alike. As one of America’s Heritage Rivers, the New River is one of the few in the United States that can be experienced as a natural waterway and is an American treasure.
C. Grayson County is blessed with natural beauty and is well-known for the scenic terrain of Grayson Highlands State Park, Mt. Rogers and the New River. Placing a prison here would forever send a negative message to residents and visitors.
D. The site in Cox’s Chapel Community will incur substantial costs for a bridge and new roads that would be
invasive on private property and community residents. The expense for construction would add increased financial responsibilities to this already expensive project.
E. A great deal of money has been spent on preserving the New River, its communities and its heritage. Building economic strength through tourism with the establishment of the heritage music trail The Crooked Road and the artisan network ‘Round the Mountain, growth and progress has come with small and well-planned steps. Grayson County needs balanced and planned growth to enhance present opportunities.
F. The prison would forever bring a negative change to the human, natural and economical environment to the second oldest river in the world.
Please share this information with your incarcerated love one and others. United we stand, divided we fall.
Resource Information Help for the Disadvantaged(RIHD)
Prisoner Self Help Rehabilitation
PO Box 55 - Highland Springs - Virginia 23075
(804) 562-2123 www.rihd.org
Addresses for Letter Writing Campaign To Governor Tim Kaine
The Honorable Tim Kaine
Office of the Governor
Patrick Henry Building, 3rd floor
1111 East Broad Street
Richmond, VA 23219
Ms. Kim Lipp
Virginia Department of Corrections
6900 Atmore Drive
Richmond, VA 23261
804-674-3102-1206
John W. Marshall
Virginia Department of Public Safety
Patrick Henry Building
1111 East Broad Street
Richmond, VA 23219
Mr. Preston Bryant
Secretary of Natural Resources
Office of the Secretary of Natural Resources
P.O. Box 1475
Richmond, VA 23218
Senator William C. Wampler, Jr.
510 Cumberland Street, Ste. 308
Bristol, TN 24201-4381
Senator John H. Chichester**
Finance Committee Chairman
P.O. Box 904
Fredricksburg, VA 22404
Senator Walter A. Stosch**
In-session address:
General Assembly Building, Room 621
Capitol Square
Richmond, Virginia 23219
(804) 698-7512
Mailing address:
Innsbrook Centre
4551 Cox Road
Suite 110
Glen Allen, Virginia 23060-6740
(804) 527-7780
Sterling Proffitt, Chairman**
Commonwealth of Virginia Board of Corrections
6900 Atmore Drive
Richmond Virginia, 23225
Jimmy Burrell, Vice Chairman**
Commonwealth of Virginia Board of Corrections
6900 Atmore Drive
Richmond Virginia, 23225
Bobby Mitchell, Secretary**
Commonwealth of Virginia Board of Corrections
6900 Atmore Drive
Richmond Virginia, 23225
Local Officials
Charles W. “Bill” Carrico
1139 Turkey Knob Road
Fries, VA 24330
276-744-7925 - Home
276-773-9600 – Office
Mr. Ralph Tuggle
848 Black Rock Mountain Lane
Independence, VA 24348
276-773-2806
Mr. Mike Maynard
550 Little Wilson Road
Mouth of Wilson, VA 24363
276-579-9442
Mr. D.K. “Doug” Carrico
2450 Old Baywood Road
Galax, VA 24333
276-238-8826 - Office
276-238-8844 - Home
Larry K. Bartlett
94 Pondside Lane
Galax, VA 24333
276-236-9333
Joe Vaughn
2948 Clito Road
Fries, VA 42333
276-744-7255 Home
Posted by lois at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2006
CT: Plan to have residential program for men currently incarcerted
"According to a study conducted earlier this year at Central Connecticut State University, the overall recidivism rate among more than 8,000 prisoners who were released in 2000 and tracked for six years, was 39 percent. Those who served their entire sentences at a correctional facility had a recidivism rate of 47 percent, compared to a 24 percent rate among those who were released into residential programs."
Hartford Courant- CONNECTICUT NEWS
Plan Would Open Home To Inmates
Blue Hills Avenue Facility Now Houses A Residential Program For Youths
December 28, 2006
By STEVEN GOODE, Courant Staff Writer
BLOOMFIELD -- An agency that for years has operated a residential program for troubled youths on Blue Hills Avenue is seeking permission to convert the facility for use as an adult halfway house.
The proposal, by Windsor-based Community Solutions Inc., comes as the state Department of Correction continues to look for ways to increase adult residential placements as a means to combat recidivism and help reduce the bloated inmate population, which is again near levels reached earlier in the decade.
Community Solutions, which operates 40 residential supervision and treatment programs in Connecticut and other states, is one of several vendors that contracts with the correction department to house inmates released into community facilities.
Under the Blue Hills Avenue proposal, which must be approved by the planning commission, 40 male inmates would be housed near a condominium complex and an enclave of single-family homes, for two to eight months each, and would be offered a wide range of services, including employment, housing search, life skills development and case management.
Bloomfield officials expressed support for the plan to house adult prisoners making the transition back to their communities, with some ground rules.
"We are going to insist on them not having certain types of clients that are not appropriate to a neighborhood context," Town Manager Louie Chapman Jr. said Wednesday.
The restrictions would address individuals with acute or chronic psychological or psychiatric difficulties, predatory sex offenders, and those convicted of arson.
Brian Garnett, spokesman for the Department of Correction, said Wednesday that there are currently 1,057 halfway-house placements statewide and the department is seeking 150 more as it expands community reunification efforts.
Garnett said that while offenders will continue to serve their full sentences, portions of those sentences will increasingly be served in residential programs.
The push for more halfway houses was given a boost with the appointment in 2003 of Theresa Lantz as correction commissioner, and continues today backed by data on recidivism rates.
According to a study conducted earlier this year at Central Connecticut State University, the overall recidivism rate among more than 8,000 prisoners who were released in 2000 and tracked for six years, was 39 percent. Those who served their entire sentences at a correctional facility had a recidivism rate of 47 percent, compared to a 24 percent rate among those who were released into residential programs.
"As a result, we have sought out other opportunities, because we know it works," Garnett said. "Halfway-house placements are the best thing we can do to support them and make sure they don't re-offend."
Garnett said the community release push is not a reaction to recent figures that show the state's inmate population again is on the rise after three years of decline. He attributed the recent increase to more violent crime and arrests in urban areas, as well as the system housing illegal immigrants for federal agencies. As of Wednesday, there were 18,800 prisoners incarcerated in Connecticut, according to Department of Correction figures. Garnett said the department will require those eligible for supervised release to meet strict standards.
"We are not going to put anyone into a community who is going to create a risk," he said.
Chapman said that when the facility was geared toward housing juvenile offenders in the past, some residents initially expressed concern. He said there was no increase in crime as a result and that he expected a similar result with the change to a halfway house for adults.
The proposal is scheduled to go before the Bloomfield Plan and Zoning Commission on Jan. 22. Contact Steven Goode at sgoode@courant.com.
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-ctconboard1228.artdec28,0,1139591.story?coll=hc-headlines-local
Posted by lois at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)
VA: Cox's Chapel No Place For A Prison
12/28/06
Cox's Chapel no place for a prison
John A. Duvall
Duvall lives in Comers Rock and is a retired United Methodist pastor.
The Roanoke Times has earlier reported plans for a state penitentiary on New River in Cox's Chapel community in Grayson County. Evaluation is ongoing.
Grayson political leaders are hyping this prison as a cure-all for the county's ailing economy. Couple this with the implied blackmail that it must go to Cox's Chapel or "almost certainly not be in Grayson County," along with the claim it would keep area youth at home with jobs guarding convicts, and Grayson officials and the private contractor appear to think they're making a convincing case.
I believe the result will be destroying a historic community and sacrificing the honest toil, way of life and noble citizenship of generations upon the reckless altar of unfeeling expediency.
Further, the county supervisors reportedly stand "unanimous" in this venture. Thus, the question arises of who represents, and offers to protect, the rights of the multiplied scores of area citizens who happen to disagree? If Samuel Johnson were alive, I think he'd now write, "The last refuge of scoundrels" is no longer patriotism, it's rule by confidential unanimity!
It's also argued a prison will hasten area public water systems with low rates guaranteed. I think dependable water/sewer systems, with reasonable prices should be expected, with or without a prison.
The truth is, prisons have become big business trafficking, sadly, in human wreckage. Virginia has more people locked away than the entire populations of Grayson and Carroll counties and Galax combined. Without possibility of parole, the numbers skyrocket.
Additional space, when required, should be built only at industrial locations. Planting a multimillion dollar common jail along the banks of the picturesque New River in the midst of a nationally recognized rural community, however winsome the site, ought to be the last thing Grayson leaders or Virginia corrections officials advocate, or do.
Grayson County's pastoral beauty and quality families are legendary. Both must be nurtured and protected. I urge Virginia leaders to summarily decline the Cox's Chapel site.
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/wb/xp-97674
Posted by lois at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)
MA: 2 men and one woman commit suicide in prisons in Dec.
Third suicide this month at a Massachusetts prison
12/28/2006, Daily Hampshire Gazette
BOSTON (AP) - A convicted killer serving a life sentence for a 1983 murder hanged himself early Wednesday in his cell at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, a state prison spokeswoman said, in what was the third suicide this month in the state prison system.
Glenn Bourgeois, 44, was found hanging in his cell in a segregation unit at 4:34 a.m., and was pronounced dead less than an hour later at Norwood Hospital, said Diane Wiffin, Department of Correction spokeswoman.
Bourgeois was convicted of first degree murder, armed robbery and other charges in 1985 stemming from a fatal shooting during a robbery in Middleborough in September 1983, Wiffin said.
Bourgeois used a bedsheet to hang himself in a cell in a segregation unit called 10 Block. Wiffin said the unit was fully staffed with a lieutenant and two officers. She said a review of video shows the officers followed policy by conducting cell checks every half-hour.
There are 60 cells in 10 Block, currently housing 57 inmates, she said. Bourgeois was "not an active mental health case," according to a DOC statement. He was transferred to Cedar Junction on Aug. 8 from the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater after officials discovered a cellular phone and 8-inch hacksaw blade piece in his cell. Officials said last week that two people in custody hanged themselves at separate state prison facilities within two hours of each other late Dec. 12 or early Dec. 13.
Nicole Davis, 24, was found hanging by a bedsheet at MCI-Framingham late Dec. 12. Davis was in custody for a 30-day drug detoxification program but was not a convicted criminal.
Convicted murderer Eduardo Soto, 33, was found hanging by a bedsheet at Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater early Dec. 13.
"The only parallel is they are in DOC custody," Wiffin said of the rash of suicides. "It's not evidence of a larger matter."
Still, the DOC in September began a suicide prevention assessment. Wiffin said the findings would be released early in the new year.
Posted by lois at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2006
NC: Prison Boom Continues
News & Observer
Raleigh, NC
Dec 27, 2006 12:30 AM
State's new prisons not enough
Lawmakers face prospect of spending millions to avoid overcrowding
Dan Kane, Staff Writer
When North Carolina finishes a prison building boom in 2008, it will still lack room for roughly 400 inmates, according to the latest estimates for North Carolina's prison population.
The space crunch only gets worse from there.
By 2016, the prison system will have nearly 6,400 more inmates than beds if no measures are taken to add space or reduce sentences.
Given the time it takes to build prisons, state lawmakers and Gov. Mike Easley again face the prospect of spending tens of millions of dollars in the coming legislative session so the prison system does not become dangerously crowded.
"You can't wait until the last minute to decide what you are going to do," said Boyd Bennett, the prisons director for the N.C. Department of Correction. "It's my belief that it will be an issue that the legislature will need to address."
The lack of space causes other problems. County jails could again see their cells filled with convicted criminals awaiting assignment to a state prison. The crunch also makes it harder for lawmakers to push for tough-on-crime initiatives that are likely to be popular with voters, such as increased penalties for gang activity or child pornography.
"What scares me is we're making new laws every day that are putting more people in jail, and so the population's going up -- I don't see it going down -- and we're going to have to work harder to accommodate them," said state Sen. John Snow, a Cherokee County Democrat and co-chairman of a state budget subcommittee that oversees prison spending. Snow is a former Superior Court judge.
At the same time, the lack of prison space allows lawmakers to consider alternatives that could shave time off some inmates' sentences and could free cells. The N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission has proposed several law changes to achieve that, but lawmakers have not warmed to the suggestions.
Other states, in an attempt to save money during budget crunches, have revised sentencing laws to reduce prison time for drug criminals and nonviolent repeat offenders.
Bennett said correction officials and Easley's budget staff are working on a plan to deal with the lack of cells.
A 10-year capital plan correction officials produced in May would provide space for roughly 7,650 inmates, largely by adding dormitories to existing prisons. Those expansions would cost between $10 million and $20 million per prison, department officials say.
The department also recommends a new 1,000-bed medium-security prison and a new 500-bed minimum-security prison with estimated costs of $63 million and $28 million, respectively.
All told, the plan's price tag comes to roughly $260 million for expansions and the two new prisons. Another $310 million would pay for new health care facilities in four prisons across the state.
Bennett said the department is looking to save money by having inmates perform some labor, which has the added benefit of teaching them a trade.
Nearly all the new construction would be for medium- and minimum-security housing.
Bertie Correctional Institution in Windsor, for example, is a new 1,000-bed maximum-security prison that would add a 500-bed section for medium-custody inmates and a 250-bed section for minimum-security inmates.
The last six prisons that are either built or are under construction are 1,000-cell maximum-security facilities that, at roughly $90 million each, are the most expensive to build.
Some lawmakers have criticized the department and other lawmakers for focusing solely on those types of prisons, especially after prison population projections indicated there were greater needs for less expensive medium and minimum-security housing.
Prison officials now plan to house medium- and maximum-custody inmates at the last maximum-security prison authorized by lawmakers, one that is under construction in Columbus County. It is due to open in 2008.
That proposed conversion, if approved by lawmakers, would allow Columbus to house 500 maximum custody inmates and 1,000 medium-custody inmates.
http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/525650.html
Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)
CO: Geo plan hits a bump in Ault
The Tribune
Ault prison plan hits bump
Roxye Arellano,
December 26, 2006
After the state Department of Corrections pulled its contract with the GEO Group to build a prison in Pueblo, Ault residents wonder about GEO's proposed prison plans in their backyard.
While some speculate that the department's decision to pull the contract will halt the company's plans for Ault, others say it has changed nothing. For Phillip Tidwell, a member of the Citizens Against Ault Prison, the Department of Correction's decision in Pueblo was good news for his own fight.
"We are elated ... finally someone will investigate them," he said. "The board is not calling off anything, but to me, like the DOC, why hasn't Ault pulled out on our contract with them? They're not truthful, not honest from the beginning ... Now, we don't feel alone. We will continue our own fight, it just feels like we're being assisted by the DOC."
The contract was canceled for the Pueblo prison after concern about Geo's lack of progress on the project.
The corrections department said that after four years, the company failed to respond to inquiries from them and failed to break ground on the Pueblo facility.
In Ault, the state awarded the GEO Group the right to build a 1,500-bed medium security men's prison on 40 acres in the southeast part of town. Despite the initial discussions, there still are no final decisions on the Ault proposal.
Ault Mayor Brad Bayne said the department's decision about the Pueblo facility won't change what's happening in Ault.
"The town hasn't changed its views on this," he said.
He said for the prison to be built in the town, there has to be a guarantee from the state, a negotiation between the town and the GEO Group that makes sense and a vote of residents to approve the plans.
Town officials haven't heard from a GEO Group representative since September when GEO hosted a public forum answering questions from residents, he said. "... We're in a holding pattern until the state guarantees the matter," he added.
The plan first came to light at the end of May when the GEO Group gave a proposal to the Ault Town Board. According to meeting minutes, representatives from GEO said the project would be funded through a local government bond, where the state pays the local government, which then pays GEO. They said the facility would house 1,500 beds, but the request for proposal on the project would allow up to 2,250 beds.
To fight the project, Citizens Against Ault Prison demanded an injunction on the town's code which will require a vote of residents to decide the fate of the prison. The injunction, which was signed by 297 voters, was approved by board members in November.
Although Ault's prison proposal hasn't had discussion on the construction phase, one issue remains the same: The lack of a guaranteed head count the GEO has requested from the corrections department. The state normally pays private facilities on a per-person basis.
"GEO asked for a bed guarantee," said Alison Morgan, director of private prisons for the Colorado Department of Corrections. "... Historically, the state has not provided a guarantee."
Ault residents have been divided on having the prison come to town. One group says the prison will help the town survive with increased tax revenues, jobs and housing developments. Others do not trust GEO or town board members and worry their voices are not being heard.
They are not the only ones who don't trust the GEO Group. Rep. Buffie McFayden, D-Pueblo, questioned why GEO Group was awarded a contract to build a facility in Ault when the same company had failed to perform under the Pueblo contract since 2003.
An audit performed by the Legislative Audit Committee questioned Nolin Renfrow, a former top official for the state corrections department, when he helped GEO Group win a state contract earlier in the year.
Renfrow is handling the discussions and deals with the town of Ault. The audit states Renfrow was helping GEO Group get a contract for a private prison in Ault while he was still employed by the state. The Ault project is expected to cost up to $100 million, and Renfrow would get a 1 percent fee or up to $1 million from the deal.
McFadyen questioned why the department was even considering a GEO request of giving them a written guarantee that the new beds would be filled, something the state has never provided to any of the five other existing private prisons in the state. While the talks of the prison facility are still ongoing, the recent news stories have taken a toll on the issue in Ault. GEO representatives did not return calls.
"In my own personal opinion, it doesn't look good for GEO," said Mayor Bayne. "... But I don't get too wrapped up when reading on the Pueblo issue or about Nolin. All that needs to play out. We only know as much as it is in the paper."
MORE ONLINE
To see the Department of Corrections letter to GEO Group log online at www.greeleytribune.com.
http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20061226/NEWS/112250091
Posted by lois at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)
Murders Up In Big Cities
Murders up in New York, other big cities
By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
NEW YORK -- After many years of decline, the number of murders climbed this year in New York and many other major U.S. cities, reaching their highest levels in a decade in some places. Among the reasons given: gangs, the easy availability of illegal guns, a disturbing tendency among young people to pull guns when they do not get the respect they demand, and, in Houston at least, an influx of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
In New York, where the city reported 579 homicides through Dec. 24 -- a nearly 10 percent increase from the year before -- the spike is mostly the result of an unusually large number of "reclassified homicides," or those involving victims who were shot or stabbed years ago but did not die until this year. Thirty-five such deaths have been added to this year's toll, compared with an annual average of about a dozen.
At the same time, Police Department spokesman Paul Browne noted that this year's total is only slightly higher than last year's 539 homicides -- the city's lowest death toll in more than 40 years.
Browne blamed the rise in part on the availability of guns, particularly weapons from out of state. The city this year sued dozens of out-of-state gun shops that it says are responsible for many of the illegal weapons on the streets of New York.
In Chicago, homicides through the first 11 months of the year were up 3.3 percent compared with the same period in 2005, reversing a four-year decline. A police spokeswoman said gang violence has been a contributing factor.
In New Haven, Conn., there were 23 homicides as of Tuesday, compared with 15 in 2004 and in 2005. Police Chief Francisco Ortiz said that about half of this year's killings involve young people settling disputes with guns instead of fists.
"They're all struggling with this thing about respect and pride," Ortiz said. "It's about respect. It's about revenge. It's about having a reputation. It's about turf and it's about girls."
Houston police attribute the 15 percent increase in the homicide count to the influx of Katrina evacuees from the Gulf Coast.
"So we expect that to settle," Lt. Murray Smith said. "We're hoping it will go down."
New Orleans, with its post-Katrina exodus, is the only major U.S. city that saw a sharp decline in the number of homicides. There were 154 in New Orleans this year as of Monday, said police spokesman Sgt. Jeffrey Johnson, down from 210 in 2005. But the city was largely empty during the fall and winter of 2005-06, and even now has only about half of its pre-Katrina population of 455,000.
Some cities, like Cincinnati -- which has had 83 homicides so far, up from 79 in 2005 -- posted their highest numbers ever. Others saw their highest death tolls in years.
Oakland, Calif., had 148 homicides as of Wednesday, up 57 percent from last year and the highest in more than a decade. Philadelphia's 2006 homicide total was 403 as of Wednesday, the first time the number has topped 400 in nearly a decade. There were 380 killings in all of 2005.
Philadelphia officials have struggled all year to reduce the violence. In July, Mayor John F. Street gave a televised address in which pleaded with young people: "Lay down your weapons. Do it now. Choose education over violence."
A few cities reported slight decreases in murders. Los Angeles' total was down about 4 percent to 464 homicides through Dec. 23. San Francisco's fell about 15 percent. San Francisco Police Sgt. Steve Mannina said the drop is partly due to increased patrols in violence-prone areas and more overtime approved by the police chief.
The FBI does not release its national crime statistics until several months after the end of the year. The bureau's statistics for the first six months of 2006 showed an increase of 1.4 percent in the number of murders in the first half of 2006 compared with the first six months of 2005.
Andrew Karmen, a criminologist at John Jay College in New York, said that while there are various theories for the drop in murders in New York and other cities in the 1990s, no one knows for sure why it happened. And if they are going up again, no one knows the reason for that, either, he said.
He noted that police departments tend to take credit when the murder rate goes down. "When crime goes up it will be interesting to see whether they will accept responsibility," Karmen said.
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=548400&category=&BCCode=&
newsdate=12/27/2006
Posted by lois at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
CA: Why LA jail cells have revolving doors
A TIMES INVESTIGATION
Why L.A. jail cells have revolving doors
A strained justice system and a flawed rehab law feed the cycle of repeat offenders.
By Megan Garvey and Jack Leonard, Times Staff Writers
December 26, 2006
Bertha Cuestas was standing outside her Highland Park apartment scratching off an instant lottery ticket when veteran Los Angeles Police Department Officers J.C. Duarte and Harold Marinelli spotted the 50-year-old from their patrol car.
They had been arresting Cuestas for prostitution and drugs since their days on the vice squad in the mid-1990s. On this warm October afternoon, she was wanted for failing to report to the judge in her most recent drug case.
"Why didn't you go to court?" Duarte asked her.
"I was busy," she replied.
Cuestas knew the drill. She asked a friend for money, then stuffed the $7.42 he gave her into her bra for the bus ride home when she got out of jail.
"How many times have you guys done this with her?" her son asked, cradling his infant daughter in his arm.
"Too many times," Marinelli said.
It was the start of a typical week for Duarte and Marinelli. Like other patrol officers throughout Los Angeles County, the longtime partners are spending more and more time picking up old regulars like Cuestas.
A Times investigation has found that thieves, drug offenders and other repeat criminals are cycling in and out of jail faster than ever.
Since 2000, the number of people booked two or more times into jails in Los Angeles County in a single year has jumped 73%, reaching 61,646 last year, according to a Times analysis. Repeat offenders now account for 42% of bookings, up from 26% in 2000.
Once booked, defendants enter a justice system whose resources have not kept pace with demand, even as crime has dropped in recent years.
There are not enough prosecutors to try them. There are not enough courts to sentence them. There are not enough jail or prison beds to house them. And there is not enough treatment to help them.
Instead, repeat offenders drain limited justice resources and are quickly back on the streets to get arrested again, taking up the time of police, prosecutors, public defenders and judges. Patrol cops are frustrated. Victims feel forgotten.
"Under any other definition of crisis, this would be an emergency," said Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who runs the nation's largest network of jails. "The system is collapsing because of its volume."
A solution, top law enforcement officials say, would require far more money than lawmakers have been willing to commit.
"We didn't cure malaria until we started draining the swamps instead of just swatting at the mosquitoes," said Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton. "The resources have just not been committed to draining the swamps."
A week on the beat
To gauge the effects of the revolving door, The Times examined jail bookings since 2000. Reporters interviewed prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, law enforcement leaders and criminologists.
The paper also spent a week in October with officers in the LAPD's Northeast Division, a 29-square-mile collection of affluent and poor neighborhoods that runs from Eagle Rock to eastern Hollywood.
Police that week made 28 adult felony arrests, on typical charges for the division's patrol officers, mostly drug offenses, thefts and domestic violence. Within six weeks of their arrests, 12 had cycled through the court system, were found guilty and were back on the streets. Three others arrested on warrants were released by judges within days.
Of those 15, three have already been rearrested and are back in jail.
"We get so many repeaters it's ridiculous," Officer Duarte said. "They do a few days and then they're back out again."
Duarte and Marinelli had a hand in five arrests that week, all involving repeat offenders. Together, the five had at least 106 previous arrests and 61 convictions. Cuestas alone had been arrested 21 times, most recently in July.
Cuestas had been ordered to enter rehab in August under Proposition 36, the 2000 state initiative that mandates treatment rather than incarceration for most nonviolent drug offenders. She never went, leading to the warrant.
She is among thousands who have failed to complete treatment. Although nearly 8,000 people in the county successfully completed Proposition 36 rehab between July 2001 and June 2005, they are the minority. UCLA researchers found that about 75% of those sentenced to treatment opted out, never showed up or stopped going.
Duarte and Marinelli believe the initiative gives longtime, chronic users like Cuestas too many chances to reoffend, with little consequence.
"We need to let the courts know Prop. 36 is not working for a lot of people," Duarte said.
A parolee is arrested
A day after they arrested Cuestas, Marinelli and Duarte were called in to help with a search. Rodolfo Salcido, 35, had been pulled over driving a stolen 1991 Toyota Camry. Before police could detain him, he fled, jumping over a picket fence in a Cypress Park neighborhood.
Police found Salcido crammed into an attic crawl space in the laundry room of a nearby apartment building.
"All right, officers, I'm coming out," he told them. He was on parole for stealing another car. Sweat poured from his shaved head and tattooed torso.
Salcido had spent the last seven years in and out of prison, never in for more than a year or out for more than nine months. In 1999, he was convicted of stealing a $4,000 LAPD radio from an unmarked police car. Soon after, he went to prison in another burglary case, the first of four prison terms.
In his wake, he left victims like Emma Sanchez, a mother of two and owner of the stolen Camry. Sanchez is one of more than 23,000 people whose cars were stolen in the city this year. She said it took her more than six months, working for minimum wage as a lunch-truck driver, to save $2,500 to buy the car.
She said she paid about $220 to the city to get her car out of the impound lot. Her prized $400 stereo was gone.
The Camry smelled of stale beer and cigarettes.
She feels uneasy behind the wheel, as though the car is no longer hers.
"They say once a car is stolen, it's not good anymore," Sanchez said. "I don't even like driving in it. It's not the same anymore. It feels like it was violated."
'Don't I know you?'
A few hours after Salcido's arrest, Duarte and Marinelli were on a new case. The division's detectives received a tip that Orlando Gallegos, 34, a burglary suspect also wanted for failing to report for his parole, was living at a dingy Highland Park hotel.
In the late afternoon, the officers pounded on his door. They found him in his narrow room, several baggies of heroin in the freezer, stolen credit cards on the dresser and two convicted criminals as company.
In the dim hallway, the suspects knelt, handcuffed and facing the wall. Gallegos caught the eye of Marinelli.
"Don't I know you?" Marinelli asked him. "You look familiar to me."
A check of Gallegos' rap sheet jogged Marinelli's memory. Three years earlier, Gallegos had led him on a brief high-speed chase in a stolen car.
"I knew I knew you," said Marinelli, shaking his head.
Gallegos told police he'd found the credit cards in a trashcan.
Police first arrested Gallegos when he was 18 for possession of a small amount of marijuana. Five years later, he was arrested and convicted of vandalism.
In 1999, he was convicted of domestic violence. A burglary conviction in 2000 led to prison time after he violated probation. Two years later, when Marinelli caught him driving a stolen car, he was sent back to prison.
Gallegos' convictions, though frequent, never met the threshold of a strike under California's three-strikes law, which increases sentences for repeat offenders convicted of more serious or violent crimes. And so he cycled rapidly in and out of jail and prison.
One of the men in the hotel room, Evaristo Torres, 31, was furious at the arrival of police. He said he'd only come by to find someone to "smoke some weed with, get a beer with." He told officers he didn't even know the names of the other men.
Gilbert Morales, 46, told police he was on parole for drunk driving and on probation for drug possession. In the cinderblock holding cells of the Northeast Division, an officer searched him.
The officer pulled a tiny baggie filled with what looked like rock cocaine from Morales' small front jeans pocket. Another bag held what appeared to be a balloon of heroin and powder cocaine.
"Am I going to find anything else?" the officer asked. "You might as well tell me because I'm going to find it."
"No, nothing," Morales said.
The officer pulled another tiny bag from one of Morales' socks: methamphetamine and a single tablet of Tylenol.
It was his 47th arrest. Over the years, he'd had 24 convictions, seven for felonies. This was his third arrest this year.
After nightfall, Marinelli and Duarte helped drive Gallegos, Morales and Torres to the city's downtown jail in Parker Center.
There, Morales said he believed he could stop using drugs, if he could get the right help.
"I did good for a while when I had residential treatment. Maybe if I can get that again," he said.
His friend Gallegos needed medical evaluation for an old head injury. A nurse asked if he was on any medication.
"Dylantin for seizures," he said. She gave him his dose for the day.
Was he on any drugs or alcohol? He shook his head no.
"He got interrupted," Marinelli said.
Some deals are made
Duarte and Marinelli doubted that the five suspects they helped arrest would serve much time. They were right. Four were back on the streets within three weeks.
Cuestas, the drug abuser whose son watched her arrest, spent six days in jail before a judge released her on probation.
On Dec. 7, she failed to show up for a court hearing to decide whether her probation should be revoked. A judge issued a new arrest warrant.
Twelve days after his arrest for car theft, Rodolfo Salcido shuffled into Department 50 of the downtown Los Angeles criminal courthouse. His previous convictions ‹ for robbery, burglary and car theft, among other crimes ‹ meant that he faced up to 13 years in prison. Because his 1995 robbery is considered a strike under the three-strikes law, he would have to serve 80% of the time.
But prosecutors and Judge David M. Horwitz agreed on a three-year prison sentence in return for a guilty plea. As part of the deal, the judge did not consider Salcido's robbery conviction. With credit for good behavior, he is likely to serve only half his sentence.
It did not take long to resolve the drug arrests of the three men in Orlando Gallegos' Highland Park hotel room.
Torres sat in jail for five days until he appeared in court and promised to pay the fine he owed on his previous drug case. When he did so three weeks later, the case was dismissed.
Less than three weeks after their arrests, Gallegos and Morales each pleaded guilty to drug possession. Probation officers recommended prison for Morales, noting that he had already been sentenced under Proposition 36 and "has either been unable or unwilling to rehabilitate."
But Proposition 36 required that both men be sentenced to treatment. In drug court, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Maria E. Stratton read aloud a long list of probation conditions.
"If you mess up ‹ and you might mess up ‹ come to court," she told them. "Don't just blow it off. I'd hate to have the police sent out to find you."
That afternoon, the friends left the criminal courthouse together as free men. It had been 19 days since their arrests.
On Dec. 1, Gallegos rode a bus to the downtown criminal courthouse to check in with Stratton. He had yet to enroll in treatment or attend 12-step meetings. She told him to come back in January with more to show for himself.
His friend Morales was due in court the same day. But there was no answer when Stratton called his name. The judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
A vicious cycle
The county's top law enforcement officials concede that local justice often appears at odds with itself. The number of arrests by county police agencies has risen sharply since 2000. Yet budget cuts have reduced the number of prosecutors available to handle their cases.
The county's courts have not added a single judge to hear criminal cases in more than a decade. Overwhelmed, judges are increasingly relying on special courts where defendants are offered more generous deals in return for quick guilty pleas.
The available room for offenders in jail has also shrunk, due to financial woes and federal court limits on overcrowding. Most offenders sentenced to jail are released well before they complete their sentences. Since 2002, more than 16,000 inmates have been rearrested during time they would still have been in jail if not for early release.
Low-level offenders with enough felony convictions eventually get sent to state prison. But they too cycle in and out. More than half are back in prison within two years of their release.
Beyond jail and prison walls, the state has committed $120 million each year to Proposition 36 ‹ an expense that researchers note has saved millions more on incarceration costs. But a shortage of funds for treatment programs has created waiting lists for residential rehab beds, increasing the chance participants in the program will relapse while awaiting treatment.
Baca blames state lawmakers for concentrating their efforts on enacting laws that increase prison terms for the worst offenders, such as murderers, rapists and other violent criminals. Those laws, he said, fail to deal with drug abuse that plagues lower-level offenders, who commit the bulk of crimes.
"All of these extraordinary laws only work for the worst of the worst," Baca said. For the common offender, he said, they are "not a deterrent."
'We need help'
Even criminals say the system is failing.
On a recent Saturday, Salcido walked into the visiting area of the county's Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic. He was still awaiting transport to prison on his car-theft conviction. Salcido worried his children would read about him. But he began speaking about his drug problems. When he was caught, he said, he'd been on a three-week methamphetamine bender.
"Why do you think these crimes are committed ‹ because I like committing crimes?" he asked. "I've done [prison]. What's the point? Obviously, it's not helping me. Can't they put two and two together? Why not say, 'Here's 18 months in a live-in program?' "
Salcido said he'd attended AA meetings in prison but needed more help. After leaving prison in January, he said, he stayed off drugs for months. Then he was ordered to make child-support payments that took nearly half his $400-a-week construction job wages.
"Instead of drinking a couple of beers, you start doing a couple of lines. Stop coming home. Stop going to work. You're going to lose your job," he said.
"It's always prison, prison, prison. It just corrupts you more," he said, his voice angry and frustrated. "We need help. We're sick. It shouldn't just be back to prison."
Out of jail after his latest arrest, Orlando Gallegos was struggling to rebuild his life.
During the three weeks he was incarcerated, he lost his job servicing old refrigerators. The manager of the hotel where he'd been living threatened to evict him. He had no rent money.
Three weeks after his release, Gallegos said he needed a steady job to stay out of trouble. But his criminal history along with the seizures he suffers make it difficult for him to find work.
"I can't get a job so I find different ways of trying to make my money. When I don't have no work, sometimes I have to steal for it," said Gallegos, who spoke slowly and sometimes struggled to articulate his thoughts. "A car ‹ if I see a window open, I might see what's in it or I might go into a store and steal whatever I can steal. Like, if there's a bike laying out in front of the yard, I might take itŠ. I do these little [crimes] that I know I'm not going to go to prison for the rest of my life."
For now, he said, he was managing to stay clear of heroin and wanted to find work again.
"I like being ‹ how do you say? ‹ stable Š taking care of myself, you know. Paying my bills, you know. That felt good, you know, paying my rent every month. And to buy something. I don't have to go steal for it," he said.
Marinelli and Duarte, who have been partners for 18 years, said they've seen too few people turn their lives around.
"A lot of these guys could change if they really wanted to, but the problem is that it's too hard," Duarte said. "Too hard once you've got a felony record ‹ to get a decent job or to make ends meet. And especially if you've got a drug problem, then forget it. All bets are off."
But both officers said their sympathies lie with victims.
"They get outraged," Marinelli said. "'What? He's already out?' Or they'll call us and say, 'Hey! The guy you arrested yesterday for vandalizing my wall is standing right in front of my house right now!' They don't understand the system."
Postscript:
On Dec. 18, Gilbert Morales was arrested again by LAPD officers and is facing new drug possession charges. Bertha Cuestas was arrested Dec. 20 for failing to appear in court. Rodolfo Salcido is awaiting transportation to state prison. Orlando Gallegos said he planned to enter treatment next month. Evaristo Torres lost his job while in jail. He said he is struggling financially and emotionally but has not had new trouble with the law.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
megan.garvey@latimes.com
jack.leonard@latimes.com
Times researcher Maloy Moore and staff writer Hector Becerra contributed to this report. Data analysis by Doug Smith and Sandra Poindexter.
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Rise in caseload
In recent years, Los Angeles County's courts and jails have struggled to keep pace with demand.
2000
Total number of bookings: 321,032
Bookings involving repeat offenders: 82,400
Felony filings: 56,404
Number of county prosecutors: 989
---
2005
Total number of bookings: 375,655
Bookings involving repeat offenders: 159,389
Felony filings: 68,277
Number of county prosecutors: 903
---
Note: Bookings based on calendar year data. Filings, number of prosecutors are for fiscal years.
---
Case study: Northeast Division
During the week of Oct. 2 to Oct. 8, police made 28 adult felony arrests in the LAPD's Northeast Division on suspicion of crimes that included drug possession, theft, assault and a variety of other offenses.
Of the 28 arrested:
12 were found guilty, sentenced and let out of but two were rearrested and are back in jail
5 have court cases pending
3 were sentenced to prison
3 were released by the courts, but one was rearrested and is back in jail
2 were released early but placed in federal custody on unrelated charges
2 were not charged with a crime
1 was sentenced to drug treatment in jail
---
Sources: L.A. County Superior Court, L.A. County district attorney's office, L.A. County Sheriff's Department.
http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me-churn26dec26,0,1712742.story?coll=ktla-news-1
Posted by lois at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
FL: Private Sector Solution to Mental Health Problems Rather than Jail/Prison
"The Florida Substance Abuse and Mental Health Corp., created by the Legislature last spring, of which I am an ex-officio member, will advise the governor on this very issue in 2007. The corporation has put together a Committee on Criminal Justice to examine this dilemma and to help develop a comprehensive mental health and substance abuse care plan for juveniles and adults. The committee is concentrating on developing a plan that includes diversion tactics to place people with mental health or substance abuse needs who commit minor infractions in alternative facilities rather than jails and prisons. The committee also will focus on in-care and after care services for both age groups."
Cyclical mental health care effects costly in Lee County Turnstile approach leads many to prison
Originally posted on December 26, 2006
People in need of mental health care in Lee County have been facing a crisis for quite some time. Years, in fact. Years of neglect and cyclical care that's just not working.
People in need of mental health and substance abuse care continue to enter and exit a turnstile that one time may lead to a short-term care facility and the next time may lead into the state or federal prison system or even a juvenile justice facility. Most times there is very little hope of breaking this cycle as there are too few beds available for long-term care. This ineffective pattern is costly to taxpayers because people in need are continuously in and out of our courts and criminal justice facilities. This is not the right venue for them and truthfully, the cycle is just plain cruel to people who truly are in need.
We need to realize that it is not a crime to need mental health care. But it is a crime to treat people with a mental illness as though they are criminals.
To exacerbate this issue, when a person with a mental illness is placed in a jail or justice facility, they may be given contradictory or less effective medications than they have been originally prescribed, causing physical and emotional reactions and unneeded stress on the individual. Controlling medical care in the criminal justice system is mostly a fiscal issue, not a best-medical care practice, and could provide a contradictory purpose to the person needing mental health treatment. For example, earlier this year in a Pinellas jail, an inmate plucked out his eye in frustration while waiting for treatment.
JAIL CRISIS
Once released from the jail or prison system, people in need begin living under short-term state care or in private facilities. When they are released from these temporary shelters, they often begin living on the street and then can end up without medication and back in the justice system. This is a broad example of the broken circle.
According to the Florida Department of Children & Families, more than 309 adults in crisis are currently being held in jails and prisons while waiting for one of the paltry 1,329 available state beds. For juveniles, there only are 158 beds available and half a dozen youth are awaiting care. Despite ever-increasing spending on correction facilities for both juveniles and adults, Florida's jail and prison populations are growing faster than we can build them.
On a national level, up to 700,000 people or about 6 percent of the 11.4 million adults booked into U.S. jails each year have active symptoms of serious mental illness. In Florida about 20 percent of the adult inmates are people with a mental illness.
Florida is not alone in this crisis but perhaps we can set a good example for what is needed. Turning our backs on this issue and pretending it does not exist is not the solution. Instead, the solution is a public-private team approach that will provide a smooth transition from a crisis situation to long-term private care.
STATUS QUO UNACCEPTABLE
The Florida Substance Abuse and Mental Health Corp., created by the Legislature last spring, of which I am an ex-officio member, will advise the governor on this very issue in 2007. The corporation has put together a Committee on Criminal Justice to examine this dilemma and to help develop a comprehensive mental health and substance abuse care plan for juveniles and adults. The committee is concentrating on developing a plan that includes diversion tactics to place people with mental health or substance abuse needs who commit minor infractions in alternative facilities rather than jails and prisons. The committee also will focus on in-care and after care services for both age groups.
The committee and larger corporations do recognize already-in-place local and state agencies and facilities that can provide the base network for people in need. It is looking to strengthen these with legislation, guidance and enhanced diversion and long-term services which means increasing expenditures for these services. Earlier this month, the Department of Children & Families developed a 13-point list of Forensic Waitlist Actions to help focus attention on the need for additional and diversionary care.
I want to bring these solutions into Lee County and help our existing facilities and programs fill in the gaps. This will take social and financial support. The Smart Growth Committee recently held a workshop where members discussed supporting this initiative. However, additional input and discussions are needed to make this partnership work.
Status quo won't do. The goal is to provide relief to our community by helping to thin out the jail population, keep people off of the streets and save money by taking people in need out of the court system and providing them with preventative care.
‹ Bob Janes is chairman of the Lee County Board of County Commissioners.
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061226/OPINION/612260
330/1015
Posted by lois at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
CT: State Prisons Bulging Again
State prisons bulging again, but Rell says situation improving
December 26, 2006
HARTFORD, Conn. --State officials say Connecticut's prison population has again boomed to the level it was three years ago when overcrowding forced the state to ship some prisoners to Virginia.
But Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who praised state correction officials for handling the recent increase without incident, said Tuesday that she believes the population is now starting to drop again.
Figures show that the increase, which comes after three years of decline, is especially sharp among prisoners awaiting trial.
The prison population jumped from about 17,700 in 2001 to 19,200 in 2003. It was less than 10,000 in 1990.
The big increase spurred lawmakers to examine alternatives to prison, especially for drug addicts and nonviolent offenders.
The population steadily declined in 2004 and 2005, dipping below 18,000 again at the beginning of this year.
But it crept up to 18,500 in the middle of this year and surpassed 19,000 this fall, said Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the Department of Correction. The increase is due mostly to police roundups of gang members and other violent criminals in Hartford and New Haven, he said.
The state has had to house prisoners in gymnasiums at a few prisons, he said. State officials have asked federal immigration authorities if they can remove illegal immigrants from state prisons.
They've also asked judges in the state if they can release more defendants awaiting trial on nonviolent charges instead of jailing them on bond.
"It's not a mandate" to the judges, Garnett said. "But it's a way to give us some breathing room."
It would cut the number of inmates awaiting trial, a group that typically accounts for about 25 percent of the jail and prison population, Department of Correction statistics show.
State Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee and a former prosecutor, told The Advocate of Stamford that defendants who await trial in jail are more likely to receive a prison sentence from a judge than those who can afford to pay bond.
"If you come in off the street, you have a much better chance of getting probation than you do if you are in custody," he said.
Adam Liegeot, a spokesman for Rell, said Connecticut's prison population began decreasing in late summer.
"Gov. Rell has made it a priority to implement offender re-entry programs to ensure that those who have served their time and are released from prison will become productive, law-abiding citizens," Liegeot said. "Gov. Rell believes these re-entry efforts benefit both public safety and the taxpayer."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2006/12/26/state_priso
ns_bulging_again/
Information from: The Advocate, http://www.stamfordadvocate.com
Posted by lois at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2006
James Brown, The Godfather of Soul, Dies at 73
December 26, 2006
James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul,’ Dies at 73
By JON PARELES
James Brown, the singer, songwriter, bandleader and dancer who indelibly transformed 20th-century music, died early yesterday in Atlanta. He was 73 and lived in Beech Island, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga.
Mr. Brown died of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized for pneumonia, said his agent, Frank Copsidas.
Mr. Brown sold millions of records in a career that lasted half a century. In the 1960s and 1970s he regularly topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, although he never had a No. 1 pop hit. Yet his music proved far more durable and influential than countless chart-toppers. His funk provides the sophisticated rhythms that are the basis of hip-hop and a wide swath of current pop.
Mr. Copsidas said that Mr. Brown had participated in an annual Christmas toy giveaway in Augusta on Friday but had been hospitalized on Saturday. After canceling performances planned for midweek, Mr. Brown on Sunday night got his doctor’s approval to perform on Saturday in New Jersey and on New Year’s Eve at B.B. King’s nightclub in New York.
Mr. Copsidas said Mr. Brown used one of his best-known slogans to convey his dedication to his fans: “I’m the hardest working man in show business, and I’m not going to let them down.”
Through the years, Mr. Brown did not only call himself “the hardest working man in show business.” He also went by “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “the Minister of Super Heavy Funk” and “the Godfather of Soul,” and he was all of those and more.
His music was sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious. Beyond his dozens of hits, Mr. Brown forged an entire musical idiom that is now a foundation of pop worldwide.
“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know,” he wrote in an autobiography.
The funk Mr. Brown introduced in his 1965 hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” was both deeply rooted in Africa and thoroughly American. Songs like “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Cold Sweat,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Hot Pants” found the percussive side of every instrument and meshed sharply syncopated patterns into kinetic polyrhythms that made people dance.
Mr. Brown’s innovations reverberated through the soul and rhythm-and-blues of the 1970s and the hip-hop of the next three decades. The beat of a 1970 instrumental “Funky Drummer” may well be the most widely sampled rhythm in hip-hop.
Mr. Brown’s stage moves — the spins, the quick shuffles, the knee-drops, the splits — were imitated by performers who tried to match his stamina, from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, and were admired by the many more who could not. Mr. Brown was a political force, especially during the 1960s; his 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” changed America’s racial vocabulary. He was never politically predictable; in 1972 he endorsed the re-election of Richard M. Nixon.
Mr. Brown led a turbulent life, and served prison time as both a teenager and an adult. He was a stern taskmaster who fined his band members for missed notes or imperfect shoeshines. He was an entrepreneur who, at the end of the 1960s, owned his own publishing company, three radio stations and a Learjet (which he would later sell to pay back taxes). And he performed constantly: as many as 51 weeks a year in his prime.
Mr. Brown was born May 3, 1933, in a one-room shack in Barnwell, S.C. As he would later tell it, midwives thought he was stillborn, but his body stayed warm, and he was revived. When his parents separated four years later, he was left in the care of his aunt Honey, who ran a brothel in Augusta, Ga. As a boy he earned pennies buck-dancing for soldiers; he also picked cotton and shined shoes. He was dismissed from school because his clothes were too ragged.
He was imprisoned for petty theft in 1949 after breaking into a car, and paroled three years later. While in prison he sang in a gospel group. After he was released, he joined a group led by Bobby Byrd, which eventually called itself the Flames. At first, Mr. Brown played drums with the group and traded off lead vocals with other members. But with his powerful voice and frenzied, acrobatic dancing, he soon emerged as the frontman.
In 1955 the Flames recorded “Please Please Please” in the basement studio of a radio station in Macon, Ga. A talent scout heard it on local radio and signed the Flames to a recording contract with King Records. A second version, recorded in Cincinnati in 1956, became a million-selling single.
Nine follow-up singles were flops until, in 1958 a gospel-rooted ballad, “Try Me,” went to No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues chart. Mr. Brown followed up with more ballads, although the Flames’ stage shows would turn them into long, frenzied crescendos. His trademark routine of collapsing onstage, having a cape thrown over him and tossing it away for one more reprise, again and again, would leave audiences shouting for more.
In 1960 Mr. Brown’s version of “Think” put a choppy, Latin-flavored beat — hinting at the funk to come — behind a sustained vocal and pushed him back into the R&B Top 10 and the pop Top 40.
Mr. Brown had his first Top 20 pop hit in 1963 with “Prisoner of Love,” a ballad backed by an orchestra. But before those sessions he had done a series of shows at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the one on Oct. 24, 1962, was recorded. His label had not wanted to record the shows; Mr. Brown insisted. Released in 1963, “Live at the Apollo” — with screaming fans and galvanizing crescendos — revealed what the rhythm-and-blues circuit already knew, and became the No. 2 album nationwide.
James Brown and the Famous Flames toured nonstop through the 1960s. They were filmed in California for the “The T.A.M.I. Show,” released in 1965, which shows Mick Jagger trying to pick up Mr. Brown’s dance moves.
By the mid-1960s Mr. Brown was producing his own recording sessions. In February 1965, with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” he decided to shift the beat of his band: from the one-two-three-four backbeat to one-two-three-four. “I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat,” Mr. Brown said in 1990. “Simple as that, really.”
Actually it wasn’t that simple; drums, rhythm guitar and horns all kicked the beat around from different angles. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” won a Grammy Award as best rhythm-and-blues song, and it was only the beginning of Mr. Brown’s rhythmic breakthroughs. Through the 1960s and into the ’70s, Mr. Brown would make his funk ever more complex while stripping harmony to a bare minimum in songs like “Cold Sweat.” He didn’t immediately abandon ballads; songs like “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1966, mixed aching, bluesy lines with wrenching screams.
Amid the civil rights ferment of the 1960s Mr. Brown used his fame and music for social messages. He released “Don’t Be a Dropout” in 1966 and met with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to promote a stay-in-school initiative. Two years later “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” insisted, “We won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve.”
When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, Mr. Brown was due to perform in Boston. Instead of canceling his show, he had it televised. Boston was spared the riots that took place in other cities. “Don’t just react in a way that’s going to destroy your community,” he urged.
By the late 1960s Mr. Brown’s funk was part of pop, R&B and jazz: in his own hits, in songs by the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, and in the music of Miles Davis. It was also creating a sensation in Africa, where it would shape the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, the juju of King Sunny Ade and the mbalax of Youssou N’Dour.
Musicians who left Mr. Brown’s bands would also have a direct role in 1970s and 1980s funk; the saxophonist Maceo Parker, the trombonist Fred Wesley and the bassist Bootsy Collins were part of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and Mr. Parker also worked with Prince.
Through the early 1970s Mr. Brown’s songs filled dance floors. His self-described “super heavy funk” gave him No. 1 R&B hits and Top 20 pop hits with “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and “Mother Popcorn” in 1969, “Super Bad Pts. 1 & 2” in 1970, “Hot Pants” and “Make It Funky” in 1971, “Get on the Good Foot Pt. 1” in 1972 and “The Payback Pt. 1” in 1974. He provided soundtracks for blaxploitation movies like “Black Caesar” and “Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off,” and performed at the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire.
The rise of disco — a much simplified version of Mr. Brown’s funk — knocked him out of the Top 40 in the late 1970s. But an appearance in “The Blues Brothers” in 1980 started a career resurgence, and in 1985 Mr. Brown had a pop hit, peaking at No. 4, with “Living in America,” the song he performed in the movie “Rocky IV.” It won him his second Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording. That year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of its first members.
Meanwhile hip-hop had arrived, with Mr. Brown’s music often providing the beat. LL Cool J, Public Enemy, De La Soul and the Beastie Boys are among the more than 100 acts that have sampled Clyde Stubblefield’s drumming on “Funky Drummer” alone. In 1984 Mr. Brown collaborated with the influential rapper Afrika Bambaataa on the single “Unity.” He kept recording into the 21st century, including a 2002 studio album, “The Next Step.”
Mr. Brown maintained a nearly constant touring schedule despite a tumultuous personal life. During the 1970s the Internal Revenue Service demanded $4.5 million in unpaid taxes; the jet and radio stations were sold. His oldest son, Teddy, died in a car accident in 1973.
In 1988, intoxicated on PCP, he burst into an insurance seminar adjoining his own office in Augusta, then led police on a car chase across the South Carolina border. He was sentenced to prison for carrying a deadly weapon at a public gathering, attempting to flee a police officer and driving under the influence of drugs, and was released in 1991.
In 1998 after discharging a rifle and another car chase, he was sentenced to a 90-day drug rehabilitation program. He was officially pardoned by South Carolina in 2003, but arrested again in 2004 on charges of domestic violence against his fourth wife, Tomi Rae Hynie, a former backup singer. “I would never hurt my wife,” he said in a statement at the time. “I love her very much.”
She survives him, along with their son, James Brown II, and at least five other children.
In 1999, Mr. Brown made a deal to receive more than $25 million in bonds against advance publishing royalties. This year, however, he sought to refinance the bonds with a new loan. The banker who had made the original deal, David Pullman, objected to the terms, and Mr. Brown filed a lawsuit against him in July.
But Mr. Brown’s status as an American archetype had long since been assured. A definitive collection, “Star Time” (Universal), was released in 1991. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2003, the same year that Michael Jackson presented him with a BET Award for lifetime achievement. In a 1990 interview with The New York Times, he said, “I was always 25 years ahead of my time.”
John O’Neil contributed reporting.
Posted by lois at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2006
CA: COs earn $220 million in overtime
NATHAN BILOW / AP
Seattle Times
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Nation Digest
Overtime at California prisons costly
About 6,000 California corrections officers earned more than $100,000 in the past fiscal year, thanks to overtime in the strained prison system, and one brought in more than $250,000.
Overtime added $220 million to the $453 million base pay for those prison workers, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. More than 900 earned $50,000 or more in overtime alone.
Overtime costs have soared since the officers' current labor contract took effect five years ago, the newspaper reported.
The biggest payout to a corrections officer for the fiscal year that ended in June was $252,570, which went to a lieutenant.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to change the nation's largest prison system, which incarcerates almost 174,000 people in 33 prisons that were designed to hold 100,000.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003492872_ndig24.html
Posted by lois at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
"Ask A Policeman"
December 24, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor, NY Times
Ask a Policeman
By PETER NEUFELD
AFTER the Nov. 25 police shooting death of Sean Bell, the New York Police Department compiled a preliminary report. The 23-page report summarizes interviews of officers who did not directly participate in the critical encounter, of civilians who heard the gunfire but saw little and even one of Mr. Bell’s two wounded friends, questioned by the police as he lay in his hospital bed. Astonishingly, the report does not include a single interview with any of the four detectives and one police officer who fired the 50 shots at the three unarmed men.
Richard Brown, the Queens district attorney, noted that the report raises as many questions as it answers. But what does he expect when the report contains no interview with the shooters? Not only does this institutional failure make it extremely difficult to get a conviction in the event that a crime occurred, but it also minimizes the ability of the police internal affairs division to discipline police officers for their transgressions.
Good policing and common sense are deliberately ignored when the shooters are officers rather than civilians, as I know from representing Abner Louima and other victims of police misconduct. Not only do police suspects receive far greater protection than the rest of us, but our Police Department and the city’s five district attorneys, inexplicably, afford greater protection to officers than do the police and prosecutors in any other major city in the nation.
In the typical shooting incident where the police know who was involved but not how the shooting happened, investigators are trained to immediately separate and question suspects and participants, preventing those involved from getting together and devising a shared story. A good detective does not necessarily expect a quick confession, but even a superficially exculpatory statement, voluntarily given, can later be used to prosecute if the details of the denial are contradicted by other, more persuasive evidence.
In the 1997 Abner Louima case, preferential treatment bought time for the few bad officers to meet in the basement of the precinct and concoct a story that Mr. Louima had injured himself in the performance of a consensual sex act. In 1999, immediately after Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times, instead of isolating the four officers, their union delegates accompanied them — as a group — to the hospital so they could be treated for ringing in their ears. They spent the next several hours together.
Eventually a narrative emerged, one that was parroted by all four. They all claimed to be looking for a rapist who had been on the run for years. They all believed Mr. Diallo, perhaps in the act of removing his house keys to enter his home, was reaching for a gun. And they all mistakenly believed that when one of their own tripped and fell, Mr. Diallo had shot him, justifying the fusillade of shots.
Of course, we don’t know yet what narrative will be offered by the officers who fired their guns in the Bell case. But we do know that before they utter a single word on the record, they will have had the opportunity to scrutinize every word in the preliminary report and review every finding of the crime scene unit and ballistics team. Indeed, they will know all of this before the case is even presented to a grand jury.
The most infamous obstacle to police questioning had been the notorious 48-hour rule, which gave New York City police officers two business days to retain counsel before they could be questioned. But this rule (recently eliminated by the city), along with other procedural protections, apply only to administrative investigations. They do not govern — and hence cannot pose an obstacle to — investigations into suspected criminal misconduct. In practice it is not the rules of the Police Department that compromise investigations, but rather the orders of the five city prosecutors prohibiting anyone at the department from questioning officers in shootings where crime is suspected. Prosecutors want to be the only ones to question the shooters. That is why the police investigators who prepared the report never got to talk to the people with the most useful information.
Their rationale for this strategy is a 1967 United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that statements made by New Jersey police officers, who had been questioned under threat of dismissal, could not be used against them in a later criminal case. But today in New Jersey, and in almost all large cities, officers who fire their guns are asked, without delay, to give an explanation. The courts have repeatedly held that unless there is an express threat of dismissal, the answers to questions will be admissible in a criminal case. And, even if the statement can’t be introduced in a criminal proceeding, it can be used as the basis for disciplining the officer.
In 1998, when two white New Jersey state troopers fired 11 bullets into the car of four unarmed black and Hispanic college students, the officers were questioned on tape within a couple of hours of the shooting. Their description of where they were standing when they fired was subsequently contradicted by the scientific evidence and provided the basis for a grand jury indictment.
Even if the Queens prosecutors are justified in keeping the questioning of the policemen to themselves, there is simply no reason to put off the interviews. Their purported justification — to wait until all the other evidence has been analyzed — is wanting. There is no rule against multiple interviews. Indeed, it is not unusual for detectives to interview participants several times as new facts emerge in the investigation.
Certainly, police officers should receive no less constitutional protection than we all enjoy. If asked, they can invoke their right to remain silent. But like 80 percent of Americans, including the state troopers in New Jersey, they are likely to waive that right and offer an explanation. It is unconscionable that on the one hand it is O.K. to question a man riddled with bullets and lying in a hospital bed, but it is not all right to simply ask the uninjured officers what happened.
Peter Neufeld is a civil rights lawyer.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
The Second Chance Act: The Right Has A Jailhouse Conversion
December 24, 2006, NY Times Magazine
The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion
By CHRIS SUELLENTROP
Not too long ago, you could tell whether an election was under way by watching prime-time television and counting the number of ominous recitatives about prisoners and ex-prisoners in the commercials. This fall, however, the seven million Americans who are in the custody of the state — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — did not loom large on nightly TV; in fact, as has been the case for nearly a decade, they barely received any notice at all. Prisoners are no longer the charged political symbols and campaign-season scapegoats they once were.
This decline in the exploitation of crime coincides with an odd and surprising change in the politics of crime. The G.O.P., the party of Richard Nixon’s 1968 law-and-order campaign and the Willie Horton commercial, is beginning to embrace the idea that prisoners have not only souls that need saving but also flesh that needs caring for in this world. Increasingly, Republicans are talking about helping ex-prisoners find housing, drug treatment, mental-health counseling, job training and education. They’re also reconsidering some of the more punitive sentencing laws for drug possession. The members of this nascent movement include a number of politicians not previously known for their attention to prisoners’ rights. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a former federal prosecutor whom The New Republic once accused of being stained “with the taint of racism,” wants to reduce the penalty for possession of small amounts of crack. Referring to mandatory-minimum sentences, Representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina, whose district is home to Bob Jones University, declared on the floor of the House: “I voted for them in the past. I will not do it again.” Perhaps most remarkably, the outgoing Republican-controlled Congress came tantalizingly close to passing the Second Chance Act, a bill that focuses not on how to “lock them up” but on how to let them out. The bill may become law soon, if Democrats continue to welcome the new conservative interest in rehabilitation.
By some measures, the Second Chance Act is a small bill. It authorizes less than $100 million over two years to address a significant problem: about 700,000 ex-offenders (the population of a good-size American city) will leave prison in 2007 — and two-thirds of them are likely to be rearrested within three years. The bill would provide states with grants to develop model programs for prisoners returning to society. Those states that accept the grants will be asked to re-examine any laws and regulations that make it unreasonably difficult for ex-offenders to reintegrate themselves into their communities — the classic example is the ban on allowing felons to receive a barber’s license. (If the felon in question is Sweeney Todd, of course, the ban might make sense. But a blanket prohibition that includes check bouncers and marijuana users seems overly broad.) The bill also provides money to faith-based organizations and other nonprofits for prisoner-mentoring programs. Finally, it requires states to measure how well their programs achieve the bill’s main goal: reducing the rate of recidivism among recently released prisoners.
No one expects the Second Chance Act to solve the prisoner-re-entry problem overnight. The bill’s authors are probably too confident that drug treatment, education and housing assistance can reduce recidivism on their own. Such services, many criminologists say, are effective only when paired with the tight supervision of ex-offenders. Some researchers point to the “broken windows” response to crime and suggest trying a similar approach with prisoner re-entry: quickly punish any small violations of the terms of a prisoner’s release with graduated sanctions while returning ex-offenders to prison only for new crimes, not for technical parole violations like missing a meeting with a probation officer. The Second Chance Act does nothing to support this sort of approach.
As policy, then, the bill won’t be an elixir. But as a symbolic political gesture, the Second Chance Act completely reverses recent practice. For the first time in decades, Congress is poised to pass a bill that aims to make the lives of prisoners and ex-prisoners easier, not more difficult. In the 1990s, Democratic and Republican Congresses scrapped the Pell Grant program for prisoners, barred drug offenders from receiving federal student loans and cut highway money for states that did not revoke or suspend the driver’s licenses of drug felons. Now leading politicians of both parties are proposing that states remove laws and regulations that wall off the ex-criminal class from the community. Rather than eliminating education and substance-abuse treatment programs, Congress may well finance them. When I met with Mark Earley, a former political star of the Christian right and a present-day prison reformer, I began explaining to him why I was surprised by the Second Chance Act and the so-called “re-entry movement” surrounding it. He knew why I was surprised: “First of all,” he said, by the very fact “that there is common ground” between Republicans and Democrats. “And second of all, it’s this?”
Many liberals and Democrats — from Senator Joe Biden to members of the Congressional Black Caucus like Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a representative from Cleveland, and Danny Davis, a representative from Chicago — are sponsors of the Second Chance Act. Still, the issue is not a top priority for the party. In their recent blueprint for Democratic success, “The Plan,” Rahm Emanuel, the influential Illinois congressman, and Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, wrote only one paragraph on crime — and that was mostly a hymn to the achievements of the 1994 crime bill. The campaign document for House Democrats, “A New Direction for America,” promises action on national security, the economy, higher education, energy, health care and retirement. The words “crime” and “prisons” never appear.
Prison reform is not a highly advertised position of the Republican Party either, but a growing number of social conservatives are trying to make it a centerpiece of the Christian-conservative agenda. The most striking aspect of the Second Chance Act may be the cross-section of Republicans, from every wing of the party, who support it. Senator Arlen Specter, the top-ranked contender for the award of Least Favorite Republican among movement conservatives, is a lead sponsor, as is Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who may be Christian conservatives’ top choice for the 2008 presidential nomination. Among the House sponsors of the bill are Mike Pence, an Indiana congressman who is a leader of the conservative caucus in the House and a darling of Washington’s conservative press corps, and Dan Lungren, a California representative and former California attorney general who helped write California’s three-strikes law (which he still supports). “For liberals in criminal justice, he’s like the devil, almost,” says a key liberal lobbyist for the bill, Gene Guerrero of George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center.
The Second Chance Act would seem an unlikely bill to be advanced during an election year. At every level of government, after all, elections are thought to encourage tough-on-crime legislation. Recalling his time in the Illinois Legislature, Barack Obama, an early sponsor, says: “We used to have a joke. Let’s say the offense was that defacing property was a Class C misdemeanor, or a Class A misdemeanor. Suddenly somebody would jack it up to a Class 2 felony. And it was always before election time. And we’d say, ‘You know, it’s not a good idea to leap all the way to the maximum penalty, because you’ll have nothing to come back with next election.’ You know, you want to take it in stages.”
With the Second Chance Act, however, three of what were the most endangered senators in America — Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Jim Talent of Missouri and Mike DeWine of Ohio — put their names on the bill; all lost their re-election bids. Their support for the legislation wasn’t an issue in their losses, but even that fact is remarkable. In today’s political environment, crime policy has so receded from controversy that the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee could approve the Second Chance Act in July under the assumption that the full House might take it up on the eve of an election in which the Republican majority was at stake.
What has changed? It’s true that crime rates have declined in recent years (notwithstanding a slight uptick last year), but for the last quarter of the 20th century, crime policy was impervious to fluctuations in street crime. If crime went up, politicians got tough on crime. If crime went down, politicians still got tough on crime. At the state level, at least, that is no longer the case — and a large shift in public opinion has much to do with it. In 1994, crime and health care were the two top issues that Americans thought the government should tackle. Nine years later, less than 1 percent of Americans named crime as a top political issue.
If safer streets had something to do with the change in public attitudes, so did another development: the changing place of crime in the national debate over moral values. Over the past decade, as the political scientists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck have suggested, the culture war of the 1970s and 1980s that revolved around race has been replaced by one that revolves around religion. A side effect has been a radically different crime debate. If the Second Chance Act fails to pass, it will not be because the two parties cannot agree on the importance of rehabilitation programs in prisons. But it may be because they disagree on the role religious organizations should play in rehabilitation.
This September, Mark Earley ascended to a lectern at the Washington Convention Center to recite a political act of contrition. Earley, who is white, seemed among the least likely attendees of the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual legislative conference to rouse the mostly African-American audience of liberal activists, Capitol Hill staff members, lobbyists and members of Congress to sermon-listener cries of “Amen,” “Yes, sir” and “Tell it!” The most successful Christian conservative politician to emerge from the State of Virginia, Earley represented the district of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed for 10 years in the Old Dominion Legislature. In 1997, he ran for attorney general on a platform that combined socially conservative positions on abortion and other issues with a dollop of tough-on-crime rhetoric — and won.
Now Earley came to confess his sins. In front of an audience filled with former prisoners who were attending a job fair connected to the conference, Earley cast his arms wide and proclaimed: “I was wrong. I repent!”
“I’m 52 years old,” he said at the beginning of his remarks, “and for the first 48 years of my life, I didn’t think much about prisoners. And when I did, it went something like, I’m glad I’m not one, and I’m glad they are where they are.” He continued: “And I really pretty much had the view that prisoners were at the end of the line. That if you were in prison, you had no hope, you’d made a mess of your life, and it was better for me that you were there, because my family could be safe.”
He went on: “I was elected to the Virginia Legislature and served 10 years, from ’87 to ’97, in the Senate of Virginia, and quite frankly, spent most of my time in the Legislature working on how to put more people in jail and keeping them there longer. Virginia, like most states in the ’80s, abolished parole, instituted three strikes and you’re out, lowered the age at which juveniles could be tried as adults from 16 to 14.” Earley told the crowd that these policies helped increase the American prison population “tenfold in the last 30 years.” Unlike most politicians who say such things, Earley wasn’t bragging. He was apologizing.
Like many Republicans and Christian activists, Earley’s prison-house conversion dates from an encounter with Chuck Colson, the Watergate crook turned Christian evangelist. When Earley lost the Virginia governor’s race in 2001 to Mark Warner, Colson asked Earley to take over Prison Fellowship, the ministry that Colson founded in the mid-1970s. Earley declined on the assumption that devoting himself to prisoners was tantamount to throwing his life “down a dark hole.” Over the next few months, Earley read his Bible and was struck by the number of criminals who play starring roles: Moses, for example, murdered a man and became a fugitive. Paul presided over the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Earley came to a realization: “If Moses or Paul had lived in Virginia or any state in the United States today, they would be serving, had they been caught, a multiple-decade prison sentence.” He took the job.
Of course, it’s easy to admit the error of your political ways when you’ve left office and don’t have to worry about voters punishing you for your change of heart. But Earley is far from alone in his apostasy from the usual anti-crime politics. Howard Coble, a congressman from North Carolina and the chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security in the last Congress, said in 2003 that the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II were “appropriate at the time.” And yet when Coble first introduced the Second Chance Act to the full judiciary committee this summer, he called the bill “an enlightened departure” from the politics of “lock them up and throw away the key.”
“At one point, I may have embraced that theory,” Coble told me over the phone from his home in Greensboro, N.C., during the August Congressional recess. “I still embrace the theory of locking the cell door if an offender has been convicted of a crime. But I don’t say throw the key away. I say, keep the key handy, so the same key that locked that door can also unlock it.” Coble’s words recalled those of Alexander Maconochie, a Scottish prison warden who reformed Norfolk Island, the Alcatraz of 19th-century Australia, by inventing the concept of indeterminate sentencing — an incentive-based system involving early release for hard work and good behavior: “When a man keeps the key of his own prison, he is soon persuaded to fit it to the lock.”
For most of the 20th century, indeterminate sentencing and rehabilitation were consensus policies in the United States. The decision to call the state agencies that run prisons departments of “corrections” was intended to reflect the rehabilitative nature of their work. But in 1974, a sociologist named Robert Martinson published an article called “What Works?” in the neoconservative journal The Public Interest. John DiIulio, President Bush’s first director of faith-based initiatives, once called Martinson’s essay “arguably the single most influential article ever published in that influential journal.” Martinson answered the question he posed by concluding that “with few and isolated exceptions,” there was no evidence that any rehabilitation programs successfully reduced recidivism. His article and the subsequent media attention it received — along with the high crime rates of the 1970s — are credited with shifting the emphasis in crime policy from rehabilitation to punishment and “just desserts.” Martinson later retracted his argument: in a 1979 article in The Hofstra Law Review, he acknowledged that some rehabilitation programs had “an appreciable effect,” while emphasizing that other programs were actually harmful. But the political environment was not as receptive to a more nuanced approach. Following California’s lead in 1977, state after state abandoned rehabilitation and indeterminate sentencing in favor of punishment and fixed sentences.
Today’s revival of rehabilitation began during the final years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The Clinton administration had been as punishment-oriented as its Republican predecessors. With the exception of a few liberal members of Congress — mostly members of the Congressional Black Caucus who represent urban districts — Democrats in the 1990s abandoned prison reform. The two defining moments of Democratic crime politics in the 1990s were Clinton’s decision as governor of Arkansas to allow the execution of the mentally impaired Ricky Ray Rector in 1992 and the passage of the 1994 crime bill; along with banning assault weapons and putting 100,000 cops on the street, the bill also prominently featured longer sentences for criminals and a federal three-strikes law.
But in the spring of 1999, Janet Reno turned to Jeremy Travis, then the director of the National Institute of Justice, and asked, “What are we doing about all the people coming out of prison?” It began to dawn on Reno, Travis and others that the mandatory sentences Congress and state legislatures created over the preceding decades had an unintended side effect: automatic release. More and more prisoners were leaving prison without having to earn their release, because the incentives to change their behavior had been removed. That seems obvious: what else would you expect from states that abolished parole and replaced discretionary sentencing with fixed sentences? Yet few lawmakers and corrections professionals seemed to have considered the consequences. In October 1999, Reno and Travis held a news conference promoting the idea of prisoner “re-entry,” a word Travis came up with that rebranded the unpopular notion of prisoner rehabilitation. “Re-entry” shifts the emphasis from the criminal to the community — from how an inmate is treated to how safe you and your neighbors will be when he or she is released. In that sense, re-entry preys on the public fear of a nation of Willie Hortons, but it does so in the service of going “softer” on crime.
Even as Reno and Travis were promoting the idea of prisoner re-entry, Matt Salmon, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was championing the No Second Chances Act, a bill that would take federal money away from states that released a prisoner who then committed a crime in another state. The political climate seemed unfriendly. Yet Reno and Travis’s initiative aroused little opposition — or much notice of any kind.
Criminologists of both parties hope that the decreasing importance of crime as a political issue will make it possible to have a more sober discussion of the subject at last. They want to see a less ideologically charged debate and one that rests more closely on sound research. There’s only one problem: a shocking paucity of such evidence to inform the policy debate. As Christy Visher, a researcher from the Urban Institute, put it in the May 2006 issue of Criminology and Public Policy, “There is no consensus answer to the question Do prisoner-re-entry programs work?”
And yet there is a consensus to not do what we are doing. Criminologists largely agree that increasing the use of incarceration at some point becomes counterproductive and crime actually starts to rise. Many researchers suggest that we’re at that point already. In his book on re-entry, “They All Come Back,” Travis notes that only about 25 percent of the violent-crime reduction in the 1990s was because of “incapacitation” — the fact that would-be criminals were locked up and unable to commit more crimes. Michael Jacobson, who worked as the New York City corrections commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, points out that the city’s nation-leading decline in street crime during the 1990s coincided with a decline in the use of incarceration as a weapon of crime control. San Diego, the No. 2 city in crime reduction from 1993 to 2001, also sent fewer people to prison during that period.
The best way to deter crime, according to most researchers, is to increase the swiftness and the certainty of arrest for people who break the law, not to increase the severity of their sentences. Many experts would like to see some kind of return to indeterminate sentencing, though they disagree on the particulars. Ultimately, they’d like to see sentencing turn from an Industrial Age policy, a one-size-fits-all assembly line, to an Internet Age policy of personalization. Joan Petersilia, a leading researcher on parole, recommends using statistical risk profiles, similar to those employed by auto insurers, to determine which ex-offenders should receive the most support or supervision from re-entry programs. She argues in her book “When Prisoners Come Home” that “from a victim’s standpoint, there is no benefit from determinate sentencing or automatic-prisoner-release schemes,” because you “replace a rational, controlled system of earned release for selected inmates with automatic release for nearly all inmates.”
Outside the criminology community, conservatives have embraced re-entry to save lives, to save souls and also to save money. Putting aside Medicaid, spending on corrections has been the fastest-growing item in state budgets in recent years. Partly for this reason, Louisiana and Mississippi — the two states, Michael Jacobson notes in his book, “Downsizing Prisons,” with the highest rates of per capita incarceration in the country — embraced sentencing reform in 2001. Louisiana eliminated some mandatory sentences and required that the first two “strikes” for offenders be violent, rather than nonviolent, felonies. Mississippi, which had abolished discretionary parole in 1995, decided to bring it back for nonviolent first-time offenders. By 2003, 18 states had implemented similar reforms. Under the Republican governor, John Engler, Michigan repealed all of its mandatory-minimum drug laws.
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he did not dismantle the Clinton-era re-entry programs; rather, he adapted them to fit his faith-based agenda. Despite his strong support for capital punishment, President Bush may be the most pro-prisoner president in American history — at least if you disregard the war on terror (an admittedly enormous caveat). Certainly in terms of rhetoric, Bush has done more to advance the interests of prisoners than either Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. The Second Chance Act takes its name from the 2004 State of the Union address in which Bush asked Congress to pass a $300 million program to help prisoners as they re-enter society: “In the past, we’ve worked together to bring mentors to children of prisoners, and provide treatment for the addicted, and help for the homeless. Tonight I ask you to consider another group of Americans in need of help. This year, some 600,000 inmates will be released from prison back into society. We know from long experience that if they can’t find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit crime and return to prison. So tonight, I propose a four-year, $300 million prisoner re-entry initiative to expand job-training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups. America is the land of second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.”
Democrats were flabbergasted. Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones calls it “the only thing that George W. Bush has ever said at a State of the Union that made me stand up and cheer.” Representative Danny Davis says, “I always tell people that when he said that, I was the first person up to applaud, even though I was on the Democratic side of the aisle.”
According to Mark Earley, Bush’s speech “very subtly sent a signal to conservative Republicans that it’s O.K. to talk about rehabilitation and doing something for prisoners as they’re coming back into society, and prisoners’ kids.”
There are few, if any, senators more closely identified with the Christian conservative movement than Sam Brownback. Like a growing number of conservatives, Brownback is a political proponent of the so-called new-evangelical causes, which range from AIDS in Africa and slavery in Sudan to poverty and the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a bill that helped build the coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the re-entry movement. Even when he disagrees with his fellow religious conservatives, he gives faith-based reasons for doing so. A convert to Catholicism, he has said his religion informs his support for a less punitive approach to immigration reform. In February, he held a hearing intended to foster debate on whether the death penalty can be reconciled with Pope John Paul II’s call to create “a culture of life.”
Brownback also routinely mentions prison reform — especially the faith-based variety — in public speeches. During Alberto Gonzales’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general, he made a special point of asking Gonzales about his plans to reduce prison recidivism. He wrote a letter to The Washington Post in February complaining about an op-ed by the U.C.L.A. psychologist David Farabee, who dismissed the Second Chance Act as a return to “the intuitively appealing programs that we correctly rejected 30 years ago.” Brownback countered in his letter, “We should not be resigned to allowing generation after generation to return to prison because they don’t have the tools to break the cycle.”
When I visited him earlier this year, Brownback seemed highly aware of the dangers, even for a conservative Republican from Kansas, of seeming the slightest bit soft on crime. “I wouldn’t say I represent the mainstream of this,” he insisted. “I think we have to prove results” — that is, demonstrate an actual reduction in recidivism rates among newly released prisoners. He continued: “I personally favor a number of these faith-based approaches. But if there are other approaches, let’s try them. This is an enormous problem, and since the ’70s, we have basically just said we’ll lock people up.”
Later, in his office in the Senate Hart Building, Brownback implicitly raised the specter of Willie Horton — the fear that he and the other sponsors of the bill would be blamed for crimes committed by the formerly incarcerated: “Imagine you get one bad prisoner coming out and committing a heinous crime, which is likely to happen. And people’s reaction is, they get mad. They don’t want this guy out on the streets that’s doing this. If you can’t show, look, by doing these programs we are cutting the recidivism rate overall, I don’t think it will stand the blowback when that situation inevitably happens.”
Chris Cannon, a Utah conservative who is the bill’s Republican point man in the House, is less circumspect than Brownback. On crime, Cannon can sound like a liberal Democrat, if liberal Democrats still talked the way he did during my first phone conversation with him in August: “Republicans have taken a pretty harsh position, just locking people up.” And: “The system has a very strong tendency to change them for the worse. Everybody knows that, I think.” And: “Our current system is fundamentally immoral.”
A few weeks later, in his Congressional office, Cannon was just as adamant: “I think society has a huge obligation to prisoners. I think that obligation transcends our current view, which is: Lock them up, hide them away, keep my daughter safe, keep my house safe, if he or she burgles, I want that person gone. Out of sight, out of mind. Away. I think that violates the fundamental concepts of who we are as Americans.
“Nobody thinks this is a bill that solves our moral dilemma,” he went on. “Maybe I should say moral crisis. But it is a first step, an agreeable first step, and it allows us to take a look at where we ought to think about ending up.” But even Cannon occasionally realizes he’s treading on dangerous political ground. After this preamble, apropos of nothing, he declared: “In this whole thing, nobody is being soft on crime. Nobody is saying, let these people out. It’s about after someone is found to have committed a crime, what do we do to help that person become a useful, productive member of society?” Which, of course, involves letting them out.
Cannon and his allies toiled hard on behalf of the Second Chance Act, and they helped shepherd it through the House, where the Republican leadership pledged to schedule a vote if the Senate did the same. But despite their efforts, the outgoing Congress failed to move forward. The first sign of trouble came in the summer. When the bill reached the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas tried to amend it so that it explicitly, rather than implicitly, authorized the financing of faith-based organizations. Gohmert’s proposed amendment drew enthusiastic support from Republicans, but it alienated Democrats, who would have scuttled the bill in the Senate. The bill’s Democratic supporters accept that the Bush administration will allocate some of the funds to Christian organizations. But they draw the line at direct legislative authorization to finance religious organizations. Such an authorization was anathema to them unless it contained additional language restricting faith-based groups from proselytizing and from discriminating on the basis of religion in their hiring decisions. To keep the bill on course, four Republicans — including Cannon and Coble — turned against their colleagues and joined with Democrats to defeat Gohmert’s amendment.
In the Senate, with 37 co-sponsors and the support of Republican leaders, the bill seemed sure to pass. But in mid-December, as the legislative term came to an end, Senator Tom Coburn — a Christian conservative from Oklahoma who has said, “As a physician, I believe that we ought to be doing drug treatment rather than incarceration” — ignored personal appeals from Brownback, Specter and others and put a hold on the bill. Coburn supports the bill’s objectives and calls it “a good act,” but his fiscal-conservative conscience overcame his social-conservative one. He demanded the termination of other federal programs that, in his view, served similar purposes. The bill’s supporters must have felt betrayed, as some assumed that Coburn had pledged not to prevent the bill’s passage. Even so, the bill seems likely to pass, with some modifications, in the next legislative session.
In order for that to happen, the Democrats will have to take a step similar to the one Bill Clinton encouraged them to take in the 1990s, when they conceded that the country’s desire for changes in affirmative action, welfare and crime policy was more than just a proxy for racism. By passing the Second Chance Act, Democrats can acknowledge that the Christian desire to improve the lives of prisoners is more than a mere proxy