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January 31, 2007

Research Shows Prisons Decreasingly Effective in Reducing Crime

Research Shows Prisons Decreasingly Effective in Reducing Crime Wednesday January 31, 2007

NEW YORK, Jan. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Although crime is up in many American cities, lawmakers should think twice before raising penalties and extending prison sentences, advises a study released today by the Vera Institute of Justice, a 45-year-old nonprofit organization that works on safety and justice issues and is headed by Michael Jacobson, who ran New York City's jails and probation system for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

FBI reports of a 3.7 percent nationwide increase in violent crime in the first half of 2006 -- the largest annual increase in 15 years -- may soon have lawmakers calling for tougher measures to protect public safety. However, after surveying the most recent research on the effectiveness of increasing incarceration to reduce crime, Don Stemen, director of research in Vera's Center on Sentencing and Corrections, argues in Reconsidering
Incarceration: New Directions for Reducing Crime that putting more people in prison may not be the most effective solution.

"Thirty years ago, prevailing wisdom was that sending people to prison was the best and only response to rising crime," says Stemen. "But crime is a complex phenomenon, influenced by many factors. Incarceration is just one potential influence, and research shows that increasing incarceration isn't the best or only way to reduce crime."

Instead, Stemen's research review suggests that policymakers consider investing in areas such as policing or education, which show equal or better correlation with lower rates of crime.

"It's always reassuring when empirical evidence supports what one's common sense suggests," says David Keene of the American Conservative Union, the nation's oldest and largest conservative lobbying group. "This study does just that for policymakers and others interested in the question of whether anything worth doing is really worth overdoing," he says.

"The time has come for America to engage in a serious discussion to determine the best way to deal with incarceration," agrees Richard A. Viguerie, chairman of American Target Advertising and a leading conservative voice. "The old ways have failed us."

Little empirical study had been done to confirm or refute the effectiveness of incarceration in reducing crime rates when America began its historic reliance on prisons in the 1970s. Today, conversely, policymakers are faced with a large, complex, and sometimes contradictory body of research. By making sense of this information, Reconsidering Incarceration offers a clear, up-to-date understanding of what works best.

Highlights of the report include:

* Over the past 35 years a 10 percent higher incarceration rate was
associated with a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate, according to the most
reliable research.

* Ever greater rates of incarceration have been subject to diminishing
returns in effectiveness. In some neighborhoods with already high rates
of incarceration, additional increases have correlated with even more
crime than before.

* Government investment in things such as more police, reducing
unemployment, or raising education levels may be more cost effective in
reducing crime. One national study found, for example, that a 10 percent
increase in wages corresponded with a 12 percent drop in property crime
and a 25 percent drop in violent crime.

"This report could not have come at a better time," says Vera's Michael Jacobson. "With crime rates going up in many parts of the country, calls for harsher penalties and more prisons are inevitable. Governors, legislators, and the public need to know that more prison doesn't equal more public safety. You can effectively provide for public safety without overinvesting in prisons."

Between 1993 and 2005, New York City's violent crime rate fell 64 percent. During that time, the number of people sent to prison from the city likewise dropped 47 percent, and its jail population fell 27 percent. Similarly, New York State, which leads the 10 most populous states in violent crime reduction, experienced a 58 percent decline in violent crime between 1993 and 2005. Its incarceration rate also fell during that period by 7.9 percent.

"Removing violent repeat offenders from society obviously makes sense," concludes David Keene, "but the idea of jailing virtually everyone who breaks our laws and throwing them into institutions that are little more than warehouse lock-ups quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns."

A copy of Reconsidering Incarceration: New Directions for Reducing Crime, may be downloaded from Vera's web site at http://www.vera.org/reconsideringincarceration or ordered from the Vera Institute of Justice at (212) 334-1300.

The Vera Institute of Justice is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing safety and justice, promoting fair and efficient policy and practice, and working with leaders of government and civil society to improve the systems people rely upon for safety, security, and justice. Vera is a founding member of the Altus Global Alliance.

Learn more about Vera at http://www.vera.org.
Source: Vera Institute of Justice

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

U.S. H.R. 555: A Bill to Regulate Inmate Telephone Service Rates

110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 555
To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require the Federal
Communications Commission to prescribe rules regulating inmate telephone service rates.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

January 18, 2007

Mr. Rush (for himself, Mr. Boucher, Mr. Gutierrez, Mr. Wynn, Mr. Towns, Mr. Cleaver, and Mr. Cummings) introduced the following bill; which was
referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce

________________________________________________________________

A BILL
To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require the Federal
Communications Commission to prescribe rules regulating inmate
telephone service rates.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ``Family Telephone Connection Protection Act of 2007''.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

The Congress finds that:
individuals correspond and maintain contact with family members who are incarcerated in correctional institutions.

2) Except for emergency purposes, family members are not
allowed to call people incarcerated in correctional
institutions; incarcerated persons are typically allowed to
call family members and other pre-approved individuals only
through payphones physically located on the premises of
correctional institutions

(3) Inmate telephone service in correctional institutions
often is limited to collect calling.

(4) Regardless of whether the prisoners' calls are placed
members typically pay for the calls, either through their
telephone bills, in the case of collect calls received from
prisoners, or by making deposits directly into prisoners' debit
accounts.

(5) Innocent citizens are paying excessive telephone
charges simply due to having a family member or loved one who is incarcerated.

(6) The rates for calls from correctional institutions are
some of the highest rates in the United States, with with some per-
minute charges reaching $1 and service or connection charges of
$3.95 per call.

(7) Information compiled by the Congress and the Federal
Communications Commission shows that the high rates are due in
part to the lack of competition between telephone companies
that provide long distance inmate telephone service to
correctional institutions.

(8) There are no competitive forces providing incentives
for those carriers to lower prices or operate efficiently
because, unlike the mass market, only one carrier is typically
permitted to provide long distance inmate telephone service
within each correctional institution.

(9) High calling rates also are due in part to commissions
that carriers pay to correctional institution administrators
for the exclusive right to provide long distance inmate
telephone service in a correctional facility. In some cases,
such commissions account for 50 percent or more of the total
charges.

10) The collection of such commissions by correctional
institution administrators and state departments of correction
based upon interstate telecommunications revenues is a burden
on interstate commerce.

(11) Due to the lack of competition for telephone services
within correctional institutions, families of people in prison,
many of whom have low incomes, cannot choose the long distance
carrier with the lowest calling rates and must pay the
excessive rates charged by the carrier having the exclusive
right to provide long distance service to the correctional
institution from which the call originates.

(12) It is the policy of the United States to ensure that
all Americans are afforded just and reasonable communications
services, including those families that pay rates for inmate
telephone service.

(13) It is clear from various studies that maintaining
frequent and meaningful communications between people who are
incarcerated and family members is key to the successful social
reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals. Such
contact reduces recidivism and facilitates rehabilitation,
which in turn reduces crime and the future costs of
imprisonment.

(14) Frequent communications between incarcerated persons
and family members is burdened, and in some cases, prevented,
by excessive inmate telephone service rates. Excessive inmate
telephone service rates thus weaken the family and community
ties that are necessary for successful reentry into society by
persons who were formerly incarcerated and the reduction in
crime resulting from successful reentry.

(15) The Commission has the expertise and authority to
regulate inmate telephone service. Because parties to
Commission rulemaking proceedings have raised issues regarding
its authority to implement meaningful relief for excessive
inmate telephone service rates, Congress finds it necessary and
appropriate to reaffirm that the Commission has the authority
to implement the types of relief set forth in this Act.

SEC. 3. RESTRICTIONS ON THE PROVISION OF INMATE TELEPHONE SERVICE.

(a) Definitions.--Section 226(a) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 226(a)) is amended adding at the end the following new paragraphs:
``(10) The term `collect' or `collect call' refers to a
telephone call from a person incarcerated in a correctional
institution that is billed to the subscriber receiving the
call.
``(11) The term `commission' refers to a fee or other
payment by a provider of inmate telephone service to an
administrator of a correctional institution, department of
correction, or similar entity, based upon, or partly upon,
inmate telephone service revenue.
``(12) The term `debit account' refers to the payment of
inmate telephone service through a prisoner's prepaid card or
other account, which can be accessed only through an access
code, personal identification number, or similar identifier.
``(13) The term `inmate telephone service' includes the
provision of telephone service enabling persons incarcerated in
correctional institutions to originate interstate calls at
payphones or other telephones that are designated for
prisoners' personal use, regardless of whether the calls are
collect, paid through a debit account, or paid through any
other means.
``(14) The term `provider of inmate telephone service'
means any common carrier that provides inmate telephone service
or any other person determined by the Commission to be
providing inmate telephone service.''.
(b) Regulations.--Section 226 is further amended--
(1) by redesignating subsection (i) as subsection (k); and
(2) inserting after subsection (h) the following new
subsections:
``(i) Regulation of Inmate Telephone Service.--
``(1) Rates.--In order to ensure that charges for inmate
telephone service are just, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory,
the Commission shall consider, either in a rulemaking
proceeding that is pending as of the date of enactment of the Family Telephone Connection Protection Act of 2007 or in a new
rulemaking proceeding, the following types of regulation of
inmate telephone service, all of which are within the
Commission's jurisdiction and authority:
``(A) prescribing a maximum uniform per-minute
compensation rate;
``(B) prescribing a maximum uniform service
connection or other per-call compensation rate;
``(C) prescribing variable maximum compensation
rates depending on such factors as carrier costs, the
size of the correctional facility served, and other
relevant factors identified by the Commission;
``(D) requiring providers of inmate telephone
service to offer both collect calling and debit account services;
``(E) prohibiting the payment of commissions by
providers of inmate telephone service to administrators of correctional institutions, departments of
correction, and similar entities; and
``(F) requiring administrators of correctional
institutions, departments of correction, and similar
entities to allow more than one provider of inmate
telephone service to provide interstate inmate
telephone service at a correctional institution in
order that prisoners have a choice of such providers.
``(2) Scope.--The regulations adopted by the Commission
shall be technologically neutral and shall not jeopardize
legitimate security and penological interests. To the extent
the Commission regulations reduce or eliminate the revenue
derived by administrators of correctional institutions,
departments of correction, and similar entities from the
receipt of commissions, such effects of Commission regulations shall not be considered as jeopardizing or otherwise affecting legitimate security or penological interests.
``(3) Deadlines and periodic review.--The Commission shall prescribe regulations to implement the provisions of this
subsection within one year after the date of enactment of the Family Telephone Connection Protection Act of 2007. The
Commission shall review, on a triennial basis, the regulations promulgated under this subsection, including whether any
Commission-established compensation rates should be modified.
``(4) State preemption.--To the extent that any State
requirements are inconsistent with the Commission's regulations affecting or pertaining to interstate inmate telephone service including restrictions on the payment of commissions based upon
interstate inmate telephone service revenues or earnings, the
Commission's regulations on such matters shall preempt such
State requirements.
``(j) Inmate Telephone Service Fully Subject to Sections 251 and
252.--
``(1) Inmate telephone service is fully subject to the
requirements of sections 251 and 252 of this Act.
``(2) No provider of inmate telephone service may block or
otherwise refuse to carry a call placed by an incarcerated
person on the grounds that the provider has no contractual or
other arrangement with the local exchange carrier serving the
intended recipient of the call or other common carrier involved
in any portion of the transmission of the call.''.

Posted by lois at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

VA Senate passes a proposed consitutional amendment to restore voiting rights to people convicted of non-violent felonies

Measure on felons' voting rights OK'd
Richmond Times-Dispatch Friday,
January 26, 2007

The Virginia Senate passed 29-10 yesterday a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the General Assembly to set procedures in law for restoration of voting rights to nonviolent felons.

Currently, only the governor can restore felons' civil rights. People seeking to have their rights restored must go through a laborious process to have the governor review their case. Felons in Virginia automatically lose their right to vote when they are convicted. More than 200,000 have lost the right, and the largest number live in Richmond. Sen. Yvonne B. Miller, D-Norfolk, sponsor of the proposal, said some of those convicted have plea-bargained away their rights in return for a lighter sentence. Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, noted that some people were convicted of felony drug charges in the 1970s. Today, with more tolerant community standards, those same crimes would be a misdemeanor, he said. Sen. Ken Cuccinelli, R-Fairfax, objected. He said the governor can devote more personal attention to each case. The amendment would not affect the governor's restoration powers. -

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

ID: Idaho's drug courts seek 50 percent more money

Idaho Statesman
Jan 29, 2007
Idaho's drug courts seek 50 percent more money

POCATELLO, Idaho (AP) -- Administrators of Idaho's drug and mental health court are seeking an additional $4 million to increase the number of people who can participate.

In a six-page report to Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter and the Legislature, court administrators said 888 people were supervised by the court during any given month in 2006.

Boosting spending on the program by 50 percent would allow 506 additional people throughout the state to participate, 6th District Judge N. Randy Smith said.

Idaho ranks second in the nation in drug court availability based on the number of courts per capita. The first two drug courts opened in 1998, and the state had 40 drug courts as of Dec. 4, meaning there was one court for every 36,000 Idahoans, according to the report.

Otter spokesman Jon Hanian said Monday that the governor's office did not immediately have a comment to the request.

Smith oversees Bannock County's drug court, which opened its doors in 2002.

A defendant can go to drug court before or after sentencing. In both cases the defendant is likely facing prison time, but Smith said he believes choosing the drug court, rather than being sentenced to the program, empowers a defendant to start being accountable.

The recidivism rate, the percentage of people who are re-arrested, for Bannock County drug court graduates is just 4 percent. That compares to 19 percent for Ada County drug court graduates and 20 percent for Kootenai County graduates.

Recidivism rate for drug offenders throughout the state who have not gone through drug court is well over 50 percent.

Charles Snowden, a Bannock County drug court participant, knows he would be in prison if not for drug court. Snowden said rock bottom came for him last year when his youngest child was born while he sat in Bannock County Jail facing prison time.

"I didn't even get to see him be born," Snowden told the Idaho State Journal for a story Sunday. "It made me think of my kids and I felt ashamed."

Snowden, a father of four, was arrested last year for possession of methamphetamine. Today, he has been drug-free for seven months and credits Bannock County's drug court and Smith with saving his life.

The report, which was submitted to the governor's office and lawmakers last week, also noted that drug court programs cost the state less than other penalties. Per participant, the drug court costs $6,500, compared with $20,000 for each prison inmate and $10,600 for each inmate in a work release center.

---http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ID_DRUG_COURT_IDOL-?SITE=IDBOI&SECTIO
N=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-01-29-17-15-57

Information from: Idaho State Journal, http://www.journalnet.com

Posted by lois at 05:02 PM | Comments (0)

CO: Crammed state jails will "pop"

Crammed state jails will "pop"

By Erin Emery, Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 01/30/2007 06:23:02 AM MST

Ari Zavaras, the new man in charge of Colorado's Department of Corrections, has inherited a prison system that is like a balloon ready to pop.
The problem, corrections officials say, is Colorado has doubled its prison population in the past 10 years, slashed programs designed to rehabilitate inmates and slowed construction of new prisons.

Corrections officers say they feel a sense of unease because fewer people patrol the state's prisons. About 200 corrections- officer positions were eliminated during a statewide fiscal crisis that began in 2001, and only 62 of those have been restored. That leaves officers with less time to glean the kind of intelligence from inmates that can avert violent uprisings.

"I would contend that every prison in the state has the potential for a riot situation - every one of them," said state Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, whose district includes many southern Colorado prisons.

Colorado's prison population exploded - from 4,000 inmates in 1985 to more than 22,000 today - after the state toughened its sentencing laws in the late 1970s and 1980s. During the same period, the budget grew from $57 million to $533 million.

Good news, bad news

The good news: Violent crime in the 1990s dropped by 33 percent, according to a report by the Colorado Lawyers Committee.

The bad news: There's not enough room. The state is trying to manage its prisons by double-bunking prisoners and sending some offenders out of state. Over the next five years, though, the Department of Corrections says it needs $806 million for prison construction projects alone. By 2011, the department projects that 29,000 people will be behind bars.

Zavaras said his first priority is to keep the public safe. Secondly, he believes the way to get more bang for the taxpayers' buck is to change the behavior of prisoners, most of whom are scheduled to return, eventually, to the streets.

"We are going to have a heavy focus and a heavy emphasis on what we can do to slow down growth in the department," said Zavaras, who served as director of the Department of Corrections from 1993 to 1998 and as Denver's police chief before then.

Among Zavaras' first moves will be to try to restore programs cut during the budget crisis. Drug, alcohol and sex-offender programs, along with education programs, were sharply curtailed.

Between 2001 and 2005, state lawmakers cut $11.4 million in funding for inmate programs, according to a Joint Budget Committee study of budget cuts during the recession. Almost none of that funding has been restored.

If programs are not restored, the current recidivism rate of 49.2 percent could get even higher, Zavaras said.

The Colorado Lawyers Committee recently drafted a report recommending that a commission be formed to study modifying sentences.

Glen Keller, a Denver lawyer who co-authored the report with lawyer Jim Scarboro, suggested that sentences for more severe crimes could be made longer, while sentences for lesser crimes could be shorter. "Other states have done this, and they've been very successful in reducing their costs," Keller said.

Sentencing reforms could help free up money for inmate re-entry and crime-prevention programs, said Rep. Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Carroll said his committee will be looking at the Colorado Lawyers Committee report.

Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, said he supported putting state money into faith-based programs. "Education is not enough," he said. "You have to cure the heart."

Incidents fluctuating

Inside prisons, it is difficult to measure whether violence is on the rise because the Department of Corrections three years ago revamped its definitions of serious incidents. In the past three years, the number of serious incidents has fluctuated from year to year.

In July 2004, inmates rioted at the Crowley Correctional Facility in Olney Springs. In October 2002, prison guard Eric Autobee was bludgeoned to death at Limon Correctional Facility. However, prison officials say that extensive training of officers may have prevented more violence.

"We have managed to keep the lid on the place, and it almost becomes a Catch-22. It's easy to become lulled into the thought that if we're managing it, we can do it," said Alison Morgan, corrections spokeswoman. "But it's inevitable that it is going to pop at some point, whether it is a serious staff assault, an inmate death, another riot."

Some corrections officers worry that a drop in their number will lead to trouble. "You lose intelligence," said Joe Nicolini, a corrections officer who recently retired after 10 years.

With fewer hours spent walking the units, there are fewer opportunities for inmates to inform management of potential problems inside.

In southern Colorado, representatives of Teamsters Local 537 are trying to organize corrections officers who, according to Nicolini and union officials, have been forced to work 16- hour shifts or longer.

Along with the decreasing number of corrections officers are problems created by the loss of inmate programs, Morgan said.

"We have a philosophy that a busy, tired inmate is an inmate that does not cause problems," she said. "If an inmate is not in a program or in a class or has yard time, then you absolutely have a greater reliance on these officers." As a result, "there has been a greater unease among our line staff and we recognize it, absolutely," she said.

Zavaras said locking up prisoners without trying to change behavior is "shortsighted."

"If we don't change behavior, it's a public-safety issue," Zavaras said. "There's going to be more victims, more crimes."

Staff writer Mark P. Couch contributed to this report.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5115285

Posted by lois at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)

UT: Inmates might have to pay for jail costs

Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Inmates might have to pay for jail costs

LORETTA PARK - STANDARD-EXAMINER

County jail inmates may be paying some of the costs of keeping them incarcerated if a bill becomes law.

Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings spoke Monday on behalf of House Bill 263, sponsored by Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfield. The House committee approved the bill, and it now moves to the House floor for a vote.

Rawlings said current law allows judges to order inmates to pay for a portion of their jail stay to offset costs, but judges are reluctant to do so. Rawlings said Davis County judges do not want to be "the heavy-handed collector."

Oda's bill would automatically allow counties to bill inmates for a portion of their jail stay unless a judge orders otherwise.

If the fee is not paid, the inmate could have his probation extended until it is paid, or the bill could be sent to the Office of Debt Collection, Rawlings said.

Rawlings spoke in front of the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee. Attorney Reed Richards also spoke in favor of the bill on behalf of the Utah Sheriff's Association.

He said Weber County is in the process of allowing the jail to bill inmates for their stay. The county is considering charging $10 a day. It costs the county about $42 a day to house an inmate.

Charging an inmate the full price would "more than likely make it impossible to collect," Richards said.

Davis County Sheriff Bud Cox said after the hearing an inmate convicted of a misdemeanor stays in jail an average of 22 days after conviction.

One of the longest stays by an inmate waiting for a trial was Todd Jeremy Rettenberger, Cox said. Rettenberger stayed in jail for five years until he pleaded guilty to third-degree felony manslaughter in connection with the death of Motel 6 night clerk, Matthew John Whicker in 1996. "This is just a matter of them realizing they are costing the taxpayer money for their stay in jail," Cox said.

A $10 fee is "better than nothing," Cox said.

HB 263, Jail Expenses Amendments, Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfield. This bill would require inmates to pay restitution for the cost of incarceration, unless otherwise ordered by the court. Under the bill, the inmate would pay the cost of incarceration to the county correctional facility before and after sentencing, unless the amount is reduced or eliminated. The county jail would determine the cost of incarceration, but it couldn't exceed the costs established in state law.

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/208437/
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A3.

Posted by lois at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Study says policy changes could alleviate need for more prisons

Study says policy changes could alleviate need for more prisons
More prison treatment programs plus following parole guidelines could save Texas taxpayers $65.1 million, according to analysis.

By Mike Ward, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, January 29, 2007

Providing additional prison treatment programs and paroling offenders according to longstanding release guidelines would allow Texas to avoid building prisons, a new study reveals.

The analysis by the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments, to be made public Tuesday at a joint meeting of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee and the House Corrections Committee, said that Texas would have just 151,817 convicts in prison by 2012 — fewer than are currently serving time in the state's near-capacity prisons — if it opts for two changes in policy.

That could save taxpayers $65.1 million by sidetracking plans to build three prisons, the study contends.

"It's a road map to what's causing our problems, to what other states are doing, to what we should be doing," said Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who is chairman of the chamber's Criminal Justice Committee.

Supporters of the prison-alternative programs, such as Whitmire, are expected to applaud the analysis as confirmation that treatment programs are one solution to the problem of crowded prisons. Opponents are expected to dismiss it as flawed research designed to support a specific conclusion.

A copy of the three-part analysis, obtained this afternoon by Statesman.com, proposes that the state could avoid building maximum-security prisons by:

•Building a 1,000-bed lockup that would be used to treat drunken driving offenders, drug addicts and alcohol offenders.

•Adding 150 halfway house beds.

•Ensuring that the Board of Pardons and Paroles adheres to its parole-release guidelines, a move that would increase the overall parole rate from 26 percent last year to 29 percent by 2012.

•Providing funding for new lockups to house parole and probation violators for short terms, instead of returning them to a regular prison.

•Adding more treatment programs to cut the backlog of prisoners who are awaiting those programs before they can be paroled.

The principal involved in completing the analysis was national justice consultant Tony Fabelo, who formerly oversaw analyses of Texas' incarceration and prison-growth trends as director of the Criminal Justice Policy Council.

"Assume that these treatment facilities will receive some people who would not have otherwise been incarcerated, and therefore contribute to some 'net widening,' " the study states. "These projections assume that a significant number of people participating in these programs will fail and return to prison.

"Funded at an appropriate level and administered effectively, however, these programs could engage in minimal net-widening and have low recidivism rates . . . (The options) would divert a significant number of people from prison to community-based sanctions programs/treatment programs."

The findings generally agree with proposals by House and Senate leaders who have insisted for months that the state can avoid building maximum-security prisons by diverting thousands of felons into treatment and rehabilitation programs, in a move they say can reduce recidivism rates. It was those leaders who commissioned the study late last year.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/01/30/30prisons.html

Posted by lois at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

Iraqis Get Ideas From S.C. Prisons

Iraqis Get Ideas From S.C. Prisons
By MEG KINNARD
The Associated Press
Monday, January 29, 2007
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Iraqi prison officials looking to rebuild their nation's jail system toured a state prison Monday, gathering ideas _ including electronic door locks and an onsite license plate plant _ to take back to their country.
A delegation that included U.S. Justice Department officials and their Iraqi counterparts visited the maximum security Broad River Correctional Institution, where the Iraqis watched inmates make South Carolina license plates and traffic signs.
Iraqi prisoners don't have a place to work, one visitor said through an interpreter.
The plant enables an inmate "to help himself and his family. We can have productive inmates, not just consumer inmates," said the warden of a Nasiriyah prison, whose name was withheld by the Justice Department for his own safety.

The group also was interested in the prison's security system, which includes electronically locking doors and video monitoring.

"My first impression is that the prisons here are totally different from ours," the warden said. "For example, the security system, the electric doors _ we don't have this technology."

The delegation visited South Carolina because the state prison system was similar in size and organization to the existing Iraqi system, said Georgette Thornton, who works in Baghdad with the department's International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program.

The two-week visit to South Carolina will include trips to other state prisons as well as a federal prison. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/29/AR2007012901 870.html

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

January 28, 2007

Father Robert Drinan, Ex-Congressman, Dies aat 86

January 28, 2007
Rev. Robert Drinan, Ex-Congressman, Dies at 86
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:09 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Rev. Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who -- over the objections of his superiors -- became the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday.

Drinan, 86, had suffered from pneumonia and congestive heart failure during the previous 10 days, according to a statement by Georgetown University.

''His death was peaceful, and he was surrounded by his family,'' said the Rev. John Langan, rector of the Georgetown University Jesuit Community where Drinan lived.

An internationally known human-rights advocate, Drinan represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House for 10 years during the turbulent 1970s, and he stepped down only after a worldwide directive from Pope John Paul II barring priests from holding public office.

He was elected in 1970, after he beat longtime Democratic Rep. Philip J. Philbin in a primary -- and again in the November election, when Philbin was a write-in candidate. The only other priest to serve in Congress was a nonvoting delegate from Michigan in 1823.

Although a poll at the time showed that 30 percent of the voters in his district thought it was improper for a priest to run for office, Drinan considered politics a natural extension of his work in public affairs and human rights.

His run for office came a year after he returned from a trip to Vietnam, where he said he discovered that the number of political prisoners being held in South Vietnam was rapidly increasing, contrary to State Department reports. And in a book the next year, he urged the Catholic Church to condemn the war as ''morally objectionable.''

He ran for Congress on an anti-Vietnam war platform. During his Congressional tenure, Drinan continued to dress in the robes of his clerical order and lived in a simple room in the Jesuit community at Georgetown.

But Drinan wore his liberal views more prominently. He opposed the draft, worked to abolish mandatory retirement and raised eyebrows with his more moderate views on abortion and birth control.

And he became the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon -- although the call wasn't related to the Watergate scandal, but what Drinan viewed as the administration's undeclared war against Cambodia.

''Can we be silent about this flagrant violation of the Constitution?'' Drinan demanded angrily back then. ''Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?''

Decades later, at the invitation of Congress, he testified against the impeachment of another president: Bill Clinton. Drinan said Clinton's misdeeds were not in the same league as Nixon's, and that impeachment should be for an official act, not a private one.

He told the Judiciary Committee members reviewing Clinton's case, that in 1974, ''the country knew there was extensive lawlessness in the White House. ... The documentation of appalling crimes was known by everyone. Abuse of power and criminality were apparent to the American people.''

Drinan left office in 1980 -- ''with regret and pain'' -- finally succumbing to the increased pressure from his superiors, including the Pope.

But he continued to be active in political causes. He served as president of the Americans for Democratic Action, crisscrossing the country giving speeches on hunger, civil liberties, and the perils of the arms race. He spoke out against President Reagan and President Bush, and lectured and wrote about gun control, world hunger, and the war on terrorism's impact on human rights.

He also took a post as professor of law at Georgetown University in 1981, where he taught courses on international human rights, constitutional law, civil liberties, legislation, ethics and professional responsibility.

Posted by lois at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

OR: Changes in Prisons Urged

"There is recognition that our current state strategy hasn't made us any safer, but it has been very expensive," said David Rogers, the partnership's executive director.

Changes in prisons urged
By Sherri Buri McDonald
Eugene The Register-Guard
Published: Sunday, January 28, 2007

In the past decade, Oregon has had the third-fastest growing prison system in the nation, exploding from fewer than 5,500 prisoners in 1990 to more than 13,000 today.

The state Department of Corrections' budget likewise has skyrocketed, from $377 million in the 1993-95 budget period to a proposed $1.38 billion this biennium.

These were among the eye-popping statistics that the Partnership for Safety and Justice shared at a session Saturday that attracted more than 100 people, including six state legislators.

The Portland-based partnership advocates for greater fairness and effectiveness in the state's criminal justice system.

Heavy spending on prisons - at the expense of social services such as education and treatment programs for alcohol and drug abuse - is the legacy of Measure 11, members of the partnership told the group. The voter-approved ballot measure, which establishes mandatory sentences for certain crimes and treats youths as adults when they're charged with those crimes, took effect in 1995.

The partnership believes that the timing is right for the state to change its public safety strategy.

"There is recognition that our current state strategy hasn't made us any safer, but it has been very expensive," said David Rogers, the partnership's executive director.

The legislators who took part in Saturday's session at the Campbell Senior Center - Sens. Bill Morrisette, Floyd Prozanski and Vicki Walker, and Reps. Phil Barnhart, Chris Edwards and Nancy Nathanson - agreed that reform is needed.

A major overhaul of Measure 11 isn't likely because that would needing a "super-majority," requiring support of two-thirds of the 60-member House and two-thirds of the 20-member Senate to pass, Walker said.

However, several bills will be circulating this session. Walker said she's exploring a bill that would prevent criminal fines from accruing interest while an offender is in prison.

"We're setting these people up for failure," Walker said, noting that the interest can be substantial, especially after a prisoner has served a long sentence.

Preparing prisoners to re-enter the community and providing them the support they need to succeed is a key issue, she said, because 95 percent of the people who enter the prison system eventually come back out.

The issue hit home for her, Walker said, when her brother was released four years ago after serving 15 years in prison.

With no driver's license, no credit history and no job, "the stress level is intense," she said. "If we don't make progress to make that re-entry easier for them, they're going to go back."

The partnership supports two bills aimed at achieving greater fairness and rehabilitation of youths ages 15 to 17 who have been charged with Measure 11 crimes. Both bills would allow judges more discretion in determining how young offenders should be held accountable for their actions.

The partnership also will be active in the budget process, seeking to boost funds for programs that reduce recidivism, or relapse into crime, Rogers said. Voter sentiment appears to be changing, he said.

Department of Corrections officials estimate that in two years the state will have to build another prison, at an estimated cost of $660 million, including debt service, according to the partnership. But 44 percent of voters think building a new prison is a poor idea, according to a recent poll of 600 registered voters that was conducted for the partnership.

More than 80 percent of voters support requiring prisoners to get their GED - the equivalent of a high school diploma. Also, more than 80 percent support investing in programs to help released prisoners re-enter the community, according to the poll.

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2007/01/28/printable/c1.cr.prisonreform.0128.5f10UeR6.phtml

Posted by lois at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)

NC: Juvenile prisons’ audits lapse

Ashville CITIZEN-TIMES.com
Juvenile prisons’ audits lapse

By Jordan Schrader
January 28, 2007

SWANNANOA — The state’s juvenile prisons, like their adult counterparts, are not accredited and do not undergo regular audits by any independent agency.

Juvenile justice officials say they still abide by the standards of the American Correctional Association, even after their accreditation by that group lapsed for reasons that aren’t clear. They also point to myriad other internal and state rules that facilities are supposed to obey.

The ACA government affairs director said the group has talks scheduled with the N.C. Juvenile Justice Department that could lead to renewed pursuit of accreditation.

About 80 percent of state departments of corrections and juvenile services participate in ACA, the group says, including at least 18 state juvenile departments.

Learning that Swannanoa Valley Youth Development Center no longer is one of them came as a surprise Friday to the former director of the lockup, which is now the subject of a soon-to-conclude investigation into attacks on staff.

Bill Stanley said the state first sought ACA oversight of its juvenile prisons while he led Swannanoa from 1993-96.

“Whew, that was tough to get accredited,” recalled Stanley, a Buncombe County commissioner. “Man, you had to meet some stiff requirements.”

But it was worth it, he said.

The auditors provided an independent validation that health, safety, security, employee training and the budget met expectations, he said. They pored over records, inspected the cafeteria and sat down with staff and teens.

It was also expensive.

The ACA did not provide its fees, but Kentucky officials said the state pays an annual rate that has varied between about $50,000 and $100,000.

Among its benefits could be a defense in lawsuits — of which the N.C. Juvenile Justice Department has had its share — said Percy Pitzer, owner of consulting firm Creative Corrections.

“How much is $10,000 if you prevent litigation, if you prevent serious incidents, if you prevent deaths, if you prevent escapes?” Pitzer said. “It’s a drop in the bucket.”

The ACA declined to release records of their inspections, but Stanley and a former maintenance director remembered the inspections every three years giving high marks to Swannanoa and providing important checks and balances.

“Students got to talk to the ACA inspectors,” said Harry Biddix, a Weaverville man who worked there from 1992-2000. “Students got someone who was qualified to listen to them, who would actually sit down with them. And part of our grade was how the students responded.”

The department didn’t respond to questions about when the inspections stopped, but by summer 2002 an inspection report listed auditors coming from the same department as the audited.

That same year, inmates sued for being sexually and physically abused by an employee who later was convicted of sex offenses. Reports of abuse led to a state audit that reported problems in discipline and training, then plans to reorganize facilities on a new therapeutic model of care.

Last year, several staff members were assaulted.

Carolyn Donohue, who says administrators in Raleigh share responsibility for the beating of her husband, Tom, in the most serious of those attacks, said she doesn’t believe internal checks are sufficient.

“If the people running the department are the source of the problem,” she said, “then you have the fox watching the chickens.” Copyright 2007 Asheville Citizen-Times. All rights reserved. http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770127058

Posted by lois at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: "Closing the Revolving Door"

January 25, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Closing the Revolving Door

The United States is paying a heavy price for the mandatory sentencing fad that swept the country 30 years ago. After a tenfold increase in the nation’s prison population — and a corrections price tag that exceeds $60 billion a year — the states have often been forced to choose between building new prisons or new schools. Worse still, the country has created a growing felon caste, now more than 16 million strong, of felons and ex-felons, who are often driven back to prison by policies that make it impossible for them to find jobs, housing or education.

Congress could begin to address this problem by passing the Second Chance Act, which would offer support services for people who are leaving prison. But it would take more than one new law to undo 30 years of damage:

¶Researchers have shown that inmates who earn college degrees tend to find jobs and stay out of jail once released. Congress needs to revoke laws that bar inmates from receiving Pell grants and that bar some students with drug convictions from getting other support. Following Washington’s lead, the states have destroyed prison education programs that had long since proved their worth.

¶People who leave prison without jobs or places to live are unlikely to stay out of jail. Congress should repeal the lifetime ban on providing temporary welfare benefits to people with felony drug convictions. The federal government should strengthen tax credit and bonding programs that encourage employers to hire people with criminal records. States need to stop barring ex-offenders from jobs because of unrelated crimes — or arrests in the distant past that never led to convictions.

¶Congress should deny a request from the F.B.I. to begin including juvenile arrests that never led to convictions (and offenses like drunkenness or vagrancy) in the millions of rap sheets sent to employers. That would transform single indiscretions into lifetime stigmas.

¶Curbing recidivism will also require doing a lot more to provide help and medication for the one out of every six inmates who suffer mental illness.

The only real way to reduce the inmate population — and the felon class — is to ensure that imprisonment is a method of last resort. That means abandoning the mandatory sentencing laws that have filled prisons to bursting with nonviolent offenders who are doomed to remain trapped at the very margins of society.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/opinion/25thu3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2007

Offering Help for Former Foster Care Youths

January 27, 2007
Offering Help for Former Foster Care Youths
By ERIK ECKHOLM, NY Times

DETROIT — When current and former foster children formed a group to help youths who had turned 18 and were “aging out” of the system, one of the first things they did was hold a luggage drive.

“We saw that a lot of the kids were taking their clothes out in garbage bags,” said Chilton Brown, 23, a former foster child who spent ages 3 to 18 as a ward of the state, bouncing around 15 family homes or group residences.

A life contained in green plastic bags: it is the kind of humiliating detail that hits home hardest among foster youths themselves. It is also a telling sign of how unprepared many of these 18-year-olds are to live on their own, without families, jobs or school diplomas to shore them up.

In part because of the increasing advocacy by foster youth groups like Mr. Brown’s, many states are expanding efforts to help young adults prepare for life outside the system, offering transitional housing, education, medical care and mentoring as they step out on their own. States are also extending aid for extra years, in some cases to age 21 or even beyond.

“We’re finally seeing a recognition by public agencies that they have a responsibility to this population beyond the age of 18,” said Gary Stangler, director of Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a foundation in St. Louis that is helping to organize foster youth boards and offers matched savings accounts as well as job aid in 10 states. “In our society, most 18-year-old kids aren’t ready to be thrust into the world.”

Long in the shadows, the plight of aging out foster youths — some 24,000 a year nationwide who fail to be adopted and usually leave court-monitored care at 18 — is gaining new attention, as youths speak out and research reveals the numbers who end up in homeless shelters, jail and long-term poverty.

California, spurred by the lobbying of the country’s largest and most powerful group of former foster children, the California Youth Connection, plans to provide 1,200 transitional housing units, and support counseling, for young adults emerging from care.

In New York City, as part of a wider effort to fight homelessness, the state and city are creating 200 apartments for foster care veterans with special needs. Several private agencies are expanding their programs, as well.

Washington and Iowa have recently joined at least 17 other states, including New York, that allow youths under some circumstances to remain in foster care until age 21. The move keeps the youths under the protection of a court that can press for aid to which they may be entitled into their twenties but is not always offered by overwhelmed state agencies.

But a universal option to remain in foster care until age 21, which is supported by the American Bar Association and many experts, has been hampered by a lack of money. The large federal subsidies that help pay for the system’s courts, lawyers and social workers are provided only up to the age of 18, or 19 for those finishing high school.In Illinois, where nearly half of foster children now stay to 21, the extra years are paid for by the state. Early studies by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago indicate that those who remain are faring better than those who leave at 18.

But it is too soon, scholars say, to know how much difference all the new efforts will make in the lives of children who have suffered abuse or neglect and separations from their families.

In Michigan, nearly 500 youths age out annually, usually at 18. A study of 264 former foster children, released in October by psychologists at Wayne State University, showed how poorly many had fared.

Youths from Detroit and two surrounding counties who aged out in 2002 and 2003, mainly African-American, were surveyed three and a half years after they left care. Seventeen percent had stayed in the streets or in shelters for an average of two months each. Some 33 percent had spend long periods “couch surfing” with friends or relatives.

Four in ten were high school graduates. The average youth had been unemployed half the time since leaving care; most jobs were in fast food, averaging just $600 per month. More than one in four males had spent time in jail.

Under a 1999 federal law that provides some “independent living” assistance to age 21, many aged-out youths can get financial aid, including up to $1,000 to help rent an apartment and up to $5,000 a year for those enrolled in college or training schools.

“If it weren’t for these programs, I’d probably be in a shelter and I’d have to drop out of school,” said Stacey Kline, 21, who left Detroit’s foster system at 18. Ms. Kline has been an active leader in the city’s youth boards and is now in college, hoping to someday run a home for aged-out youths.

Still, for Ms. Kline it has been two steps forward, one step back: she recently borrowed emergency money from the Jim Casey program to help her rent a new apartment after, she said, an angry ex-boyfriend vandalized her previous apartment.

In other common patterns, many youths are eager to sever ties with the child welfare bureaucracy, some squander their limited aid and others are in no shape to take advantage of these benefits.

Michael Morris, 21, says he regrets forfeiting his transitional aid. Born to teenage drug users, he was in foster care in Detroit from the age of six months, drifting through dozens of private and group homes.

Though he had never even met his parents, Mr. Morris said, “I wanted a family and I wanted to be with my parents no matter whether they were on drugs.” Before he turned 18 and exited foster care, he met his sister and mother for the first time and decided to move in with his mother without the consent of the court, thus losing transitional rent and school subsidies.

He later joined one of the emerging foster youth boards in Detroit and received some matching money for what he saved while working as a security guard.

But living with his mother did not last long. Mr. Morris then tried sharing apartments, but the roommates did not pay their share of the rent. He became unemployed and recently arrived at the crisis center of Covenant House in Detroit, where he shared a barren room with two other homeless youths.

“I hope to be out by March,” Mr. Morris said. “I got a good lead on a job at Popeye’s,” he added, which would pay $7.25 an hour. Through the matched savings program, he hopes to rent his own apartment and enroll in community college.

The growing advocacy by foster children themselves has done more than anything else to draw the attention of state and national officials, said Robin Nixon, director of the National Foster Care Coalition.

In Michigan, Marianne Udow, director of human services, said one of her first acts after taking office in January 2004 was to meet with youth boards to ask for advice.

“I left that meeting feeling that the whole system was broken,” Ms. Udow said. The youth boards later issued 15 recommendations for improving the system and lobbied the governor and legislators. Some suggestions were accepted, including making sure that all foster children get a certified copy of their birth certificate and a Social Security card and help obtaining driver’s licenses.

Other suggestions would be more costly and remain under discussion, including offering free college tuition, giving former foster children cars being auctioned by the state and giving all the option to remain in care to 21.

But the youths also made it clear they believed that the problems start when the state removes children from their parents — sometimes too readily — and moves them away from relatives, friends and familiar schools.

Their first recommendation was that foster youths should have a say whenever changes in their status were considered. Their second was to provide them help maintaining ties with their birth families and hometown friends.

The state created a task force with youths on every panel. One top recommendation, the automatic extension of Medicaid coverage to age 21, has just been put into effect. The State Housing Development Authority has also allocated $3 million for rent subsidies, whose recipients will also be eligible for regular mental health and other services.

At the same time, Ms. Udow said, the state is working to reduce the frequency with which children are removed from their parents and trying to keep more children with relatives and in the same schools. The state is in settlement talks with the advocacy group Children’s Rights, which brought a suit accusing Michigan of providing inadequate protection and support to children in its care.

For the hundreds who have joined, the youth boards, with their weekly meetings and election of officers, have offered personal breakthroughs as much as a way to influence policy.

“When we come together it’s like family,” said Alice Harris, a 22-year-old mother of three children who lived in a home for unwed mothers when she entered foster care, then ran away at 16 and survived on the streets for more than a year.

More recently Ms. Harris has lived with a boyfriend, received welfare and become certified as a nurse’s assistant. She has become heavily involved with her local youth board in central Detroit, getting elected as an officer and lobbying in the state capital.

When she attended her first board meeting two years ago, she said, “I didn’t want to leave.”

“We were just gossiping, and I made friends, some of them worse off than I was.”

Chilton Brown, who says he “acted out” during his 15 years in foster care, has benefited from the new aid programs in Michigan but also illustrates how hard it can be to turn things around.

Mr. Brown gained confidence as a public spokesman, especially for the special challenges facing gay youths like himself, and has worked as a trainer of new foster parents. He entered Wayne State University with financial aid and aspirations to become a social worker. He took advantage of the matched savings program to buy a car.

But he has also lost a series of jobs, could not keep up payments on his car, lost his home when a relative moved away and has missed the last two semesters of college. He has spent the last three months living in Covenant House.

“I got too adapted to having other people take care of me,” he said in the sparse double room he shares. Now Mr. Brown’s belongings are stuffed into one suitcase, and two large plastic shopping bags.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/us/27foster.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2007

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton Replaced

January 26, 2007
Outspoken Catholic Pastor Replaced; He Says It’s Retaliation
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN, NY Times

In his last Mass as pastor at the inner-city parish in Detroit where he had served for 23 years, Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton told his parishioners that he was forced to step down as pastor because of his lobbying efforts on behalf of the victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy, a stance that put him in opposition to his fellow bishops.

Last weekend, the archbishop of Detroit, Cardinal Adam Maida, sent a letter to the parish, St. Leo, saying Bishop Gumbleton had to be removed because of church rules on retirement. But as Bishop Gumbleton, who turns 77 on Friday and had already retired last year as a bishop, told his parish last Sunday, there are many pastors even older than he who are allowed to continue serving.

“I’m sure it’s because of the openness with which I spoke out last January concerning victims of sex abuse in the church. So we’re all suffering the consequences of that, and yet, I don’t regret doing what I did because I still think it was the right thing to do,” he said, as the congregation rose and erupted in applause.

Bishop Gumbleton, though he never led a diocese, is known nationally in church circles as a liberal maverick. He co-founded the peace ministry Pax Christi and accompanied antiwar delegations to Haiti and Iraq. He broke ranks with church teaching by preaching in favor of acceptance of gay men and lesbians and the ordination of women.

Last January, he lobbied in favor of a bill in Ohio to extend the statute of limitations and allow victims of sexual abuse to sue the church many years after they were abused. He said he was speaking out because he had been abused by a priest as a teenage seminarian and knew how hard it was to speak publicly even decades later. Bishops in Ohio opposed the bill, which failed.

A spokesman for the archdiocese of Detroit, Ned McGrath, said Bishop Gumbleton’s removal from St. Leo Parish had nothing to do with his lobbying on sexual abuse or his political stands.

All bishops are required at age 75 to submit resignation letters to the pope, Mr. McGrath said, and the pope has the option to accept or reject the resignation. Bishop Gumbleton’s resignation was accepted last year, and, Mr. McGrath said, “it was with the understanding that he would give up any pastoral office.”

Cardinal Maida announced in his letter to parishioners that he had appointed a new pastor, the Rev. Gerard Battersby.

In his brief remarks at Mass on Sunday, Bishop Gumbleton told the parish that after he turned 75, he had sent a separate resignation letter to Cardinal Maida asking to stay on as pastor at St. Leo’s on a year-by-year basis. He said he was surprised by his sudden replacement.

“I did not choose to leave St. Leo’s,” he said. “It’s something that was forced upon me.”

Three canon lawyers interviewed on Thursday said there was nothing in canon law that would prohibit an archbishop from permitting a retired auxiliary bishop from serving as a pastor after 75.

Bishop Gumbleton, who has already moved out of his room behind the church and plans to move into an apartment in Detroit, did not respond to an interview request. A video of his remarks during Mass was taken by a parishioner and posted on the Web site of the National Catholic Reporter, an independent Catholic weekly newspaper that publishes a column by Bishop Gumbleton.

Mary M. Black, a parishioner at St. Leo’s, said: “Almost universally, everyone in the parish is hurt and angry and upset and bewildered.”

Ms. Black said: “He talks after Mass with people, and he is there ahead of Mass to say the rosary for anybody who has problems. And we all have his personal phone number. You do not have to go through a secretary. He was a pastor in the truest sense of the word.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)

Safety fears as US demonstrates crowd control heat-ray weapon

Safety fears as US demonstrates crowd control heat-ray weapon
How the wave device works

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday January 26, 2007
The Guardian

It looks like a table top stuck on a Humvee, but to the US military it is a revolutionary new weapon, a controversial heat-ray destined to change the face of conflict by dispersing mobs, protecting military bases and sorting friend from foe without inflicting injuries.

Called Silent Guardian, the prototype fires a high-intensity beam of millimetre waves, inflicting a burning sensation like a light bulb pressed against the skin. After 12 years in development it has been demonstrated in public for the first time, at Moody air force base in Georgia.

For the US defence department it marks the beginning of an era of "non-lethal, directed energy, counter-personnel" weapons, intended to cause temporary pain instead of killing or maiming. But critics yesterday raised fears that the weapon could cause serious, even life-threatening burns through accident or misuse.

During the demonstration a two-man crew used built-in rangefinders to target volunteers playing the part of angry rioters 500 metres away. Those hit by the beam jumped out of the way immediately to escape the sudden flash of heat.

The beam has a range of up to 1km, 10 times that of other non-lethal weapons such as plastic bullets or beanbag-firing guns. The waves penetrate clothing, but travel less than half a millimetre into the skin, where they cause water molecules to heat up. Within seconds, the beam heats the skin to around 50C (122F). Military officials plan to use the so-called Active Denial System to keep would-be attackers from approaching military installations or navy ships in dock, or for repelling mobs. It may also be useful in sorting combatants from bystanders, who are more likely to quickly leave the scene.

Speaking from the Pentagon yesterday, Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Maka said the device, which is not expected to be ready for deployment until 2010, was built to "stop, deter and turn back an adversary at a distance that lessens the potential for causing injury".

But Neil Davison, an expert in non-lethal weapons at the Disarmament Research Centre, Bradford, said that in tests so far volunteers had been allowed a cooling off period after being hit before being targeted again. "There's no way of guaranteeing people won't be targeted for longer in a real situation," he said.

Jürgen Altmann, an expert in military technology at Dortmund University, found that if the beam is tracked on a person for longer the skin temperature can quickly rise above 55C, and begin to burn.

"Even if they build in a mechanism that limits it to work for only a few seconds at a time, people can immediately be re-targeted," he said. "If more than 20% of their body receives second or third degree burns, it's potentially life-threatening."

According to papers released under freedom of information requests, mishaps during trials have caused blistering at least six times and one second degree burn when the beam was fired on too high a setting. According to the US military, the risk of injury is less than 0.1%.

Posted by lois at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Berkeley students counter drug rule

Berkeley students counter drug rule
Student government will let those with a conviction apply for a stipend, something the U.S. won't let them have.
By Seema Mehta, Times Staff Writer
January 26, 2007, LA Times

Some UC Berkeley students who are denied federal financial aid because of a drug conviction will be eligible for a new scholarship funded by the student government, the organization decided this week. Though the stipends are only $400, supporters say they are a symbolic protest against a law they call unjust.

"It's a very poor way for the government to fight the war on drugs," said David Israel Wasserman, a senior political science major and the senator in the Associated Students who wrote the resolution. "I don't think that the government should find more and more ways to deprive students of a means to an education."

David Murray, chief scientist with the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, called the Berkeley effort "misguided," saying federal aid is a privilege and that the government has an obligation to use whatever means necessary to dissuade young people from using drugs.

"If you are enabling self-destructive behavior by supporting it, condoning it or even paying for it, you're probably not helping the person get the help they need to deal with their disease," he said.

As tuition costs have skyrocketed, students are increasingly relying on financial assistance. Nearly two-thirds of undergraduates in 2003-04 received government or private aid, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Last year, the federal government gave out $82 billion in grants, loans and other assistance to more than 10 million students.

A drug conviction after a student begins receiving aid is the only crime that cuts off the federal money, a penalty that lasts at least a year. Students with three drug-use convictions or two drug-sale convictions are permanently ineligible. The lesser offenders can regain eligibility by completing drug treatment programs.

Since the law took effect in 2000, more than 189,000 students have been deemed ineligible because they admitted to a conviction or refused to provide the information on aid applications, according to the Education Department. California has a disproportionately high rate: one in every 278 applicants, 44% higher than the national average.

It's unknown how many of Berkeley's 34,000 students the rule has affected, but in the late 1990s, the school was known for having more campus drug arrests than nearly every other four-year institution in the country.

On Wednesday, the Associated Students board voted unanimously to give at least one $400 scholarship per year to a student who loses eligibility for federal aid because of a drug conviction. The recipient must maintain a 2.5 grade-point average, perform 20 hours of community service and have the "moral obligation" to contribute to the scholarship program after graduation, "once they find themselves in the financial position to be of assistance to the program."

The money, which can be spent only on college-related expenses, will come from the Associated Students' $1.5-million annual budget. The organization's funding comes from an activities fee students pay.

UC Berkeley officials who could comment on the matter couldn't be reached Thursday.

*

Posted by lois at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

CA: Littel Hoover Commission: "State Prisons in 'tailspin'"

State prisons in 'tailspin,' panel says
In a blistering report, the nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission links problems plaguing the correctional system to a lack of political will.
By Jenifer Warren, Times Staff Writer
January 26, 2007

SACRAMENTO — Three decades of tough-on-crime lawmaking has sent California's prison system into a "tailspin," creating the most pressing crisis facing the state, the government's own watchdog panel declared Thursday.

In a blistering 84-page report, the nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission linked the problems plaguing the correctional system to political cowardice among governors and lawmakers fearful of being labeled soft on crime.

If policymakers are unwilling to make bold changes, the commission said, they should appoint an independent entity — modeled after the federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission — with the power to do it for them.

"For decades, governors and lawmakers fearful of appearing soft on crime have failed to muster the political will to address the looming crisis," the commission said.

"And now their time has run out."

The 13-member commission is an independent agency composed of Republicans and Democrats appointed by the governor and legislative leaders. Since its inception in 1962, the commission has worked to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state programs.

The report, delivered directly to the governor and the Legislature, included suggestions for sentencing reform and other changes, many of them previously offered by the commission and other critics. It broke new ground, however, by bluntly stating that when it comes to corrections in California, political posturing has trumped sound lawmaking.

The state's 33 prisons are packed to twice their intended capacity, with more than 16,000 inmates bunking in hallways, classrooms and other areas not designed as housing. Prison leaders say they will be out of room for new inmates by summer, and concern about riots is extremely high.

A federal judge, meanwhile, has given the state until June to relieve the crowding or face a possible cap on the inmate population, now about 172,000.

Though Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled an ambitious $10.9-billion prison building and reform plan, its fate in the Legislature is uncertain, and most of the proposed solutions would take years to enact.

The governor has a short-term program to ease crowding — transferring inmates to other states — but it is faltering because few convicts are volunteering to go.

In October, the commission noted, the governor declared a state of emergency in the prisons: "But even that didn't bring action, only more reports to federal judges that underscore the fact that the state's corrections policy is politically bankrupt."

In an interview, Commissioner Dan Hancock said the report's unusually harsh tone was designed to highlight the desperate state of affairs, which he said extends beyond crowding to medical and mental health care and a criminal sentencing system the commission called a "haphazard jumble."

Hancock said the crisis had been caused largely by a ceaseless game of one-upmanship by politicians seeking to burnish their reputations as crime-fighters.

"Each has tried to outdo the other on who could be toughest on crime, but nobody was thinking clearly about what the ramifications would be for the state," he said. The result is an incoherent penal code dominated by what experts call "drive-by sentencing laws," often enacted by politicians responding to a single high-profile crime.

The report comes just days after Schwarzenegger and the top Democrat in the Assembly publicly lamented the lack of political will to tackle the problem.

In an interview with The Times last week, Schwarzenegger said prisons had not been a priority because they were not a "sexy" topic that affects the lives of voters — and thus had attracted little interest from lawmakers.

"You talk about prisons, people feel like, 'OK, go out and get the criminal and you send him somewhere, but wherever that is, I don't want to look there, I don't want to know,' " the governor said.

"When the people are not excited about it, how do you make the legislators excited about it?"

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) was more pointed in his comments, blaming legislators for a short-sighted "lock up everybody" mentality that has wrought painful consequences.

"It's good politically, because you can champion it as you're tough on crime," Nuñez told a news conference Monday. "But in the end, the prisons are overcrowded, we don't do enough rehabilitation, the prisoners get out of jail and go back and commit more crimes, we have the highest recidivism rate of any state in the nation.

"It's a shameful part of the California body politic. We've got to change that."

Whether the rhetoric — or the commission's report — will have any substantial effect on lawmakers is unclear.

Analysts say the political fear of being tagged as a friend of felons runs deep. And voters enthusiastically embrace ballot initiatives seeking to toughen penalties, such as the "three strikes" law of 1994 and the crackdown on sex offenders passed last year.

"We're always ever so nice to furry animals and very, very mean to criminals," said Shaun Bowler, a professor of political science at UC Riverside. "It's almost reflexive, the voters' desire to be tough. If the prisons are a cross between a sewer and the Roman Colosseum, their answer seems to be, 'Good.' "

But some criminologists say the public has been misled about just what sort of policies make the streets safer. At UC Irvine, Joan Petersilia said the "cookie-cutter" approach has put a lot of people in prison but failed to deliver much in the way of public safety.

"I don't think the public really understands that all this money we're spending isn't yielding much in return," Petersilia said. California, she noted, may spend more than $8 billion a year on corrections — a 52% increase over the last five years — but roughly 70% of inmates released by the state wind up back behind bars.

"Everyone agrees we've got a crisis, but no one is willing to put forth an agenda and lead," Petersilia said.

"That's the key ingredient that's been missing."

The Little Hoover report is available at http://www.lhc.ca.gov/lhc.html .

*

Posted by lois at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Cash-strapped state legislators are finally considering relaxing mandatory drug sentences.

Cheap trick
Cash-strapped state legislators are finally considering relaxing mandatory drug sentences.
Will budget woes succeed where appeals to justice have failed?
BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI
Boston Phoenix, January 26, 2007

AFTER MORE THAN a decade of tough-on-crime policies — fueled by 13 years of Republican administrations committed to re-introducing prisoners to the joys of lethal injection — the law-and-order atmosphere at the Massachusetts State House has begun to dissipate. A case in point: two bills recently filed on Beacon Hill that take aim at the state’s draconian mandatory-minimum-sentence drug laws.

The first measure, known as Senate Bill 167, would make drug offenders who have already served two-thirds of mandatory-minimum sentences eligible for parole — something that they currently cannot seek, unlike rapists, armed robbers, and child molesters, who are not subject to mandatory minimums. Sponsored by State Senator Cynthia Creem (D-Newton), Senate Bill 167 constitutes a kind of baby step toward reform. The proposal does not repeal mandatory minimums for drug convictions. Nor does it offer a get-out-of-jail-free card for the thousands of drug offenders who’re now languishing in the state’s 22 correctional facilities. It simply tries to ease the impact of these sentences for those who’ve done substantial time.

Senate Bill 167 also dovetails with a much larger reform effort that would moderate the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. That bill, known as House Bill 3302, would institute a comprehensive set of sentencing guidelines for all the state’s 1922 statutory crimes. Under the guidelines, judges would be allowed to depart from the rigid penalties dictated by the mandatory-sentencing drug laws and instead sentence addicts to treatment and intense supervision. The bill, sponsored by State Representative David Linsky (D-Natick), mirrors legislation first drafted seven years ago by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, a state agency dedicated to overhauling the criminal-justice system — legislation that has died at the State House every single session since.

But in these tough fiscal times, such sentencing reforms are gaining ground. Senate Bill 167, in fact, has extra appeal. According to the Sentencing Commission, approximately 2000 prisoners are currently serving mandatory minimums — out of close to 20,000 county and state prisoners. Of those, 650 people would be eligible for parole immediately if Senate Bill 167 were to pass. The commission estimates that up to 325 of these drug offenders would receive parole in the first wave. Given that it costs $36,000 per year to house one prisoner, the measure could save as much as $11.7 million almost instantly. These savings were highlighted at a packed, 100-strong May 21 hearing on the two bills before the legislature’s Joint Committee on Criminal Justice — which is expected to recommend the bills in upcoming weeks. Numerous organizations, including the Sentencing Commission, the Supreme Judicial Court, and local and state bar associations, spoke in favor of the proposed legislation. Those who attended the hearing say committee members repeatedly questioned the cost of the current drug policies. Even the state’s district attorneys, who’ve consistently opposed loosening mandatory minimums, seemed willing to compromise. Although the district attorneys reject Senate Bill 167 and House Bill 3302, they have expressed a willingness to modify certain mandatory minimums.

For those who back sentencing reform, the state’s ballooning budget crisis has opened a window of opportunity. Advocates who’ve long criticized the mandatory-drug-sentencing policies are seizing on the existing climate as a chance to change hearts and minds among fiscal conservatives and unlikely political allies. As Lynn Holbein, a member of the local chapter of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), puts it, "Today, there’s opportunity in the midst of our budget crisis. Politicians who were unwilling to make these decisions based on what’s right may do so based on money." After all, she aptly points out, "Money has a way of causing introspection."

THERE’S NO doubt that the state’s mandatory-minimum-sentence drug laws need revamping. As it stands, Massachusetts’s mandatory sentences for drug convictions rank among the harshest in the nation. Trafficking in as little as 14 grams of cocaine — an amount equal in volume to 14 packets of sweetener — gets you three years behind bars. If you’re convicted of selling those 14 grams near school property, you get another two years. If you’re convicted of possessing those 14 grams with intent to sell to minors, it’s an additional three years on top of that. And all this happens automatically.

This rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to criminal justice — an approach that shifts discretion from judges to prosecutors, who choose what charges to pursue in the first place — has long come under fire. These laws lump disparate behaviors and people into neat categories, with no room for common sense. As a result, people who deserve less severe penalties are left languishing in jail cells for decades. People who had never broken the law before. People who had unwittingly dated a drug dealer. People whose habits put them at the wrong place at the wrong time. In Massachusetts, first-time, nonviolent drug offenders routinely spend more time behind bars than rapists and child molesters. Says Martin Rosenthal, of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (MACDL), who’s pushed to repeal mandatory minimums for drug convictions since 1990, "Nobody likes to talk about the huge injustices. The poor drug mules and petty dealers who go away for 10, 15, and 20 years." Count Charles Ginsberg among the lot. A Web-page designer from Arlington, Ginsberg, 53, spent most of the 1990s locked up in a tiny cell in a Georgia penitentiary, serving a 10-year mandatory sentence for conspiring to sell marijuana. Because the "conspiracy" in question extended beyond Massachusetts, Ginsberg, a Winthrop native, was sentenced under federal mandatory-minimum laws, which, unlike the state’s, allow offenders to earn "good time" for early release. After nearly nine years and the successful completion of a drug-treatment program, he managed to shave six months from his prison term. Nevertheless, Ginsberg considers his punishment "out of whack" with his crime.

It’s not as if he didn’t sell pot. Indeed, he readily admits he became the pot dealer of choice for customers in and around Winthrop. "But I was a small fish in a big tank," he says. At the time of his November 1991 arrest — when a buyer who’d been charged with conspiracy to sell gave him up — Ginsberg had been in trouble with police only once, when, at 19, he was arrested for possessing pot. He had never owned or fired a gun. Two years before his arrest, he had stopped selling marijuana at all. And so, he says, "I didn’t deserve 10 years. If you’re a small fry and you don’t hurt anyone, I see no reason to go to prison that long." Ginsberg’s time behind the wall provided him with firsthand lessons on the failed results of mandatory minimums — not just the injustices of their severity, but also the racial disparities they deepen. More than 80 percent of people convicted under Massachusetts’s mandatory-sentencing drug laws are minorities, according to the Sentencing Commission. And the same holds true at the federal level — even though blacks and Latinos consume drugs at the same rate as whites. Ginsberg recalls meeting black and Latino men who’d done, as he puts it, "a lot less than me," yet faced much stricter penalties. Some were teenagers who had run with the wrong crowd, gotten caught with an ounce of crack, and been sentenced to 20 years. Others smoked joints inside their homes in cities, like Boston, where entire neighborhoods fall within a school zone. The experience left him convinced of the need for reform. He adds, "I feel a duty to speak out with whatever breath I have in me."

So does Nancy Brown, who heads the New England chapter of FAMM. Brown got involved in FAMM back in 1991, when her son, then 20, was charged with conspiracy to transport a controlled substance across state lines. When she heard her son, who had followed the Grateful Dead, was facing a 10-year mandatory, "I was floored," she says. "I thought, ‘Oh, my God. He must have killed someone.’" On the contrary, her son, whose name Brown asked the Phoenix not to publish, had sent an envelope containing several tabs of LSD through the mail to a friend. To this day, the sentence — which her son served in various penitentiaries until his 1999 early release for good behavior — strikes Brown as extreme. She explains, "My son used illegal substances and should pay the consequences." Yet for a young college student who’d never been in trouble, she adds, "the sentence did not fit his crime."

It’s a message that Brown and FAMM advocates have tried to send to Massachusetts legislators for years now. Ever since 1996, when the Sentencing Commission composed its set of comprehensive sentencing guidelines, advocates have fought to ease mandatory drug sentences — to no avail. When it comes to these sentences, the commission’s recommendation seems nothing if not modest: it would simply give judges discretion to sentence drug offenders to less than the mandated minimum. By having to provide written reasons for the departure, judges would be held accountable. And prosecutors could appeal such decisions at any time.

Despite these safeguards, the law-and-order brigade has sounded off against the commission’s guidelines in every legislative session since 1996. Legislators and prosecutors have criticized the measure as too soft — principally because it eliminates mandatory minimums for drug convictions. Last legislative session, however, reformers came closer than ever to success. In October 2001, the Criminal Justice Committee reported favorably on a tinkered version of the commission’s guidelines, one that would have allowed for some deviation from mandatory sentences for drug convictions. The bill specified "six mitigating circumstances" under which a judge could veer from the mandated minimums — if, for instance, a defendant has little or no prior record, is a minor player in the offense, and didn’t cause grave injury or death. Later that month, then–House minority leader Francis Marini led the effort to tighten the guidelines with an amendment that would have ratcheted up punishment for 30 crimes, from weapons possession to child molestation, but that would have left the drug-sentencing-reform measures intact. The House passed the amended bill (currently filed as House Bill 2749) on a voice vote — only to watch it die in the Senate.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that legislators seemed more open to flexible sentencing for drug offenders during the last legislative session, just as the state’s escalating fiscal crisis began to take hold. But then, maybe it’s not. As legislators grapple with a projected budget deficit of $3 billion and counting, Beacon Hill’s law-and-order culture has begun to give way to financial realities. According to Michael Cutler, a Boston attorney who heads the Drug Policy Forum of Massachusetts, a pro-drug-reform group, the problem for advocates has always come down to money. Legislators, he notes, "have had plenty of money to persecute drug users and to pay for schools and all the other services." They’ve never had to make a choice — until today. Now, no one at the State House can deny that a dollar more for prison cells equals a dollar less for classrooms, human services, and health care. Those who don’t fit the mold of what Cutler calls "the true moral crusader" can acknowledge the failures of the mandatory-sentencing drug laws without fear of attracting the weak-on-crime label. "At some point," Cutler observes, "morality falls victim to cost. Legislators can no longer afford to be moral."

Lawmakers who’ve pushed for reform agree. More and more these days, Linsky, the Natick representative, sees his colleagues "starting to scrutinize the costs of our criminal-justice system." As a result, he says, "We’re asking questions about whether or not these mandatory sentences serve the public purpose." For those eager to stop the hemorrhage of red ink, the new guidelines and parole measures offer new incentive. Adds Senator Creem, "The budget crisis means that these bills can appeal to a broader base of people. Even past opponents of reform may see a way to support" these bills.

THE MASSACHUSETTS legislature is not alone. Desperate to avert projected budget deficits, legislatures in states across the nation have begun to curtail corrections spending by moderating tough sentencing laws. As many as 20 states have loosened mandatory minimums for drug convictions since 2001, when states first began to encounter huge revenue shortfalls. So pervasive is the state-government fiscal crisis that similar sentencing reforms have unfolded even in places that pride themselves on getting tough, such as Ohio, Louisiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

By far, the most dramatic effort has occurred in Michigan, which boasted the harshest mandatory-sentencing drug laws in the US. The state has become notorious for its "650 Lifer Law," which sentenced even first-time offenders caught with over 650 grams of cocaine or heroin to life in prison without parole — the same term meted out to a first-degree murderer. Criminal-justice experts and advocates had been lobbying to ease the strict drug penalties for six years. But it wasn’t until last December, when lawmakers began slashing expenditures to make up for a $500 million shortfall, that the campaign gained momentum. On December 27, then–Michigan governor John Engler, a conservative Republican, signed into law a bill repealing the state’s mandatory sentences and replacing them with flexible guidelines similar to those proposed in Massachusetts — a step that’s already reduced the number of first-time offenders going to jail. Not only did the effort enjoy across-the-board support from politicians, but it was trumpeted even by long-time opponents like the Prosecuting Attorneys Association. The turnaround isn’t surprising, given that the elimination of mandatory drug minimums in Michigan has saved the state an estimated $41 million in 2003 alone.

To be sure, money isn’t the sole factor fueling this trend. Criminal-justice issues in general have become less politicized than in, say, the mid 1990s, when politicians and the public ate up measures like three-strikes-you’re-out mandatory sentences and prisoner chain gangs. Michael Mauer, of the Washington, DC–based advocacy group the Sentencing Project, explains that the "level of tension and emotion" surrounding these issues is lower today partly because of the reduced crime rate, which, despite a recent slight rise, plummeted during the 1990s. Part of the shift in attitudes, too, has to do with the success of such incarceration-alternative programs as the nation’s 800 drug courts, which divert first-time, nonviolent drug offenders into drug-treatment programs rather than jail. But even so, Mauer views money as the main force behind the reforms. "There’s no question that the fiscal crisis is driving these efforts," he says. "Legislators have got to balance their budgets, so they see these get-tough policies come with an expensive price tag."

This isn’t necessarily unusual. According to Jack Levin, who directs Northeastern University’s Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, changes in criminal-justice policy often result from economic necessity. While reaction to extraordinary events can drive such changes — when Somerville resident Eddie O’Brien stabbed his best friend’s mother 98 times in 1996, for instance, his case became the exemplar for trying juveniles as adults, now a favored criminal-justice policy — fiscal concerns can exert similar pressure. Levin points to the trend of de-institutionalizing the mentally ill during the 1970s, a time of comparable financial turmoil. Back then, the state adopted a policy of emptying out the institutions and integrating the mentally ill back into the community, where they’d receive services. Community-based mental-health care was touted as humanitarian reform. But, Levin says, "the real reason for this policy shift was to cut costs at the expense of mentally ill people who needed services." In the same way, he adds, "the underlying motivation for relaxing mandatory minimums has an economic basis."

For many, this economic impetus says something troubling about how we determine our criminal-justice policy. Experts like Mauer find it "sad commentary" that money has become the catalyst for drug-sentencing reform. "For years," he says, "legislators have overlooked all the evidence about the injustices, racial disparities, and inefficiencies of this system. Only when cost becomes an issue do we see this rising concern." Levin, too, thinks the latest trend shows how politicians and the public have "an infinite capacity to rationalize criminal-justice policy based on money." He then echoes the sentiment among many advocates when he concludes: "It’s not a very pretty picture whether you agree with the outcome or not. But, at least in this case, it’s positive. We’re doing the right thing for the wrong reason."

HERE IN Massachusetts, of course, it remains to be seen whether the pain of incessant budget cuts will cause lawmakers to rethink the state’s mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Although the May 21 hearing brought out scores of supporters for the parole and sentencing-guidelines measures, it also attracted opponents — namely, the district attorneys. Hampden County prosecutor William Bennett testified at the hearing on behalf of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association. He told the Phoenix that the DAs reject Creem’s bill because it wouldn’t "maintain the integrity of mandatory sentences." Rather than parole drug offenders, he and his colleagues propose placing them on supervised work release. That way, they would be able to reintegrate into society by working outside the prison walls while still serving out their sentences. The DAs also oppose Linsky’s proposed sentencing-guidelines measure. But they’ve made a nod toward compromise by embracing the last session’s House Bill 2749, which does call for some deviation from the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Explains Bennett, "There is merit in considering exceptions to the mandatories in certain circumstances," particularly as they relate to school zones.

And so, for the most part, the prosecutors aren’t too keen on easing the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Bennett even implies that the state has no need for full reform because it doesn’t have mandatory sentences for drug possession, as other states do. Only 1.8 percent of the state’s drug convictions involve a mandatory sentence, he says, explaining that DAs turn to mandatory minimums only to prosecute "aggravating factors," such as large quantities, repeat offenders, and sales to minors. Claims Bennett, "We have a much different set-up than other states do."

As the Criminal Justice Committee weighs the opposition and support for sentencing reform in upcoming months, all advocates can do is wait and hope. No doubt, many reformers feel saddened that budget woes — as opposed to concerns about justice and fairness — are moving their agenda forward. As Ginsberg bluntly puts it, "I think it’s sickening that once the money gets tight legislators are willing to listen." Then again, even he can see the silver lining in the current financial clouds. If money causes state legislators to re-examine and reduce mandatory minimums for drug convictions, so be it. To look at it another way, advocates say, it’s sadder still that Massachusetts has remained behind while other states enact their sentencing reforms. And saddest of all, that legislators here are debating only partial reforms, despite the fact that mandatory minimums have proven a failed and costly experiment. http://72.166.46.24/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/02931078.htm

This and other news about the war on drugs can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2007

TX: Plan for 5000 more cells at odds with report promoting rehab and reforms

"The criminal justice committees in the House and Senate plan to meet jointly next week to hear findings of a major report outlining several alternatives to incarceration. The report, "Justice Reinvestment," was conducted by the Council of State Governments with support from the U.S. Justice Department. It promises "data-driven" strategies to reduce corrections spending and protect the public, a committee staffer said."

Houston Chronicle

Jan. 24, 2007
The Legislature

Lt. Gov. Dewhurst calling for more prisons

Plan for 5,000 more beds is at odds with a report promoting rehab and reforms
By POLLY ROSS HUGHES

AUSTIN ‹ Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said Wednesday that Texas needs to build prisons to hold 5,000 new beds, a view at odds with a major report key lawmakers will release next week that will stress treatment programs and prison alternatives.

"We respect the lieutenant governor, but we respectfully disagree with him on this one if he's talking about building maximum-security facilities," said Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, chairman of the House Corrections Committee.

Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, said Texas could ease crowded prisons and save money by increasing treatment options and returning fewer parolees to prison for minor infractions.

Even if some of Whitmire's suggestions for treating substance abusers are adopted, Dewhurst argues that the state still needs more prison space for a growing population.

"We haven't built any new prison beds in Texas for a number of years, and our population is exploding," Dewhurst said.

"I don't ‹ and the people of Texas don't ‹ want to have dangerous people on our streets, and that's what we're going to prevent. I've been looking at a number of 4,000 to 5,000" over the next four years, he said.

That projection is in line with the budget request by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which wants to add three prisons to hold 5,000 prisoners. That would cost $440 million just for construction, a state expense opposed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which advocates limited government.

"We've suggested a number of reforms in terms of probation, parole and sentencing. By adopting those, we would certainly not need more beds," said Marc Levin, director of the foundation's Center for Effective Justice.

Levin said more than 20,000 of Texas' 150,000 prisoners are incarcerated for nothing more than nonviolent drug possession. "If we re-routed those people into community-based drug-treatment programs, we would be able to reduce the number of prison beds we need below what we have now," Levin said.

Whitmire and Madden list several other options, such as shifting drunken drivers out of maximum-security cells and converting other cells for treatment within prison.

They note that 600 nonviolent offenders have been approved for parole. They remain in prison, however, because they've been placed on waiting lists for too few halfway houses.

Levin points out that a technical infraction of parole can land an offender back in prison for an average stay of 2.5 years.

Whitmire and Madden favor more 90-day "safety" facilities, where a parole violator could be locked up and penalized for a minor infraction without landing back in an expensive prison cell for years.

The criminal justice committees in the House and Senate plan to meet jointly next week to hear findings of a major report outlining several alternatives to incarceration.

The report, "Justice Reinvestment," was conducted by the Council of State Governments with support from the U.S. Justice Department. It promises "data-driven" strategies to reduce corrections spending and protect the public, a committee staffer said.

"I think when we have our hearing starting next Tuesday, we will demonstrate to everyone we have adequate capacity if we use what we have correctly," Whitmire said.

District Attorney John Bradley of Williamson County said he supports Dewhurst's call for more prison beds.

"I think his response is right on target if you just simply look at the growth that Texas has seen in new people coming in," he said.

Bradley said treatment is the only way some offenders ever will be rehabilitated, but he disagrees that treatment is enough.

"I completely, philosophically disagree with the premise that someone shouldn't be punished if they have a drug or alcohol problem," Bradley said. "It's very easy for a legislator who doesn't want to build prisons to say in broad strokes, 'There are too many people (in prison) who have drug or alcohol problems.'"

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4497258.html

Posted by lois at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Poll_ health Care, Yes....Prisons, NO

Capital Notes
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Health Care, Yes... Prisons, No
Some interesting tidbits can be found in the just-released poll from the Public Policy Institute of California about Californians' opinions on health care reform, their elected leaders, and the state's troubled prison system.

You can read the entire poll here. But the highlights:

* The mood seems brighter out there. 55% of those surveyed think things in California are going in the right direction... 40% approve of the job being done by the Legislature (that may look low, but the legislative branch's ratings have been much lower for a long time)... and 58% now approve of the job being done by Governor Schwarzenegger.

* 71% say they approve of the governor's health care reform plan, based on what they know, while 63% support going even further: a state-run health care system, even if it means raising taxes to pay for it... 79% like health care for kids in low-income families, but that drops to 56% when undocumented children are included.

* 63% of those surveyed say they support the governor's call for an additional $43 billion in bond borrowing. And while that proposal includes money for prisons, a separate question in the PPIC survey finds some unhappiness about new prison spending. 54% oppose using new state revenues for prisons. And only 34% of those queried want the state to devote more resources to prisons.

posted by John Myers at 10:01 PM John Myers is Sacramento Bureau Chief for KQED's "The California Report"

http://www.kqed.org/weblog/capitalnotes/2007/01/health-care-yes-prisons-no.j
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Posted by lois at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

Immigrants' Rights Violated, ACLU says

Immigrants' rights violated, group says

By Greg Moran, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
January 25, 2007
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070125-9999-1n25aclu.html

Immigration detainees at an Otay Mesa facility live in overcrowded and unsafe conditions that threaten their overall health and are unconstitutional, the American Civil Liberties Union in San Diego alleged in court documents yesterday.

Hundreds of detainees are crammed three to a cell built for two, and the 1,232-bed facility is “chronically and dangerously overcrowded,” the ACLU alleged.

“They are basically stuffing people like sardines in these tiny cells,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director for the local ACLU. “This isn't just saying, we're a little cramped in here. This is systematic, long-term outrageous overcrowding.”

The ACLU is seeking to join in a lawsuit filed in 2005 by a detainee at the facility that also alleged overcrowding problems. The group is trying to expand the suit to class-action status on behalf of those who are held there.

A key argument in the suit contends that people being held for immigration violations – which are violations of civil and not criminal law – are constitutionally entitled to better conditions than criminal defendants.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California and most of the western United States and has the most immigration-related cases of any court in the country, made that finding in a 2004 case.

“This is the first case that has challenged the conditions of confinement for immigration detainees using that theory,” said Gouri Bhat, a prison rights lawyer with the ACLU in New York.

If successful, it could have wide-ranging effects on the conditions of confinement for the thousands of people held in immigration centers around the country.

Conditions in those facilities have been criticized by immigration advocates before. But Bhat said that since 2001, the number of people in detention has increased to 27,500 nationally, and conditions have not improved.

“This is the first suit of its kind that really takes aim at ICE for their practices in housing immigrant detainees,” she said.

The suit names officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest private, for-profit prison company.

If the suit forces changes in the San Diego facility, “we're hopeful that will have positive ramifications across the country,” Bhat said.

Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for ICE in San Diego, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation. However, she said, the agency conducts its own audits of detention facilities “to make sure we are adhering to all our standards.”

A spokesman for Corrections Corporation of America declined comment.

The detention facility, about 4½ miles from the Otay Mesa border crossing, is in an area that has a county jail, a juvenile hall and a state prison. It opened in 1998 and houses people caught illegally crossing the border, asylum seekers and those challenging deportation orders.

Because of the backlog of immigration cases, detainees can spend months and years awaiting a decision. Since they are charged with civil crimes, they are not entitled to lawyers and exist in a kind of limbo until their cases are resolved.

Among the chief complaints in the lawsuit is the practice of putting three detainees in a 12-foot by 6-foot cell built for two. About two-thirds of detainees are housed in this manner.

The suit contends others have to sleep in beds on the floor of the common room because of overcrowding.

The conditions have led to delays in medical treatment, poor sanitation and mental health problems for detainees, according to the lawsuit.

Courts have held that people being detained under civil law violations have to be held in conditions that are superior to people held under criminal laws, Blair-Loy said.

“The government has a higher obligation to them,” he said. “They can't be held to conditions that amount to punishment.”

Doing so is a violation of the due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, Blair-Loy said.

The same facility was examined in an audit released last week by investigators with the department, which looked at conditions at five facilities across the country.

Some violations of health and safety rules were noted at the Otay Mesa facility. But the audit did not mention what the ACLU said is severe overcrowding, nor other poor conditions and abuses the ACLU outlined in its lawsuit.

Blair-Loy said the audit, which did not discuss the practice of placing three people in a two-person cell, was no more than a “whitewash.”

The overcrowding has led to increased tensions at the facility and conflicts between the guards and the detainees. The suit said that in September, a group of detainees who wanted to speak to ICE officials about the overcrowding were “abruptly tear-gassed and pepper sprayed” by guards.

That ICE detention facilities are overcrowded is “nothing remarkable,” said John Keeley of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., which favors stricter immigration policies.

The agency does not have adequate resources, he said, and the ultimate solution to the immigration issue is the enforcement of laws.

“The solution here is not to point the finger at the men and women of ICE,” Keeley said.

The lawsuit does not seek damages, but does seek a court order that will stop the overcrowding and other practices, Blair-Loy said.

“The main motivation here is to change the system,” he said. “It's not about making money, but trying to cure the inhumane conditions down there.”

Posted by lois at 05:02 PM | Comments (0)

Mendy Samstein, 68, Dies; Championed Civil Rights

Mendy Samstein, 68, Dies; Championed Civil Rights
By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NY Times, January 25, 2007

Mendy Samstein, who left graduate school to put himself in the forefront of the fight for black voting rights in Mississippi, enduring bombings and beatings in the crucial summer of 1964, died yesterday at his home in New Lisbon, N.Y. He was 68.

The cause was carcinoid cancer, his wife, Nancy Cooper, said.

Mr. Samstein abandoned his pursuit of a doctorate in history to join the historic turmoil in the South and became known as an adept organizer and pull-no-punches speaker. He helped recruit and deploy the more than 800 college students, mainly white, who traveled from many states to rural Mississippi towns, mainly black, as part of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964.

He became a full-time organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Stokely Carmichael, who later became the group’s chairman, called him “one in a million.”

In “Ready for Revolution” (2003), which Ekwueme Michael Thelwell helped write, Mr. Carmichael said volunteers like Mr. Samstein stopped being white “except in the most superficial sense of the word.” He explained that they, too, experienced white hatred.

Mr. Samstein was one of nine committee workers in a house in McComb, Miss., on July 8, 1964, when three blasts ripped the house apart.

Abbie Hoffman, the mischievous radical whom Mr. Samstein had known at Brandeis, was at home in Massachusetts watching the news when he saw his friend crawling from the rubble. “It was then I decided to head South,” Mr. Hoffman said, according to “For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman” (1996), by Jonah Raskin.

In August 1964, Mr. Samstein, then a field secretary for the committee, told The New York Times about problems in rural Mississippi and said one county, Amite, had been under “a reign of terror.” Policemen pulled him from his car at a stoplight to beat him, Mr. Samstein’s wife said.

Mr. Samstein went on to work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s largely black delegation trying to supplant or join the all-white Mississippi delegation already chosen for the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964. His radicalism flared when Bayard Rustin, the legendary civil rights organizer, suggested compromise. According to Taylor Branch in “Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65” (1998), Mr. Samstein jumped up and shouted, “You’re a traitor, Bayard!”

The failure of the Freedom Democrats, the slowed pace of civil rights progress, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s own metamorphosis into a black nationalist group demoralized Mr. Samstein.

“I curse this country every day of my life because it made me hate it, and I never wanted to,” he said in an interview with Jack Newfield in “A Prophetic Minority” (1966).

Jehudah Menachem Mendel Samstein was born on July 20, 1938, in Manhattan. His father, a kosher butcher became ill, switched to real estate investing and died when Mendy was 10.

Mendy Samstein’s education began in a yeshiva and continued at Stuyvesant High School. He majored in European history at Brandeis and earned a master’s degree in the subject from Cornell. He was a history Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago when he was offered a teaching job at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He grabbed it to be near the civil rights movement.

His wife said his ardor came from his deep feelings about the Holocaust. “He did not want to permit that kind of destruction of a race to happen again,” Ms. Cooper said.

Bob Moses, who led a federation of civil rights groups in Mississippi, invited him to the state, where he worked with Allard K. Lowenstein, later a New York congressman, to recruit and train students from Stanford and Yale for a mock election in October 1963. The “election” did not count, but 80,000 “voters” vividly demonstrated blacks’ electoral clout.

Mr. Samstein met Nancy Cooper the same weekend the bodies of three slain civil rights workers were found. She had been a classmate of one, Andrew Goodman, at Queens College, and followed him south to teach in the so-called freedom schools.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Samstein is survived by his sons, Ivan, of Chicago, and Ben, of Manhattan; and a granddaughter.

After his civil rights days, Mr. Samstein organized against the Vietnam War, taught school, was a psychoanalyst and ran a summer camp, among other things. In 2000, he joined civil rights veterans to protest the handling of the presidential vote in Florida.

He also helped Mr. Moses with his Algebra Project, an effort to bring mathematical literacy to the poor. In a recent communication to Mr. Samstein’s family, Mr. Moses noted that it had not taken multitudes to bring change to Mississippi in the 1960s.

“It took a few people willing to risk everything,” he said.

Posted by lois at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

Childhood Poverty Is Found to Portend High Adult Costs

January 25, 2007
Childhood Poverty Is Found to Portend High Adult Costs
By ERIK ECKHOLM, NY Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - Children who grow up poor cost the economy $500 billion a year because they are less productive, earn less money, commit more crimes and have more health-related expenses, according to a study released on Wednesday. "The high cost of childhood poverty to the U.S. suggests that investing significant resources in poverty reduction might be more cost effective than we thought," said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and the Urban Institute and one of the four authors of the report.

Mr. Holzer was one of several poverty experts who testified Wednesday to the House Ways and Means Committee as the report was released. The new chairman of the panel, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, said the experts were appearing "not as bleeding hearts, but to calculate the costs of poverty to our economy and society."
"We're talking about saving money and making productive people in the age of globalization," Mr. Rangel said in comments that seemed to reflect an awareness by Democratic lawmakers of the financial and political constraints they face.
The hearing was the first of many expected over the coming year intended to focus attention on the 37 million Americans who live below the official poverty line, defined as $19,350 a year for a family of four. For more than 10 years, lawmakers had mainly focused on sweeping welfare changes passed in 1996 that imposed time limits and strict work requirements on welfare recipients. In the process, Democratic staff members in the House and Senate said this week, other crucial poverty-related topics were neglected.
Apart from an increase in the minimum wage, which the House passed on Jan. 10 but was blocked on Wednesday in the Senate by Republicans insisting on concessions for small businesses, the Democrats have not put together a broad list of initiatives to combat poverty, staff members said, and they will spend time evaluating research and cost-effective tactics.
The report on the price of child poverty was commissioned by the Center for American Progress, a liberal group here that plans to issue detailed antipoverty recommendations in the spring.
A Republican scholar and former official who testified at the hearing, Ron Haskins, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the study superb and said that while economists might quibble over details, the $500 billion cost estimate costs "might be in the ballpark."
Mr. Haskins noted that the authors had not specified the high cost of eliminating child poverty, which census figures show affected 12.3 million children in 2005, or 17.1 percent of those younger than 18.
"Do not think that if we suddenly gave a bunch of money to poor people, everything would change," he told lawmakers, adding that behaviors, neighborhoods and parents' actions need to change if children's life paths are to change.
Mr. Haskins said it was important to continue work requirements for most welfare recipients, along with government support for programs like child care and tax credits. Promoting the economic benefits of marriage is also important, he said, because a disproportionate number of single-parent families are poor.
In the only flare of partisan discord, some Democratic lawmakers questioned the effectiveness of promoting marriage, a favorite initiative of the Bush administration. But Democrats voiced no inclination to reverse the transformation of the welfare system into more of a work program.
Mr. Holzer and others said that although various proposals to ease poverty needed more research, some efforts, especially the earned-income tax credit, which benefits low-income workers, and quality prekindergarten education had been shown to justify their cost and deserved to expand.
Poor schooling, lack of employment and the high arrest rate among poor young men, especially black men, have emerged as major concerns of liberal and conservative experts alike.
David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York, testified that 16 percent of people in New York City ages 16 to 24 were neither in school nor employed and that nearly 40 percent of all black men in the city were jobless, defined as unable to find work, unable to perform manual labor because of health problems, not looking for work or in prison.
Mr. Jones joined the growing chorus of experts who call for extending the earned-income tax credit, which supplements the low wages of poor working parents, to single men and women.
Social research and neuroscience have shown the importance of early childhood development on later functioning, Jane Knitzer, director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, told the panel. Yet the Early Head Start program serves just 62,000 infants and children, Ms. Knitzer said.
In the coming year, lawmakers are expected to focus on refining and continuing some existing programs for poor children, including Head Start, food stamps and a health-insurance plan known as S-Chip.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/us/25poverty.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2007

CO: A Prison In Ault?

A prison in Ault?
Is Ault Courting Disaster?
Small town’s leaders hope GEO Group’s proposed prison holds the keys to its economic future, but experts say it would be a life sentence of economic stagnation
By Greg Campbell and Joel Dyer

January 24, 2007
http://www.fortcollinsweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=453&Itemid=35

When most people consider the components of “economic development,” they usually don’t consider incarceration as being among them.

Unless you live in the town of Ault.

Little more than a crossroads of highways 14 and 85, Ault is unique among Northern Colorado communities in that it has yet to try capitalizing on the growth and development boom shaping once-sleepy rural towns into economic powerhouses. Whereas places like Windsor, Timnath and even Severance have responded to projected regional population growth and blooming housing markets with ambitious—and sometimes controversial—economic development plans, Ault has lived up to its self-styled reputation as a bedroom community for Greeley and Fort Collins—by and large, it’s been asleep at the wheel.

“Unfortunately, during the big growth spurt that’s been happening around the Front Range, Ault hasn’t taken advantage of that,” says Ault Mayor Brad Bayne. “We have a few new subdivisions, but we really didn’t have the land to attract the good industrial growth or business. … It’s the Eatons, the Severances and the Windsors that have really been booming. One of our big initiatives (as a Town Board) was to update the comprehensive plan, annex areas for industrial growth. As a town, we probably haven’t taken real good advantage of that in the past.”

But Bayne and others on the Town Board see a remedy on the horizon, one with razor-wire fences and steel bars. Like many rural towns across the country that have found themselves without the clout or resources to attract more desirable employers, Ault has turned to the private prison industry for its salvation. Last year, the Colorado Department of Corrections filed a notice of intent to award a contract to Baton Rouge, Fla.-based GEO Group Inc., formerly a division of the Wackenhut Corp., to build a 1,500-bed medium security prison for male inmates on 46 acres just southeast of the town. The prisoners alone would double the town’s population and the presence of the facility, Bayne hopes, would provide Ault with the same type of economic benefits that have been enjoyed by its neighbors for the past several years: an influx of new businesses, new jobs that pay better than any other employer in town, an annual payment in lieu of taxes to boost the general fund and prison-funded upgrades to infrastructure like the sewer system and the wastewater treatment plant. Additionally, thanks to the higher population—the U.S. Census doesn’t differentiate between inmates and other residents—the town’s Highland School District will likely qualify for more funding from the state.

This sunny vision of Ault’s future, however, is marred by more than a few dark clouds. For one thing, the status of the contract is in question—GEO Group is under investigation by the state legislature for allegations of conflict of interest. An audit performed by the Legislative Audit Committee—at the behest of Rep. Buffie McFayden, whose district near Pueblo has 12 prisons—found that the Ault contract was negotiated with the help of private prison consultant Nolin Renfrow. At the time he was working on behalf of GEO, Renfrow was a top official with the state corrections department and stands to earn a $1 million commission on the contract. GEO itself is creating hurdles by refusing to sign the contract unless the state agrees to a guaranteed minimum number of prisoners to be housed there, something the state has never done for any of the other private prisons in Colorado. Just last week, DOC director Ari Zavaras told the Joint Budget Committee that guaranteeing beds “would be bad for Colorado,” according to department spokeswoman Allison Morgan; the issue will be decided by Gov. Bill Ritter. Adding to GEO’s troubles, the company recently saw another private prison contract for a location in Pueblo cancelled by the DOC. The contract was signed in 2003, but the company never even broke ground on the facility, again citing the need for a guaranteed number of inmates. Since Colorado pays private prison companies on a per-inmate basis, it’s essentially seeking a guarantee on its revenue stream.

Those issues have yet to be settled, but even if they are, some researchers say Ault won’t be better for it. In fact, although conventional wisdom almost universally says that small rural towns benefit from hosting private prisons, some prison industry experts say the opposite is true.

If a prison is built in Ault, in other words, the town may be condemned to a life sentence of economic stagnation.

***

In July, a flyer was mailed to Ault residents titled “The Prison Facts.” It was circulated by the GEO Group and endorsed by many of the town’s leadership, who were listed at the end of the flyer with their contact information. It lists the many economic benefits a prison would bring to Ault, including jobs for 300-350 people. The flyer admits that some administrators and senior staff will come from elsewhere in the country, but tries hard to imply that other jobs would come from Ault, noting “Ault is rural, but has over 400,000 people in a 40 mile radius. This is where GEO hopes to hire most of their employees.” That’s true of course, but that radius includes Fort Collins, Loveland and Greeley; Ault’s growth management area extends only about a half mile from the center of town.

GEO representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment for this article.

Bayne says he doesn’t expect employment perks to come solely from the prison, but also from the peripheral jobs that would be generated—an additional 300-350 workers in Ault would spur sales at gas stations, restaurants, dry cleaners and other retailers, he says.

“We’re not naive enough to think that 350 people in Ault would work in the prison,” he says. “It would be bringing traffic through the town of Ault that would lead to business at the retail sources.”

But a new prison may not result in the employment boom Ault’s leaders hope it will, according to Clay Mosher, an associate professor of sociology at Washington State University-Vancouver. Mosher and his colleague Greg Hooks are experts on how prisons impact rural towns and he says the verdict isn’t good.

“What we’ve shown is that in rural towns, prisons in fact do not create jobs,” he says.

Except for the prisoners, that is. According to Morgan, the spokeswoman for the DOC, state law requires prisoners to work in order to offset the cost of their incarceration. The jobs may be menial in-house jobs or they could be beyond the prison walls out in the community. Mosher says it’s not uncommon for crews of inmates to be employed by private companies—at bargain basement prices, no less—to do everything from logging to street cleaning, jobs that otherwise would be done by others in the community.

“In recent years, inmates have engaged in jobs ranging from telemarketing to the manufacturing of computer circuit boards and furniture,” Mosher is quoted saying in a 2004 news article about his research. “Prisoners in California have served as booking agents for Trans World Airlines, while Microsoft uses convicts to assist in the shipping of Windows software. Honda pays $2 an hour to prisoners in Ohio to do the same jobs that members of the United Auto Workers Union were once paid $20 an hour to do.”

As for the other financial boosts, such as construction employment to build the new prison and the still-to-be determined annual payment in lieu of taxes, Mosher says they’re usually short lived and overblown.

“Collectively, (rural towns that host prisons) are not benefiting,” he says.

Mosher is in a position to know—he and Hooks conducted one of the most far-reaching analyses of prisons’ economic impacts on host communities, examining trends in 3,100 counties in 48 states. The goal was to test the long-held belief that private prisons were gold mines for communities with limited alternative source of economic development. Those presumptions, according to their research, were based primarily on the perceptions of business leaders, which were no doubt fueled by those in the prison industry eager to land new contracts.

It’s not hard to see why: Between 1980 and 1998—boom time for new prison construction in the United States—the number of Americans behind bars soared by 400 percent to about 1.3 million people. The inmate population has continued to grow, although not as explosively and today, there are about 2.1 million Americans doing time in prison. As states run out of room—and money—they have increasingly turned to private prisons to meet the need. It’s estimated that about 200,000 inmates across the country are housed in private prisons, and GEO is one of the largest private prison companies in North America. According to its Web site, at the end of 2005, the company managed 61 correction/detention facilities around the world for a total of 49,000 “offender beds.” Year-end revenue in 2005 was $612.9 million with a net income of $7 million. It commands 27 percent of the global market share and it’s the second largest provider of correctional services to the U.S. government; it even runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center in Aurora where illegal immigrants were taken during last month’s identity theft raid in Greeley.

In short, it’s big business. And like all businesses, private prisons maintain their profit by reducing expenses where they can. Mosher says that often means cutting corners training guards and not being as discriminating in the hiring process. He also says there have been many instances of private prisons filling beds in medium security prisons with high-security out-of-state inmates; after all, private prisons don’t make money on empty beds.

For those reasons, among others, private prisons also have a worse record than publicly operated prisons when it comes to escapes.

“The literature tells us that there is a higher probability of escapes at private prisons,” Mosher says. “There are some potential issues there.”

***

It’s those “potential issues” that have many Ault residents up in arms about the idea of the prison coming to town. A group called Citizens Against the Ault Prison mobilized with the skill of a guerilla army, motivated primarily by safety and later by suspicions that GEO and the Town Board were working behind the scenes to grease the rails for the prison’s approval.

Phillip Tidwell, one of the group’s founders, cites everything from the chance of a prison break to devalued homes in his opposition to the prison. He believes the wave of high-value subdivisions cresting over nearby towns will eventually wash into Ault as well. He says a prison would do nothing but saddle the community with a reputation like that of Cañon City or Folsom, Calif., doing no favors for the housing market.

“Economically, this town is just on the threshold,” he says. “It’s ready to break open, just like Severance, just like Timnath. … If you want low-rent and low-cost housing, the prison may not affect you, but that’s what we don’t want to become. A prison is not going to help this town.”

Mayor Bayne has heard the arguments about a prison creating a bad reputation for Ault. But he says he’s called the mayors of Brush and Sterling, small rural communities that each host prisons, and was reassured that they’ve been nothing but beneficial to their towns.

“I recently spoke to the mayor of Brush,” Bayne says. “He said they went through all the same things we went through. For the town of Brush—and Ault could be different—ultimately it didn’t hurt and somewhat helped the housing market, because the people moving in there needed a place to live. The first (company) running that prison they had some issues, but now they’re a great partner for the town of Brush. In fact, he told me that if the opportunity ever came up to expand the prison, they wouldn’t hesitate.”

He also added that the mayor of Brush wasn’t around during the “issues” the previous private prison companies experienced, which may explain his enthusiasm. Indeed, as recently as two years ago, the facility in Brush was making national headlines for sex and abuse allegations, and it is almost always used as an example of much that it wrong with the private prison industry. At the least, it seems an odd choice for Bayne to reference when advocating for a prison in his own town.

In 1998, the High Plains Youth Facility in Brush was owned by Rebound, Inc. and was home to serious youth offenders from 21 states. That year, a 13-year-old boy from Utah committed suicide while being held at the facility. The investigation into his death revealed an institution out of control.

The DOC found that the facility was understaffed, that the staff was under-trained and that the medical personnel required by the company’s contract with the state were nearly nonexistent. A substantial number of the private prison’s young inmates were being prescribed strong psychotropic drugs even though the investigation found that a psychiatrist contracted by Rebound only spent about six hours at the facility each month. On the day that the 13-year-old killed himself, he had told staff of his intentions, but nobody relayed the threat to the night shift. On the night he died, only half of the staff required by law was on duty at the facility. But the boy’s death also revealed serious deficiencies in the DOC’s policies toward private prisons as well.

Because private prisons in Colorado often house an inmate population comprised largely of out-of-state prisoners, inspections by DOC tend to be few and far between. Due to the increased travel expense that would be required from the prisoners’ home states to do inspections at Colorado private facilities, they too are rarely done. In other words, private prisons like the one in Brush that hold out-of-state inmates fly largely under government’s oversight radar.

In the case of High Plains, the few inspections that were conducted by DOC between the years of 1993 when the facility opened and 1998 when the teenager died, found the same problems time after time: inadequate guard staffing, lack of medical personnel and overuse of physical restraints. But most shocking of all was the state’s lack of attention paid to allegations of abuse at High Plains.

Between 1993 and 1998 there were 70 allegations of abuse at the facility. Social services reported 23 substantiated abuse allegations in 1997-1998 alone. But for some reason, only one of the 23 cases turned over to local and state authorities for investigation was ever investigated prior to the teen’s death. Many of the High Plains allegations concerned guards having sex with their charges.

Even though guards having sex with inmates in Colorado is a felony—even if the sex is found to be consensual—the DOC did virtually nothing in the case of the High Plains facility. Many critics at the time presumed that this lack of action stemmed from the state’s desire to avoid the bad press that would have no doubt accompanied a sex scandal at a juvenile facility under its jurisdiction. The two guards accused of having sex with inmates were quietly dismissed by the company and the state chose not to prosecute them.

Just as the proposed facility in Ault is already under a cloud of fiscal impropriety, so too was the Rebound prison in Brush. Following an investigation of the contract with Rebound, Colorado officials found that the state had been paying $3 million a year in rent to Rebound. This turned out to be quite a windfall for the company; Rebound had only spent $9 million to build the entire facility. By the time state auditors discovered the excessive rent payment, Colorado had already paid Rebound over $20 million in rent in less than a decade. How could such a massive oversight occur? According to then Youth Services spokesman Dwight Eisnach, corrections simply wasn’t prepared to handle a contract like the one with High Plains. Eisnach told the Rocky Mountain News at the time, “We didn’t have anyone on our staff who could even analyze these things.”

If current allegations stick regarding the bidding process for the Ault facility, it would appear that the state is still less than equipped to “analyze these things.”

Finally in 1998, reporter Ann Imse of the News wrote a series of articles on the disarray at the High Plains prison which many observers credit with the facility’s eventual closing.

Following the High Plains debacle, the prison sat vacant for several years until its current owner, Tennessee-based GRW Corp., reopened it as the Brush Correctional Facility for Women (BCFW) in October 2003.

Like many private prisons, BCFW houses mostly out of state prisoners. In the case of the new Brush facility it started with women from Hawaii, Colorado and Wyoming. It was a rough start as the new facility found itself embroiled in controversy by late 2004. Like the earlier Rebound operation, sex was at the heart of the matter. A total of seven women inmates at the facility—two from Hawaii, four from Colorado and one from Wyoming—claimed that they were raped or had sex with at least three correctional officers. In addition to the sex scandal, two other guards were accused of smuggling contraband into the prison and another five guards on the staff were felons who had made it through GRW’s inadequate screening process. An examination of the facility’s DOC inspection reports by FC Weekly found that the prison was often understaffed during inspections and the promised programs designed to rehabilitate the inmates were often taught by other inmates instead of by trained personnel. The inmates’ medical treatment was also found to be dangerously inadequate.

Though several of the women claimed they were raped by the guards, a DOC investigation came to the conclusion that all of the sex was apparently consensual. Several of the women claimed that they had sex with the guards and/or a prison counselor in exchange for the promise that they would be transferred back to their home states where they would be closer to family.

In 2005, Hawaii’s Lt. Gov. James “Duke” Aiona told reporters at the Honolulu Advertiser that he was “appalled at the report from Colorado. This is the worst kind of crime that could happen, and we’re hoping it’s prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. You can’t tolerate that kind of activity.”

The state of Wyoming eventually removed its prisoners from the facility due to the scandal. On Feb. 18, 2005, then BCFW Warden Rick Soares stepped down from his post although he was never directly implicated in the sex scandal that ultimately resulted in five of his correctional officers being charged.

To say the least, the past 14 years since the private prison industry came to Brush, Colo. has been anything but smooth sailing.

***

If it’s built, the prison in Ault will avoid some of the troubles unique to those in Brush; for one thing, it will house only male adult inmates and Morgan, the DOC spokeswoman, says the intention is for only Colorado inmates to be held there. Bayne has also stressed that the prison is “not a done deal,” with many hurdles to clear before ground is broken on the facility.

The most daunting hurdle may come from the residents of Ault themselves. When researching the prison, Tidwell, one of the opponents who formed Citizens Against the Ault Prison, discovered a Town Board resolution passed and signed in May by former Mayor James Fladung stating the town would proceed with a contract with GEO, which was attached as an exhibit. The 13-page contract was complete except for signatures and an agreement on the amount of the payment in lieu of taxes. Convinced the prison was being negotiated without any public input, Tidwell and others successfully petitioned for an ordinance that requires a vote of the residents before a prison is built.

The petition was signed by nearly 300 people, but Bayne insists that not everyone is against the prison. In fact, some residents invited GEO representatives to discuss their plans at a town meeting and show them examples of what the prison would look like.

“People are concerned about what it’s going to look like,” says Realtor Ann White. “But they were quite nice looking. They had berms and of course they had fences to keep prisoners in but you could not see those.”

White is listing the land for the prison, but she says her support for the project goes beyond the real estate commission she will earn. She also says she’s called Realtors in other prison towns and found that housing markets have improved, not suffered. She has lived in Ault for 40 years and has seen neighboring communities reaping the benefits of an economic boom while Ault languishes.

“Before, we used to have a lot more people coming here from Fort Collins,” she says. “It’s just a short drive and they wanted to be in a small town. Then we saw Severance and Wellington come on with their new construction and that has really hurt the market here in Ault.

“I look around and I’m not sure we have many industrial opportunities, to really see companies come in to our little town,” she continues. “We’ve seen a lot of industries go to other towns.”

She’s not alone in her opinion.

“I look at it this way,” says longtime resident Georgi Diehl. “We have a town board that I’m very confident in. If they feel we need it, we need it.”

Others are more ambiguous.

“The business owners who are here seem to be for the prison and I have a lot of respect for a lot of them,” says Ault resident Barbara Emmert. “I just don’t feel like we need to be afraid of a prison. I don’t mind the people who are asking questions because I think that’s always good. But you’ve got to have prisons if you’re going to have laws. I just don’t see where it’s a big deal.”

As mentioned, there is a long way to go before GEO’s prison is built. Even if the award survives the investigation into Renfrow’s actions and the matter of bed guarantees is resolved, it still faces a special election. Bayne says that if the prison is rejected at the polls, the town won’t “actively go out and pursue any prison.”

But prisons have been actively pursuing Ault for years. GEO’s attempt is only the latest in a string of courtships by private prison companies dating back to 1984. And the ordinance requiring a vote on prisons can be repealed by the Town Board as long as it’s on the books for a certain amount of time.

Therefore, Tidwell and his group, with the help of a Fort Collins attorney, are currently attempting to craft a stronger ordinance, one that would prevent such a repeal unless at least half the town votes for it.

“We did what we set out to do,” he says, speaking of the petition to require a vote.

“But we’re not done yet.”

Unique, but for how long? Ault leaders want a prison in town to help its economy, but experts say prisoners are bad for business.

A prison would double Ault’s population and its leaders are banking on the hope that its 300-350 employees would spur home sales, retail sales and job growth. But experts say rural towns almost never benefit from prisons. “In rural towns, prisons in fact do not create jobs,” says researcher Clay Mosher.

Before a prison is built, it must overcome a conflict of interest investigation, a demand for a guaranteed number of prisoners that the state isn’t inclined to provide and a vote of the citizens of Ault.

Posted by lois at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2007

PA: Area prisons open up to methadone

Allentown, PA- The Morning Call
January 23, 2007
Area prisons open up to methadone
Advocates say continuing treatment for short-term inmates cuts recidivism.

By Ann Wlazelek Of The Morning Call

With critics long holding that methadone is nothing more than a legal replacement for an illegal heroin addiction, few prisoners nationwide have received the bitter medicine in jail unless they were pregnant and at risk of losing an unborn child to withdrawal.

But that is changing. Lehigh County Prison has agreed to join Northampton and Berks county prisons in taking the next controversial step: continuing methadone treatment for short-term inmates who had been taking the medicine before incarceration.

''It's effective immediately,'' Lehigh County Director of Corrections Edward G. Sweeney said about providing methadone maintenance in the prison. Spurred by proponents who say treatment helps addicts resist heroin and avoid returning to jail, Sweeney said, ''It's a growin trend.''

Not to be confused with the illegal stimulant methamphetamine, methadone is a legally prescribed and controlled drug that quells the cravings for heroin but does not produce the highs. Administered daily at government-regulated clinics, methadone helps long-time, heavy-use heroin addicts abide by the law, hold jobs, raise families.
Yet for years, a Rikers Island jail in New York was the first and only correctional facility in the country providing methadone treatment to more than pregnant inmates.

Regulations and costs associated with establishing a methadone clinic and a mindset that prisoners ''deserve to suffer'' have kept the treatment a rarity in most county jails and state prisons.

''Jails weren't methadone centers,'' explained Todd Haskins, vice president of operations for PrimeCare Medical, the Harrisburg company providing medical services to 27 county prisons in Pennsylvania, including Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Monroe and Schuylkill.
''It was illegal for them to prescribe it,'' he said. And few jails have had enough money or heroin addicts to start their own.

Also, questions have lingered about who should receive the controlled medicine and for how long, especially among drug treatment officials who believe all addicts, even those on methadone maintenance, deserve a shot at drug-free alternatives.

''If you are legitimately on methadone, I would stand in favor of that continuing at the prison level, but an assessment should be done by a neutral party, not the methadone provider,'' which could benefit from continued business, said Robert Csandl, executive director of Treatment Trends, which offers a variety of residential, partial day programs and outpatient drug rehabilitation programs in Allentown.

If maintenance works so well, he adds, ''How does that person on methadone wind up in Lehigh County Prison?''
But local and national authorities say resistance is falling in the face of positive results from treatment studies and experiences at the small number of prisons that have taken the plunge.

''Methadone maintenance isn't a right of a prisoner unless he or she is in withdrawal and a life is at risk. It was not something prisons had to provide, but we certainly believe more jails and prisons should provide it,'' said Jody Kent, public policy coordinator for the national Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

She called methadone maintenance ''a beneficial treatment.''

Kent pointed to a Federal Bureau of Prisons survey of prisoners who underwent drug abuse treatment, including methadone, before being released in 1995. The survey found that 3.3 percent were likely to be rearrested in the first six months after release compared to 12 percent of inmates who did not receive treatment.''It's a good opportunity to reduce recidivism and increase public safety,'' Kent said.

Maintaining methadone treatment in prisons also has the support of federal health officials, such as former White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey, private foundations and state drug and alcohol agencies. And authorities say it could be argued that the Supreme Court's recent rulings against withholding prior medical care to prisoners could apply to methadone as well.

'People don't understand that heroin is a lasting addiction, a chronic condition like diabetes,'' said R. Scott Chavez, administrative vice president for the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, which accredits prison methadone programs. ''You wouldn't think of not giving diabetics insulin,'' he said.

''Studies have pretty much shown that the heroin addict must consider some replacement therapy or he will go back into heroin-seeking behavior.''

A handful of jails and prisons in Connecticut, Chicago, California and New York have started their own methadone clinics within the correctional facilities, Chavez said. More, though, have gone the route of local jails — working with community methadone programs to bring the service inside.

In this area, Berks County Prison led the way 11/2 years ago, when prisons and PrimeCare officials agreed to give continued methadone maintenance a try. Northampton County Prison followed suit six months ago.

The concept came largely at the suggestion of Glen J. Cooper, a former Bethlehem health director who 10 years ago became executive director of New Directions Treatment Services, a multi-service organization that provides methadone, drug testing and counseling, mental health and HIV and hepatitis education at clinics in Bethlehem and West Reading.

Cooper's clinics provide daily doses of methadone to 665 people who had been addicted to opiates such as heroin, morphine and oxycodone. Some have been free from illegal drugs for 30 years by coming to the clinic, he said, but the average length of treatment is 31/2 years.

In prison, however, only those held for six months or less are considered, Cooper said. No ''lifers.'' Also, the methadone clinic confirms by phone call that the prisoner had been a client before treatment begins.
Appropriate doses for the week are delivered to the jail for the medical staff to administer to prisoners each day. And a clinic staffer goes to the prison to provide counseling.

Cooper sent the protocol to all 41 methadone clinics in Pennsylvania, emphasizing that studies show methadone maintenance reduces the demand for heroin inside the prison and reduces the transmission of HIV and hepatitis, which can be spread by sharing drug-injecting needles.

''We are very proud of this,'' he said.

At the Berks County Prison, Warden George Wagner said ''a couple dozen'' inmates have received methadone for an average of 31/2 months in the last year and a half.

That's not a lot, he said, considering the prison houses 1,250 men and women on any given day and incarcerates 8,500 to 10,000 in a year. Although Wagner could not provide statistics on recidivism or other impacts of the new program, he said he believes it was the right thing to do.

''I'm a fairly conservative person,'' Wagner said of his initial ambivalence about offering inmates methadone. ''But in the jail setting, an inmate could be here as little as an hour. We don't know if he or she will be bailed out in an hour, five days or a week. And just about the time the prisoner gets through detoxification, he's released, will go get a heroin fix and start all over.

''We could do more harm than good'' by not continuing methadone maintenance, he said.

Northampton County Prison Director Todd Buskirk sees methadone maintenance as an extension of the service provided to pregnant inmates for years.

The numbers so far are small: In the Northampton jail, which houses about 815 inmates on a given day, three inmates were on methadone maintenance last week, Buskirk said.

''It appears to be working well,'' he said. ''At least, I've not received any complaints.'' PrimeCare's Haskins said the service works well in counties that have a methadone treatment center like New Directions.

''It doesn't cost more,'' he said. ''It actually saves the prison money because instead of transporting patients to the clinic for the medicine and counseling, the clinic provides the service at the jail.''

The problems come in counties that have no methadone clinics, Haskins said. ''In some places, we need to drive across two or three counties'' to transport inmates to methadone treatment centers, he said. Security guards or someone from the sheriff's department must go along.

Cost may not be a problem now, acknowledged Cooper, because New Directions is supported by a five-year, $500,000 federal grant. But when that grant runs out, he said, counties will most likely be asked for additional money. In Berks, for example, methadone maintenance and counseling cost New Directions about $9,800 last year, Cooper said.

Lehigh County's Sweeney does not expect a community backlash to the plan to provide continued medicines to about 20 of the 7,000 prisoners who come through the jail each year.

''Methadone is becoming more accepted and mainstream,'' he said, noting support from county drug and alcohol officials and training sessions offered at the Pennsylvania County Corrections Association, of which he is first vice president.

Methadone maintenance is not yet a standard of care, required for accreditation, Sweeney said. ''But my expectation is next time they put standards out, it will be recommended.''

BITTER MEDICINE What is methadone?

A legally prescribed and controlled drug that quells the cravings for heroin but does not produce the highs.

What's the controversy?
Critics say methadone is nothing more than a legal replacement for an illegal heroin addiction.

What's new?
Lehigh County Prison will join Northampton and Berks county prisons in continuing methadone treatment for short-term inmates who had been taking the medicine before incarceration.

What do proponents say?
The treatment helps addicts resist heroin and avoid returning to jail.

Copyright © 2007, The Allentown PA Morning Call

Posted by lois at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Not eager for return of juveniles incarcerated in detention centers

Not eager for return of juvenile offenders
Officials worry that a proposed shift from state-run detention halls could overwhelm L.A. County facilities.
By Susannah Rosenblatt
Times Staff Writer

January 23, 2007

As Los Angeles County labors to turn its ailing juvenile detention department around, and as federal officials launched an inspection of probation camps Monday, officials expressed concerns over the governor's proposal to shift up to half the young offenders in state custody back to counties.

Los Angeles' probation system of roughly 4,000 minors in three juvenile halls and 19 camps has been plagued by violence among youths and inadequate staffing. The department has yet to comply with all of the 56 improvements to the halls mandated after a 2003 Justice Department report. And federal officials have begun a monthlong visit to several county probation camps.

Under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recently proposed prison reform plan, Los Angeles, home county of nearly a quarter of the 2,800 state-custody youths - many with severe behavioral problems - would be hard pressed to cope, officials said.

"We'd be nuts to assume an additional responsibility, especially a responsibility of this magnitude," county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Friday.

Under the governor's plan, nonviolent male inmates and female juvenile offenders would serve time in local facilities. The state would pay counties $94,000 a year for each minor and spend $400 million to build or refurbish juvenile facilities statewide, but local officials fear that won't be adequate.

The governor's plan makes some sense, one local official said.

Counties offer more treatment programs and opportunities for youngsters than the state Division of Juvenile Justice, said David Davies, a top L.A. County Probation Department aide. And, he added, it makes sense to locate teens closer to home. "Having our minors locally gives us certainly a better opportunity to work with the minor and the family," Davies said.

On the other hand, space to house teenage offenders locally is scarce, and officials are leery of the lack of detail in the governor's plan.

"The governor's budget proposal is really a skeleton that has to be fleshed out," said Bob Taylor, the county's chief probation officer. "There's going to have to be considerable dialogue between the county and the state as to what this new system will look like" and the implications for the jail system as a whole.

The Board of Supervisors approved a motion by Yaroslavsky last week for probation officials to try to determine the potential effects of the governor's plan.

Regardless of the plan's specifics, Los Angeles is "not equipped to deal with the really hard-core youth authority offenders," said Ralph Miller, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 685, which represents 4,000 Los Angeles County probation officers. "We don't have room."

The county is in the midst of revamping its probation camps, and the board has allocated more than $40 million for more staff and improved surveillance in the camps and the halls. The department also is working to include families in efforts to rehabilitate youths at the camps. The hiring of almost 400 staffers in the halls was part of an effort to emphasize rehabilitation over confinement alone, Davies said.

Taylor expects the Justice Department to report its findings on the camps within six months.

He said federal officials have offered the county up to three more years to comply with the Justice Department's requirements for improving juvenile halls. Among them are establishing an electronic tracking system for minors' medical records and improving schooling for violent inmates. County administrators, who Taylor said have met more than half of the requirements to date, are scrambling to meet the remaining ones to avoid the imposition of a consent decree.

"We obviously can't take on additional obligations until we fix the obligations that we have," County Administrator David Janssen said of the prospects of a state-ordered inmate transfer.

Yet there has been progress in improving the halls, Davies said. Violence by youths against one another is down over last year, as is the use of force by deputies, both attributable to increased staffing levels and better training, he said.

As the county's juvenile detention system takes small steps forward, officials "have to tread very carefully so that we don't overburden or overwhelm the department when it's in a very fragile state," said Anna Pembedjian, justice deputy for Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

susannah.rosenblatt @latimes.com

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-probation23jan23,1,5913317.story?coll=la-headlines-california

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TX: Criminal justice leaders push home nurses, anger management to help trim crime

Criminal justice leaders push home nurses, anger management to help trim crime
Proposals signal a shift in Texas get-tough penal system

By Mike Ward, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/01/24/24criminal.html

Home nurse visits for new mothers. Anger management programs for middle-school kids.
Teaching convicts the principles of entrepreneurship. Not your standard criminal justice fare. But as the Legislature prepares to tackle changes to Texas' sprawling prison system, these programs are high on lawmakers' lists.

Legislators who are spearheading the proposals admit they are a change of direction for Texas criminal justice, but they say such programs are more likely to cut recidivism and crime rates than building more prisons.

House and Senate leaders this morning confirmed the details of the proposals, which they plan to unveil during a rare joint legislative hearing next week.

"If you give people the tools to become better citizens when they leave prison, and don't just lock them up and then let them out, it makes so much more sense," said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston. "Public safety is the No. 1 priority in whatever we do, and if we can enhance public safety and save money, that would make the most sense."

House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, who has been working for weeks to refine the details of the new initiatives, said thousands of convicts might be successfully kept from returning to prison and thousands more might never break the law to start with.

"This could be the biggest change in years in how we address criminal justice in this state," Madden said.

If the additional programs should eventually be approved, they would mark a significant departure from a state policy during the past 15 years of mostly building new prisons to keep up with growing numbers of convicts. In the early 1990s, Texas tripled the size off its prison system in five years and while greatly expanded drug and alcohol-treatment programs were proposed, they were never fully funded or opened.

Key elements of the new proposals under consideration:

•A program, successful in 22 other states, where first-time, low-income mothers are visited by a nurse every week or every other week until the child is 2 years old. Madden said other states have seen healthier babies, a reduction in family violence, less school dropouts, even lower imprisonment rates for the child as they reached adulthood. For about $21 million, legislative leaders said the state could serve 2,300 families, out of 80,000 that are eligible for help in such a program.

•Expansion of a pilot program in which middle-school students in alternative education classes, those who have been kicked out of regular school, are intensively counseled in anger management, proper behavior and socialization skills. The pilot has successful at six Austin schools and officials are looking at expanding it statewide, Madden said.

"These are kids who, many of them are on their way to prison," he said. "If we can change their behavior, they can become productive and we can lower the incarceration rates — which means less prisons."

•Expand a prison entrepreneurship program, launched about two years ago, that teaches convicts how to manage a business, even how to start their own business. Executives from Fortune 500 companies teach classes and mentor prisoners as part of the program that has about a 5 percent recidivism rate, compared with 40 percent or more in regular prisons.

"This would not cost the state any money," Madden said, "but it could have a tremendous impact on reducing the growth rate of our inmate population."

•A new medical-therapy program designed to eliminate or greatly reduce recidivism among imprisoned alcoholics, and cocaine and methamphetamine users. Madden said the FDA-approved program, which uses a combination of drugs, nutritional supplements and counseling, "has shown very promising data" at reducing recidivism in a pilot program now underway in the Dallas area.

Whitmire and Madden confirmed that officials are studying possible successes of the new therapy method if it were used in conjunction with prison-based and probation treatment programs.

•Shifting of existing prison drug- and alcohol-treatment programs to enroll prisoners when they first enter prisons, instead of when they are about to leave. Because many of the programs are now done at the end of a prisoner's sentence, long waiting lists often delay a convict's departure from prison on parole — a glitch in the corrections system that officials say is one reason Texas is short of prison beds.

"It makes more sense to treat (convicts) when they get to prison than to wait until they get out," Whitmire said.

"Some would say you should treat them when they hit the streets, but the argument against that is that the state provides no aftercare — no way to help them stay clean after they get out. If we treat prisoners while they're in prison, we can provide aftercare directly while they're still inside."

Whitmire and Madden said the proposals to be unveiled tentatively Jan. 30 at a planned joint meeting of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee and the House Corrections Committee are part of a broader corrections plan designed to cut recidivism rates.

Such a joint hearing would be a rarity. But legislative leaders say they plan to have prison and parole officials brief members of both committees at the same time, after which they plan to discuss a number of alternative-to-prison programs along with changes to the parole and probation systems.

mward@statesman.com; 445-1712

Posted by lois at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

U.S. Supreme Court Eases Restrictions on Inmate Suits

January 22, 2007
Court Eases Restrictions on Inmate Suits
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A unanimous Supreme Court signaled Monday that some courts are going too far in barring lawsuits by inmates complaining about their treatment.

In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court overturned procedural obstacles in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that led to dismissal of civil rights complaints brought by three Michigan inmates.

The appeals court in Cincinnati covers the states of Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky. Federal courts in the circuit allowed just 18 of nearly 500 inmate civil rights suits to proceed, a recent American Civil Liberties Union study concluded, making the circuit the most restrictive in the country for such lawsuits.

The Republican-controlled Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act in 1995, seeking to slow a flood of federal lawsuits.

The law requires prisoners to go through a lengthy administrative grievance process before they may sue in court.

The law worked -- too well, according to critics. Nearly 42,000 civil rights petitions were filed in 1995 before the law took effect. Five years later, the number was down to 26,000, according to the Justice Department.

''Today's decision will at least help to ensure that the courthouse door is not completely shut,'' ACLU legal director Steven Shapiro said in a statement.

Roberts wrote that under the prison reform act, inmates are not required to demonstrate that they have exhausted the administrative complaint procedure. The chief justice said a lawsuit is not necessarily invalid just because a defendant was not named in the inmate's earlier administrative grievance. In addition, Roberts wrote, the prison litigation law does not require dismissing the entire lawsuit when an inmate fails to exhaust some of his claims administratively.

The Supreme Court is ''not insensitive to the challenges faced by the lower federal courts in managing their dockets and attempting to separate ... needles from haystacks,'' Roberts wrote.

But the chief justice added that adopting ''different and more onerous pleading rules ... should not be done on a case-by-case basis by the courts.''

The cases are Jones v. Bock, 05-7058, and Williams v. Overton, and Walton v. Bouchard, 05-7142.

------

On the Net:

Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/

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

NM: Program for prisoners draws fire over Scientology

Program for prisoners draws fire over Scientology

Friday, January 19, 2007
By Lauren Etter, The Wall Street Journal

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Last November, in a cedar sauna cranked up to 160 degrees, a crowd of sweaty men read books and chatted amid mariachi music. They emerged to nibble from a tray of raw vegetables or take shots of olive oil.

This is not a spa. This is Second Chance, one of the country's most unusual alternatives to the nation's prison systems. Founded by a Scientologist and former real-estate developer -- and funded partly by federal tax dollars -- Second Chance is a treatment program for nonviolent prisoners with substance-abuse problems.

It is based on principles of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Scientology religion, who argued that toxins from drugs and pesticides accumulate in the body's fatty tissues, making it difficult for addicts to kick their habit. Saunas and vitamins are intended to purge these residues. Facing few options for successful long-term ways to treat criminal defendants with serious drug problems, 24 of New Mexico's 84 district judges have sentenced more than 50 prisoners to terms at Second Chance.

Even before it opened its doors to inmates last September, Second Chance and its unconventional methods had ignited a controversy in New Mexico's legal community. At the center of the debate are two former friends and sometime adversaries. William Lang, chief district judge in the area that includes Albuquerque, doesn't want his colleagues to sentence inmates to Second Chance. On the other side is Judge Lang's predecessor, W. John Brennan, who was hired by Second Chance to convince judges to do just that.

"There's a dire need for a secure residential facility for defendants with substance-abuse problems," says District Judge Ross Sanchez. He has sent three inmates to Second Chance, where the minimum stay is six months.

But Judge Lang says he is "highly suspicious" of the program. "If it is connected to Scientology, just say so," he says. Second Chance officials and a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology say there are no ties.

For most of his 25-year career, Mr. Brennan was a highly respected member of the legal community. He and Judge Lang were close; Mr. Brennan presided over Judge Lang's wedding 18 years ago. But the men had a falling out in 2002, when Judge Lang unsuccessfully attempted to gather enough votes from judges to unseat Judge Brennan.

Then, late one night in May 2004, Judge Brennan was arrested. Within four months he had resigned as judge and pleaded guilty to drunk driving and cocaine possession. He was sentenced to a year's probation. Judge Lang assumed Mr. Brennan's post as chief judge of New Mexico's Second Judicial District.

Now a consultant for Second Chance, Mr. Brennan believes that Judge Lang is cool toward the program because of his personal grudges. "I think it has to do with me," says Mr. Brennan, who lobbies judges to send convicts to Second Chance. "I don't think it has to do with the program." He adds Judge Lang's own battle with alcoholism makes him skeptical of unorthodox treatment programs.

Judge Lang, who attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, says personal grudges have nothing to do with his skepticism about Second Chance. Judge Lang says he believes funding for treatment should go to existing programs that have a track record.

Now the $350,000 in federal funds granted to Second Chance is running out. Last month Mr. Brennan appeared with one state representative before New Mexico's Legislative Finance Committee and asked for $3.6 million for the program.

Second Chance is the brainchild of Rick Pendery, a former real-estate developer who says he has spent decades studying world religions with a focus on the writings of Mr. Hubbard.

In 1995 Mr. Pendery opened the first Second Chance program in Ensenada, Mexico, using his own money and funds from the Mexican government. His first attempts to open a program in the U.S. failed.

Then in 2002, Mr. Pendery gave a presentation on Second Chance to a conference of women legislators in San Diego and took about 60 of them to Ensenada. Anna Crook, a Republican state legislator from New Mexico, came away impressed, she says.

Ms. Crook asked New Mexico's Department of Corrections to work with Second Chance to establish a pilot project. The department declined because Second Chance isn't a "good fit," according to a spokeswoman. Undeterred, Ms. Crook says she then went to Washington and secured $350,000 for Second Chance from the 2004 appropriations bill.

With federal funds approved, Mr. Pendery says the "overwhelming majority" of the remaining $300,000 needed to start Second Chance came from businessman Randall Suggs, a Scientologist who owns a stake in the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team. The state of New Mexico later allocated $300,000. Mr. Suggs didn't return phone calls.

Second Chance's next challenge was to persuade judges to send addicts convicted of either misdemeanors or felonies to the program. In September 2005, Mr. Pendery approached Mr. Brennan, who had recently returned from two months of rehabilitation at the Betty Ford Center. Mr. Brennan wanted to get back into the criminal-justice field, but says he initially wasn't sure what Scientology was. After trying some of the Second Chance treatments himself, Mr. Brennan was sold and signed on.

"In the back of my mind I thought five years down the line, if this works, I'll have some sort of public redemption," he says.

In August 2006, Mr. Brennan was scheduled to make a presentation about Second Chance to a panel of New Mexico criminal judges. Judge Lang made his opposition clear. "I suggested it would probably not be a good idea" for Mr. Brennan to give the presentation, says Mr. Lang. "The whole pall that (the arrest) cast over the court, and the great cloud of suspicion, had not completely lifted."

Ultimately, Mr. Brennan didn't make the presentation. He says he was told Judge Lang didn't want him entering the courthouse, an account Judge Lang disputes.

Last summer, Judge Lang cautioned many of New Mexico's district judges and Kari Brandenburg, district attorney for the Second Judicial District, about the program, he says. Ms. Brandenburg argues any kind of treatment -- however unusual -- is better than no treatment at all. "We need to have an open mind," she says. "If it doesn't work we'll get rid of it."

The center received its first inmate in September. Currently, about half of the inmates who are qualified to go to Second Chance ultimately go to the program, Mr. Brennan says.

Still, some judges are balking. "I'm not ordering or sentencing anybody to that program at this time," said Judge Denise Barela Shepherd at a Nov. 8 hearing where she sentenced a probation violator to prison instead. In an interview, Ms. Shepherd said there isn't enough evidence for her to conclude the program works.

Mr. Hubbard's principles have been taken to prisons before. For many years a program called Criminon, also based on Mr. Hubbard's teachings, has operated drug-intervention programs in jails. But Second Chance represents the first time in the U.S. that an incarceration facility has been designed around Mr. Hubbard's methods, which involve not just behavioral treatments but saunas and specific diets as well.

Located on a tumbleweed-strewn patch of desert, Second Chance's cement structure is ringed by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Inside, linoleum hallways give way to an open dormitory. A nearby room houses the sauna, which is used by every inmate for a four-week period, five hours a day.

Inmates eat organic beef. They choose from an array of vitamins to ingest, including potassium pills if they're feeling dizzy, or bioplasma pills to offset salt depletion. Inmates addicted to heroin can get a massage, called a "nerve assist," from another inmate. Scientologists believe nerve assists help drugs depart the body.

In addition to saunas and specific diets, Second Chance focuses on helping inmates communicate more effectively, on the belief that better communication skills will reduce offenders' need to act out in negative ways.

One recent morning, Vincent Gutierrez, 29 years old, who has been in and out of jail for drug use since age 13, sat with a group of other inmates working on a series of communication drills that are also based on techniques developed by Mr. Hubbard.

One drill, called bull-baiting, is designed to help participants learn how to tolerate verbal assaults. Mr. Gutierrez stared into the eyes of another inmate stationed three feet away. As his partner yelled scripted statements at him like "You look like a frog!" Mr. Gutierrez was supposed to remain impassive. Another drill has inmates sit opposite each other, look each other in the eye and read lines from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Mr. Gutierrez says the drills have helped him "figure it out the positive way instead of using my knuckles."

Mr. Pendery says that by addressing the root causes of drug abuse, his program reduces the number of inmates who return to jail after being released. He says a study shows that the Second Chance program in Ensenada resulted in a drop in recidivism rates to 10 percent from 83 percent over a six-year period. The Mexico program recently closed its doors after losing its government funding, he says.

Advocates say Second Chance also saves money because it doesn't require maximum-security guards and doesn't administer pharmaceutical drugs. It costs about $55 a day for one inmate in the Second Chance program, compared with about $70 a day for an inmate at the county jail.

Bill Miller, an addiction expert and a retired professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, reviewed Second Chance at the request of the city of Albuquerque. "There's a lot of use of sauna with the idea that you sweat out toxins in the system. I don't know of any scientific basis for that," he says. "It wasn't clear to me what sort of scientific basis there was even for the conception of the program to begin with."

Does it work? "Basically we just don't know," he says. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07019/755193-28.stm
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Posted by lois at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2007

MT: Incarcerated Women Move Into Converted Hotel

Inmates move into converted hotel
By GREG TUTTLE
Of The Gazette Staff 1/20/07

Ten years ago, Rochelle Hopkins stayed overnight at the Howard
Johnson Inn while on a family trip from her home in Havre to Billings.

On Friday, Hopkins unpacked a small bag in a room at the building on
South 27th Street, but this time she checked in for at least six months.

Hopkins was one of 29 women on Friday who began long-term stays at
the former hotel.

"It's kind of ironic," Hopkins said.

For Hopkins and 28 other area inmates, Friday was move-in day at
Passages, the newest women-only state inmate facility. The new center
is operated by Alternatives Inc., a Billings-based nonprofit
organization that provides pre-release supervision, assessment and
treatment programs.

Home to 155 female inmates

Administrator Dave Armstrong said another group of women, many from
the Montana Women's Prison a few blocks away, will be brought to the
new facility next Friday. The remaining inmates will take up
residence in the 80,000-square-foot former hotel by late March or
early April. At capacity, the facility will house 155 female inmates.

Alternatives purchased the building from the hotel company for about
$5 million, Armstrong said. Remodeling, which includes some security
measures and a kitchen, will cost another $2 million when complete.
Alternatives also is moving many of its administrative offices to the
building from its current location on First Avenue North.

The opening of the new facility comes after lengthy negotiations and
a series of public hearings at which some residents spoke against the
opening of another corrections facility on the South Side.

But the organization got approval from the City Council last May,
agreeing to pay the city $40,000 a year to make up for lost taxes. In
September, Gov. Brian Schweitzer's administration approved the
project by permitting the state Department of Corrections to
privatize the Billings Assessment and Sanction Center, which had
operated out of the Montana Women's Prison.

The facility will ease some of the crowding at state and local prison
and jail facilities by housing women inmates approved for pre-release
programs and treatment.

'Immediate impact'

"Basically, this building is designed to relieve some of the prison
overcrowding and has had an immediate impact," Armstrong said while
watching the first group settle into their new surroundings.

A staff of about 60 people will work at the center, including 24
security officers. Jan Beggers, a longtime Alternatives employee, is
the director.

For Hopkins and her roommate, Lenna Coates of Bozeman, the facility
was a welcome change.

"No bars," said Coates as she looked around the room, which included
two queen-size beds and a dresser. The women said they also
appreciate the private bath and shower.

"This environment is really healthy," said Hopkins, 36, who is
serving time for forgery and recently graduated from a state boot
camp program for women. She will be eligible for release in about six
months, she said.
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/01/20/news/local/30-
hotel.txt

Posted by lois at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

MD: Proposals for Prisons, Law Enforcement & Substance Use

Public Safety - Improving Security at Correctional Facilities

$32.6 million for a new 192-cell medium security housing unit at the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown
$6.7 million for 155 new correctional officer positions
$6.1 million for security camera systems and improved security equipment
$1 million to improve monitoring of sexual offenders
$984,000 to assist local law enforcement agencies with sex offender registration and community notification
Expanding Death Benefits for Public Safety and Military Personnel
Enhancing Juvenile Services - $1.3 million for non-residential community-based sex offender treatment
$1.1 million to improve behavioral health assessments, substance abuse treatment, and other services
Increasing Drug Abuse Treatment by $5 million

http://www.mddems.org/ht/d/ReleaseDetails/i/998556

Posted by lois at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

Michigan's Prison Spending Eats Large Hole in Budget

Michigan's prison spending eats large hole in budget

David Eggert / Associated Press
Sunday, January 21, 2007 http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070121/POLITICS/
701210308/1022

LANSING -- Some politicians are as wary of freeing prisoners as they
are of raising taxes.

But with Michigan facing a daunting $800 million-plus budget hole
this year, it's harder to ignore how much the state spends locking up
criminals.

States such as Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania have more residents
than Michigan but incarcerate fewer inmates. Michigan's per-capita
incarceration rate is the country's 11th-highest, ranks higher than
seven other Great Lakes states and is fourth-highest among the 11
most populous states.

"The easy thing is to say, 'Don't let anybody out,'" said state Sen.
Michael Switalski of Roseville, the top Democrat on the Senate
Appropriations Committee. "Then you've got to pay the bill. But we're
having trouble paying the bill."

About 1,500 more inmates are being housed in state prisons this year
than officials anticipated -- for a record-high total of more than
51,000.

Tom Clay, a budget guru with the nonpartisan Citizens Research
Council of Michigan, has given hundreds of talks about the state's
fiscal status in recent years. He says people are startled to learn
that Michigan spends more on prisons than public universities.

Clay said during a November conference that Michigan's annual prison
budget is $1.9 billion -- roughly a fifth of the general fund -- but
would be closer to $1.4 billion if the state's incarceration rate
wasn't 40 percent higher than that of its Great Lakes neighbors.

About 17,000 people, or one-third of all state employees, work for
the Corrections Department.

While Michigan was hardly alone in the nationwide "get-tough"
movement of recent decades, its crackdown on crime was harsher, says
Clay. Truth-in-sentencing laws passed in 1998 require offenders to
serve more of their sentence. Release rates for parolees also are
lower than 15 years ago, which means Michigan inmates are staying in
prison longer.

Clay notes that corrections is one of just two state departments
covered by the general fund whose spending is higher now than six
years ago. The other is the Community Health Department, which
provides health care for the poor.
Health care costs are rapidly rising throughout the entire state
budget and broader health reforms are needed at the national level,
but Michigan can directly reverse or slow prison spending, Clay says.

State officials agree.

"We're definitely going in the wrong direction," corrections
spokesman Russ Marlan said of a rise in prisoners the past two years,
which follows earlier declines. "We're not seeing communities that
are much safer. What are we getting for (higher spending)? That's
what we need to look at."

It's unclear what sort of changes, including major reforms, could be
proposed when Gov. Jennifer Granholm unveils her budget plan in early
February. But some legislators warn against closing prisons.

"When you let more bad people out on the streets, more people are
going to be less safe," said Sen. Alan Cropsey, a DeWitt Republican
who oversees the corrections budget. "Public safety has got to be No.
1, and (Patrick) Selepak proved that."

Selepak was mistakenly released from prison and killed three people
last February in Macomb and Genesee counties. Republicans criticized
Granholm and made it an issue in the Democratic governor's re-
election campaign.

Selepak is likely a big reason why the state is housing 3 percent
more inmates than expected in the budget year that started Oct. 1,
according to prison officials and others.

The state hadn't expected to reach 51,000-plus prisoners until
September 2008.
Selepak "made the Parole Board very gun-shy and extremely cautious
about any paroles," Switalski said.

Immediately after the Selepak slayings, the Michigan Parole Board
granted fewer requests for parole, and corrections officers sent more
parolees back to prison for violations.

"All it takes is one crazy getting out and performing some heinous
crime," Clay said. "If you're a politician, you're afraid you're
going to get blamed for it and chances are if you're a high-level
politician, you will be blamed."

Barbara Levine of the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public
Spending, a prisoner advocacy group, says many parole-eligible
inmates could be safely released today. The Parole Board should free
more prisoners at low risk of re-offending, along with sick and older
inmates and those denied parole under the so-called "life means life"
policy, she argues.

"The bottom line is we ought to start looking at other states,"
Levine said. "Our crime rates aren't different. There's simply no
evidence whatsoever that dropping parole rates has actually made
anybody safer."

An area that policymakers may re-examine is sentencing guidelines.
Judges are sending drug offenders and non-assaultive criminals to
prison at twice the rate that was projected when the guidelines
started in 1999, Marlan says.

Those offenders could instead serve jail terms or go on probation,
enter substance abuse programs, undergo drug testing and daily
monitoring, or wear electronic tethers -- less expensive options than
prison. The average annual cost to house a prisoner is about $32,000.

The state also wants to expand a program that aims to reduce the
number of released inmates returning to prison.

If Michigan brought its incarceration rate of 489 inmates per 100,000
residents closer to those of surrounding states, Clay and Levine say
it could save hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Maybe we need to be a little smarter on crime," Marlan said.

Posted by lois at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2007

MA: A Really Bad Idea from Gov. Deval Patrick

A really bad idea from Gov. Deval Patrick. There are already are on-going probation fees, victim-witness fund fees, drunk driving fees, GPS bracelet fees and other fees like court mandated drug counseling groups. All of this in the context of prohibitions against jobs because of CORI. Currently, 85% of people who are incarcerated are indigent at the time of sentencing & certainly they aren’t going to make any money when they are in prison.
The Boston Globe

EILEEN MCNAMARA
A misstep on prisons
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist | January 21, 2007
Brandyn Keating was a member of Governor Deval Patrick's working group on public safety, one of the panels he put together during the transition to take the state's temperature on pressing policy issues he would confront this month as he took the reins as the first Democratic governor of Massachusetts in 16 years.

At hearings across the state, the executive director of the non profit Criminal Justice Policy Coalition heard a lot about crime, about mandatory sentencing, about the need for better community policing. What Keating did not hear was any suggestion that the state tap convicted criminals as a lucrative resource to pay for more police officers on the streets of the Commonwealth.

Imagine her surprise when the governor proposed just such a levy at the Massachusetts Municipal Association's annual meeting. Keating reacted in much the way Patrick's audience did, with stunned silence. "I didn't hear this idea floated anywhere," she said, and called it "unrealistic and counterproductive. I have to believe he will come to his senses."
Patrick might if he remembers that the campaign is over, and he won. The voters did not buy what the fear-mongers were selling last fall, that a lawyer who champions a criminal's legal rights would make a governor who is soft on crime.
Requiring offenders to pay for the repercussions of their crimes is a time-honored practice across the country, from Illinois's surcharge on child pornographers to fund counseling for sexually abused children to Indiana's levy on domestic abusers to support battered women's shelters. But this state already imposes any number of fees on offenders to pay for everything from witness services and victim compensation to the tracking devices some wear around their ankles.

"I couldn't understand where this came from. No one talked to us or anyone else I know," said Lanny Kutakoff, executive director of the non profit Partakers Inc., which runs education programs in four state prisons. "This seems very much the antithesis of Patrick's philosophy."

It is the antithesis of thoughtful public policy, too. Patrick's projections that he could raise $10 million a year from a largely indigent population that is plagued by substance abuse and mental health problems is fanciful. "These people can't afford the fees they are forced to pay now," Kutakoff said, noting that Patrick's predecessor as governor, Mitt Romney, sharply increased probation fees a few days before he left office.

In the week since Patrick floated this lead balloon, the administration has said no more about it. The press office did not return a call seeking more details. The silence probably reflects the feedback Patrick is hearing from the inmate advocacy community, which had hoped that 16 years of Republican pandering to the tough-on-crime crowd would give way to meaningful corrections reform.
"He's new to the job," said a patient Kutakoff. "He needs some time to be educated."
"He has an enormous amount of stuff to pore through right now," said an equally sympathetic Keating. "We think he is open to rethinking this idea."
Volunteers in the Partakers prison programs hope so. Many of them dip into their own wallets to help inmates pay for necessities. One woman who regularly visits an inmate at Bay State Correctional Center scoffed at the notion that prisons in Massachusetts are "hotels with fresh soaps and little shampoo and conditioner kits." She asked not to be identified because the prisons require volunteers to disclose any contact with the media (another policy ripe for change).
"A prisoner may earn up to $5 a week, half of which must go into savings. Out of this they may buy toiletries, school supplies, stamps, jeans and sneakers from only one vendor at a price double or triple what a free person would pay," she said. "People love to be tough on crime and therefore tough on criminals, but these men and women are human beings, too, and most of them are not only broken up, they're broke."

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@ globe.com

Letters to the Editor---The Globe
Making criminals pay January 21, 2007

AFTER READING about how our new governor will raise $10 million by charging criminals, I have to protest ("Patrick proposes new fee on criminals," Page A1, Jan. 14). That $10 million would be better spent on programs that would eliminate the need for hiring another 250 police officers.
Where does Governor Patrick think these criminals come from? They come mainly from situations where they see no hope, no compassion.
How about if we put that $10 million toward GED programs, mentor programs, after-school programs, or drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs? Or toward hiring more social workers so that they can better serve fragile families who are growing future criminals as we speak?
We can still fine the affluent who pass occasionally through our justice system, but let's not further beat down those who pass through all too often.
LISA MacLEAN Roslindale

GOV. PATRICK'S resourcefulness and ability to think clearly are evident in the idea of paying for more police with a "safety fee," which would be assessed on every person convicted of a crime. Creative thinking has been missing from politics in Massachusetts for years, and is nonexistent at the national level.
Opponents of the plan are making unnecessary noise about an inconvenience equivalent to a slap on the wrists of criminals. Instead of seeking to take advantage of the good will of the people of Massachusetts, opponents should think again and be grateful for this governor. Patrick's idea is just and sound. I look forward to more of the same from him.
PATRICIA McCARRON
North Andover

The new governor's proposal is a shameful way for him to start out his term. This may play well to the law-and-order crowd that brought us the current prison crisis, but it targets a population that is largely indigent and whose families would bear the burden, as opponents pointed out in your article.
Eliot Spitzer, New York's new governor, started his term in a much more promising way: by ending the contracts allowing phone companies to charge prisoners and their families exorbitant fees for collect calls. While the contracts brought in $16 million for the state in 2005 alone, Spitzer agreed with activists that the practice was exploitative. It inhibited contact between prisoners and their families -- contact that enhances public safety by improving a prisoners' chances of reintegrating once they get out. It also amounted to charging low-income communities for their own relatives' incarceration.
Meanwhile, Patrick starts his term with more of the same punitive and failing criminal justice policies. What is he thinking? We need progressive solutions to Massachusetts' prison crisis.
CHRIS STURR Boston The writer is the co-editor of Dollars & Sense magazine.

GOVERNOR PATRICK'S proposal to impose an additional fee on criminals is deeply disappointing and disturbing. His statement that "it's fair to have people who are at the center of causing and committing crime to help us pay" reminds us how far our views have shifted to the right.
What does it say about our political attitudes if the newly elected Democratic governor of a traditionally liberal state looks to criminal defendants to help solve the state's fiscal problems? Is that not like a new CEO suggesting that low-level employees who are laid off pay a fee to help solve the company's fiscal problems?
With a landslide victory and a mandate for change, Governor Patrick could reshape our attitude about the cost of maintaining our way of life and who should bear it. He could remind us that those who benefit most from our way of life should bear most of the responsibility for its upkeep.
He could flatly state that it is not acceptable to blame the poor and the weak for what is wrong with our world. And he could challenge those of us who share the power to change our world to help him fix what is wrong with it. We elected Patrick to help us make this a better world.
ANTHONY J. CANATA Holyoke

Here is the article from the Globe:
The Boston Globe
Patrick proposes new fee on criminals
Money would fund hiring of more police

By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff | January 14, 2007
Governor Deval Patrick said yesterday that he had come up with a way to pay for more police officers in Massachusetts: charge convicted criminals a fee.
Unveiling his most detailed account yet of his plans for next year's state budget, Patrick said he would propose a "safety fee," which every person convicted of a crime would have to pay.

The program is modeled on a similar fee the state now levies against people who violate the law, a program that generate s about $6 million annually to pay for services for witnesses and victims of crime. Those fees range from $90 for anyone over age 17 convicted of a felony to $50 for those convicted of a misdemeanor and $45 for anyone who commits a civil motor vehicle infraction, such as speeding.
Patrick said he had not yet set the amount of the proposed fee. But he estimated that it would raise $10 million annually, about half of the $20 million he expects to spend to hire 250 additional police officers in the new fiscal year, which begins July 1. Patrick said he wants to eventually add 1,000 new police officers to the streets, at a cost of $85 million.
"There are debts to society that have to be paid by people who break our laws, some of that by jail time, some of that by fees," Patrick said at a press conference at the State House. "I don't imagine it's going to be so onerous that it's impossible to pay, but I do think it's fair to have people who are at the center of causing and committing crime to help us pay."
Reacting to Patrick's announcement, advocates of prisoners' rights said the plan was unfair.
Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which represents inmates, said about 85 percent of convicted criminals in Massachusetts earn less than $11,000 a year at the time of their convictions. In prison, only about 10 percent of inmates work, earning $1.50 a day.
"While this may sound logical initially," Walker said of the proposed fee, "most defendants are indigent and are already assessed a number of fees. Those who are sent to prison have to pay to see doctors, and get haircuts, and who ends up paying? Their families."
"I'm dubious because disproportionately the people in the criminal justice system are people who don't have a lot of money," said Sarah Wunsch, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. "It seems to me imposing fees on people who don't have a lot of money is not the way to go."

Patrick, in a speech earlier yesterday to the Massachusetts Municipal Association, also promised to deliver a "modest increase" in state aid to cities and towns, mainly to pay for elementary and high school education. He also said he wants to hear ideas from local officials as he considers whether to abolish a property tax exemption for telecommunications companies and to legalize casino gambling or slot machines.
Finally, he suggested allowing cities and towns to join the Group Insurance Commission, the health insurance program for state workers, which he said would save communities millions of dollars annually.
"We didn't come here today with a big bag of free cash, nor a series of set mandates," Patrick told hundreds of local officials at the annual meeting of the association, which represents the interests of city and town governments. "We came with a few ideas about a grand bargain we want to make with you: what we can do, what we think you can do, and what we ought to do together to build stronger cities and towns and ultimately a stronger Commonwealth."
Pressed by local officials in a question-and-answer session, Patrick declined to say how much he would deliver in additional local aid, though he said the bulk would be funneled to schools. This fiscal year, the state provided about $4.9 billion in local aid, including $3.5 billion for schools. According to the municipal association, funding for grades K-12 has decreased by $682 million since fiscal year 2002, when adjusted for inflation.
Citing a looming budget gap that he says could top $1 billion, Patrick said affording an increase in state funding for local services would "be neither easy nor instant." State funding, in addition to schools, helps pay for trash collection, police and firefighters, and other services.
"Because the strength of our communities is central to everything else," Patrick said to applause at the Hynes Convention Center , "I will not decrease local aid. In fact, we plan a modest increase."

Patrick also pledged to support legislation that would allow cities and towns to hike the state's 5 percent meals tax to as much as 8 percent.
"Many cities and towns need alternative revenue sources, beyond property taxes, to support the services your residents want," Patrick told the local officials. "I trust you and your neighbors to determine whether a 1, 2, or 3 percent increment on lunch at the local pub is appropriate and fair."
Many local officials, including Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, have unsuccessfully pressured the Legislature to grant them the power to raise such taxes. Yesterday, they welcomed Patrick's support.
"That's essential," said Geoff Beckwith , executive director of the municipal association . "The local option tax for meals, we believe, is long overdue. Most communities in the country have the ability to diversify their tax base, beyond their local property tax, and in Massachusetts, we don't have that ability."
Critics said that among the items Patrick proposed yesterday, the meals tax seems most likely to generate opposition in the Legislature.
"It's families that end up paying those taxes, and that makes Massachusetts less affordable," said Senate minority leader Richard R. Tisei , a Wakefield Republican. "In Boston, they point out, it's tourists who end up paying a lot of the tax, but when you really boil it down, it's average families who want to go out for dinner, and it's additional costs that you're putting on them."
Patrick said he harbored "misgivings" about legalizing casinos because of their potential to increase crime and tax the poor. But he said he wanted to "hear all sides" as he makes up his mind.
He also said he wanted to hear from all sides as he considers repealing a property tax exemption for telecommunications companies. Patrick said the tax made sense to help the industry grow when it was in its infancy, but now he questions its merit. If the exemption were repealed, Menino said, Boston would be able to deliver an average of $200 in property annual tax relief to city homeowners.
"Our job is to consider whether that exemption is right today," Patrick said, adding he wanted to "balance all of the interests."
Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.

C Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/01/14/patrick_p

Posted by lois at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2007

NY: Albany reaps reward from jail space

Albany Times Union
Albany reaps reward from jail space
Feds, state and counties paid nearly $5 million last year to hold inmates
By CAROL DeMARE, Staff writer
Friday, January 19, 2007

COLONIE -- The county jail received nearly $5 million last year in boarder revenue from other counties and the state and federal governments to lodge their inmates, according to figures released this week.

The boarder program has been a boon for the county since its inception in 1990, bringing in $71 million over 17 years.

Last year's boarder revenue of $4.9 million was a drop from 2005 when the county received $5.5 million. The figures are released annually by Sheriff James Campbell and jail Superintendent Thomas J. Wigger.

The Albany County Correctional Facility on Albany Shaker Road has a capacity of 1,030 inmates. Its daily population ranges from 750 to 800, Campbell said.

Empty cells are rented out to the federal and state governments and other counties whose facilities are overcrowded.

Under a federal contract with Albany County, jail officials guarantee cell space for 30 federal inmates who are in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.

The county received $2.2 million last year from the marshals, at a daily rate of $91.53 per inmate. Five counties that had a shortage of cells paid $100 per inmate for a total of over $1.5 million. Greene, Schenectady and Rensselaer are neighboring counties. Ulster is just south of Greene while Suffolk is on Long Island.

The state houses its parole violators at the Albany jail. It also often pays for "state-ready" inmates, who have been sentenced to prison and are waiting to be placed in a state correctional facility. It is often several days before the state is ready to take those inmates, according to Campbell.

The state's per diem rate is $40 an inmate. The county received $1.1 million last year for housing those inmates.

Other payments brought the total to just under $5 million.

"Thankfully, the members of the Albany County Legislature had the foresight to look to the future when they planned the renovation and expansion of the old jail," Campbell said. "Their circumspection has allowed the county to take care of our own correctional needs, and at the same time, generate boarder revenue ... by utilizing our empty cells."

Wigger credited jail employees for their work in supporting the boarder program.

County income
Five counties paid rent last year to board inmates at the Albany County
jail:
Greene: $62,500
Rensselaer: $675,300
Schenectady: $211,700
Ulster: $84,300
Suffolk: $563,600
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=555275&category=ALBANY&BC
Code=&newsdate=1/19/2007

Posted by lois at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Governor's office slams prison board in letter

"Leighty said the Department of Corrections is "in the very preliminary stages" of reviewing the merits of the site, as required by the Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act of 2000, and public comments are still being taken. The act allows the state to negotiate privately and without going through a bidding process for projects such as the prison. The process had been going on for nearly two years before county and state officials announced in November that the site was being considered for a prison."
Roanoke Times
Friday, January 19, 2007

Governor's office slams prison board in letter
An official said the Board of Corrections misled people by voting against a New River prison site.

By Paul Dellinger
The state Board of Corrections had no business passing a resolution opposing a prison site on the New River in Grayson County, a spokesman for Gov. Tim Kaine said Thursday.

William Leighty, Kaine's chief of staff, said the board exceeded its authority Wednesday when it took sides in a controversy under way in Grayson since the proposed prison was announced in November.

"As you know, the board does not have a role in the site selection process and, by this action, you have created an incorrect impression that decisions were already being made about individual sites," Leighty said in a letter written Thursday to board Chairman Sterling Proffitt of Richmond.

The contents of the letter were made public by the governor's office Thursday afternoon.

The board passed the resolution after hearing from two Grayson County residents who oppose the proposed New River site in the Cox's Chapel community. They said a prison there would harm river-related tourism and change the rural character of the community.

Leighty said the resolution, passed by the three members of the nine-member board present at Wednesday's meeting, ignored the other side of the issue.

"The office of the governor has received several hundred letters, both for and against the site. We have informed those citizens that they would be notified of a public information meeting which will be held prior to any decision being made on this or any other site," Leighty said.

"Your action undermines public confidence in the comment process, and is in direct conflict with the assurances given by the office of the governor to citizens of the region," he told Proffitt.

Leighty said the Department of Corrections is "in the very preliminary stages" of reviewing the merits of the site, as required by the Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act of 2000, and public comments are still being taken.

The act allows the state to negotiate privately and without going through a bidding process for projects such as the prison. The process had been going on for nearly two years before county and state officials announced in November that the site was being considered for a prison.

Leighty noted that county supervisors are among those in favor of the prison because of its benefits to the local economy.

Grayson residents opposed to the New River site are not necessarily against a prison somewhere in the county.

"I sort of would like to see the prison go in Grayson County, just not on the river," Thomas Smith, a Mouth of Wilson resident, said Wednesday. "That's what I hope."

Public-Private Infrastructure is making an engineering study of the New River site to see if it can be used. It was one of three firms submitting proposals to the Department of Corrections to build a 1,024-bed prison for Virginia at the river site, and has secured an option on the property.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv%5Cwb/100763>

Posted by lois at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2007

Motley Fool Article on Geo Group

GEO Group Might Be a Lock

By Billy Fisher
Monday December 18, 5:37 pm ET 

http://biz.yahoo.com/fool/061218/116647783168.html?.v=1

The release of Rocky Balboa later this week brought back thoughts of the classic scene at the opening of Rocky III when Paulie unleashes his fury on the Rocky arcade game after a heavy night of inebriation and ends up in the can. While I certainly wouldn't condone such acts in real life, it was pretty entertaining, and in real life somebody does stand to benefit.

One of the potential beneficiaries would be the GEO Group (NYSE: GEO - News). The Florida-based corporation operates correctional, detention, and mental-health facilities for government agencies in the U.S. As of Jan. 1, 2006, the company had nearly 50,000 beds under its management.

After a fairly stagnant year for its stock price in 2005, this small cap has had a breakout year, with shares appreciating nearly 60%. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, the company reported that its pro forma income increased 152% to $21.7 million from $8.6 million during the same period in 2005. So what has brought this success? In short: an acquisition, high occupancy rates, and new contracts.

GEO Group acquired Correctional Service Corp. in November of 2005. This acquisition alone added $88.2 million in revenues, or 14% of total revenue, for GEO Group for the nine months ended Sept. 30. In terms of occupancy, the company maintained a 97% average rate at its U.S. correction and detention facilities, only slightly lower than the 99% rate it had for the first nine months of 2005.

A major development that helped GEO Group maintain strong occupancy rates is the federal government's Secure Border Initiative. During its fiscal 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set records for enforcement activity as it increased its detention bed space by almost 30% and ended its long-standing practice of "catch and release" along the southern border of the U.S. What kind of impact did that policy change have on GEO Group?

In August, it increased the capacity of its South Texas Detention Complex by 87% to 1,904 from 1,020 inmates to accommodate the demand.

As for new work, the company won contracts to manage facilities in Indiana and the U.K., which provided additional revenues of $8.9 million and $3.3 million, respectively, for the first nine months of 2006. GEO Group's mental health/residential treatment business grew its revenues by 107% during the first three quarters of 2006 with new contracts leading to residential treatment revenue that increased to $50.2 million from $24.2 million in the first nine months of 2005.

There are risk factors. The company has a significant amount of debt and carries a rather high debt-to-equity ratio of 2.01. GEO Group also highly relies on its contracts with federal and other government agencies for its primary source of revenue. While current prison population trends have been favorable for business, a reversing trend could be detrimental.

For the time being, the outlook appears to be favorable for this stock; probably moreso than the outlook for Paulie when Sly picked him up from jail. The company is maintaining its full-year guidance for revenue growth of 50% to 54% and has earned the respect of money managers. GEO Group is a top-25 holding of the Brazos Micro Cap (FUND: BJMIX) fund. The fund's lead manager, Stephen Alloco, is big on prison stocks, with Corrections Corp. of America (NYSE: CXW - News) being the top holding of his Brazos Small Cap (FUND: BJSCX) fund.

Fool contributor Billy Fisher does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned.

Posted by lois at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

reply brief was filed this week in response to the Hayden v. Pataki

January 19, 2007 Disenfranchisement: News/Updates from the Sentencing Project
New York: Legal Defense Fund Urges Court to Reconsider Decision

A reply brief was filed this week in response to the Hayden v. Pataki case urging the Second Circuit to reverse the district court's dismissal of the plaintiff's constitutional claims. The case challenged the state’s disenfranchisement law that bars people with felony convictions from voting while they are in prison or on parole. The court dismissed the case in February 2005 concluding that “Congress did not intend the Voting Rights Act to cover such [felon disenfranchisement] provisions” and that such an application “would alter the constitutional balance between the States and the Federal Government.” The Second Circuit will not schedule oral argument on the appeal before the end of January.

Posted by lois at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2007

OH: Small Counties Fuel Rise In Women's Incarceration

Small counties fuel rise in female prisoners
Whites make up 65 percent of population
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
John Caniglia
Plain Dealer Reporter

Small, rural counties across Ohio have sent scores of women to state prisons, filling the system with inmates convicted of minor charges because they lack alternative programs that would keep women out, a report says.

Increases from places including Medina, Butler and Scioto counties are also one reason why white women make up 65 percent of the 3,658 population in the state's two women's prisons, according to consultant James Austin's report to prison officials. That statistic alone makes Ohio unique, since in most states black women are more often incarcerated.

In 10 years, the overall women's state prison population is expected to surge, going up 46 percent to 5,214 inmates, Austin estimated. He said the jump in men would be about 36 percent in the same time span.

He urged the state to help smaller counties that ship low-level offenders to prison, as smaller, cash-strapped counties lack options such as extensive drug and alcohol counseling.

But Lynn Grimshaw, who spent 28 years as Scioto County prosecutor, said the proliferation of drugs, not a lack of services, is fueling the increase.

"In my first five years in office, we sent two women to prison," he said. "Now, you see three or four a month go to prison from Scioto County. Drugs play a larger role, and women have made major strides in that area."

Women need programs more than men do, officials said. They have more mental health and drug abuse issues. In Ohio, nearly two in five female inmates have children. Austin also said women are less likely to get arrested again.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Joan Synenberg said: "It doesn't matter if it is a small town or a large one. If you don't get to the root of the problem, these people may keep coming back."

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1169028084300
620.xml&coll=2

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

Justices say car theft can be cause for deportation

Justices say car theft can be cause for deportation
By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 18, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court made it easier Wednesday for the government to deport thousands of legal immigrants who were involved in car thefts.

In a 9-0 decision, the justices said noncitizens who were convicted or pleaded guilty in California to the theft of a motor vehicle also are guilty of an "aggravated felony" under immigration law, even if they simply aided another person in the theft.

The ruling reverses a decision of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which said California's law was too broad and could brand some minor participants as criminals deserving of deportation.

Despite the focus on California's law, the decision will apply across the country: The court noted that every state has a similar car-theft measure.

Government lawyers said the 9th Circuit's ruling, which applied throughout the West, had blocked the deportation of more than 8,000 immigrants.

Under a strict 1996 immigration reform law, legal immigrants who have an aggravated felony on their records are to be automatically deported from the United States. Intended to rid the nation of immigrants who are criminals, the law calls for their deportation even if they have lived legally in this country for decades and have a job and family.

And because it triggers a deportation, the law has put a sharp focus on what crimes can be deemed an aggravated felony. Congress listed a series of such crimes, including a "theft offense" that can result in at least one year in prison.

Luis Duenas-Alvarez, a 32-year-old native of Peru and a permanent legal resident, pleaded guilty in Marin County in 2002 to taking a Honda Accord without the owner's permission. He was sentenced to three years in state prison. As his term neared its end, federal authorities moved to deport him, saying his offense was an aggravated felony.

But the 9th Circuit blocked that move, ruling it was not clear whether Duenas-Alvarez intended to steal the car. It was one of a series of rulings in which the appeals court said California law on vehicle thefts was too broad because it applied to the participants in a theft, not just to the principal thief.

Writing for the court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer disagreed with that analysis. In criminal law today, "one who aids or abets a theft falls, like the principal, within the scope" of the law against auto theft, he wrote. "We cannot agree that … California's law is somehow special," he wrote.

The high court's ruling was not a total victory for the government, however. The justices stopped short of deciding whether mere "joy riding" could be deemed an aggravated felony. They also left open the question of whether the deportation law should extend to persons who are an "accessory after the fact" to a car theft, including traveling in a stolen car. These issues can be decided later, the court said.

Wednesday's ruling in Gonzales vs. Duenas-Alvarez is a setback for the immigrant, but not a final defeat.

"The decision expressly leaves open our ability to present additional arguments to the Court of Appeals," said Christopher J. Meade, a New York lawyer who represented Duenas-Alvarez in the high court.

Last month, the Supreme Court leaned the opposite way in a related case involving legal immigrants who commit drug crimes.

In an 8-1 decision, the justices rejected automatic deportation for an immigrant who pleaded guilty to drug possession in South Dakota.

Reacting to Wednesday's ruling, Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg said it was no surprise the court said those who aid or abet a theft are guilty of the crime of theft.

"In modern law, aiding and abetting is not a separate offense. This was mainly a rebuke to the 9th Circuit, which was clearly trying to find a way to save this guy from deportation," Weisberg said. "Some of their decisions seems to have a neon ring around them that says, 'Reverse this decision.' "

*

Posted by lois at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

VA: State corrections board opposes Grayson prison plan

The Roanoke Times 1/17/07
State corrections board opposes Grayson prison plan

By Paul Dellinger

The Virginia Board of Corrections passed a resolution today in Richmond that recommends against locating a new prison on the New River in Grayson County.

The resolution came after comments by several Grayson County residents who oppose the New River site. But the nine-member policy-making board does not determine prison sites, so the vote does not change the siting process now under way.

County supervisors and state legislators announced plans for the 1,024-bed medium-security prison at a Nov. 9 meeting in Independence.

The meeting drew a room full of people who objected to the prison being located on the river and in a rural community. Despite projections that the prison would bring 375 jobs and an annual payroll of $6 million to economically-stressed Grayson County, opponents said the facility would change the character of the Cox¹s Chapel community near the site and threaten the county¹s tourism potential.

³I sort of wanted to see the prison go in Grayson County, just not on the river,² Thomas J. Smith, a Mouth of Wilson resident, said after learning of the board resolution. ³That¹s what I hope.²

³All current sites are still on the table, and we are in no position to make a decision at this time,² Larry Traylor , public information spokesman for the Department of Corrections, said today.

Some of the opponents of the river site would still like to see Grayson get the economic benefits of the prison.

The county board of supervisors asked the state to consider Grayson County as the site for a state prison as far back as 2004. Besides benefiting from the jobs and payroll, the county would get state payments in lieu of taxes on the 80-acre site needed for a prison. At the suggested New River site, the prison would be a big enough water user to make a proposed regional water authority practical and affordable for parts of the county having water problems.

The state has hired a firm called Public-Private Infrastructure to make an engineering study of the New River site to see if it can be used. A bridge across New River to the prison has also been discussed as a means to get traffic to and from the site without affecting the community. It is opposed by county residents who want the river kept as it is.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/breaking/wb/100537

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

January 17, 2007

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

January 17, 2007
Economix
What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy
By DAVID LEONHARDT

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country.

Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war.

Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say.

The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.”

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year.

Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion.

“This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.”

As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option.

But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion.

This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq.

Posted by lois at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

MA: A Really Bad Idea--New Fees for People Convicted of Felonies Proposed by Gov. Patrick

Patrick proposes new fee on criminals
Money would fund hiring of more police

By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff | January 14, 2007

Governor Deval Patrick said yesterday that he had come up with a way to pay for more police officers in Massachusetts: charge convicted criminals a fee.

Unveiling his most detailed account yet of his plans for next year's state budget, Patrick said he would propose a "safety fee," which every person convicted of a crime would have to pay.

The program is modeled on a similar fee the state now levies against people who violate the law, a program that generate s about $6 million annually to pay for services for witnesses and victims of crime. Those fees range from $90 for anyone over age 17 convicted of a felony to $50 for those convicted of a misdemeanor and $45 for anyone who commits a civil motor vehicle infraction, such as speeding.

Patrick said he had not yet set the amount of the proposed fee. But he estimated that it would raise $10 million annually, about half of the $20 million he expects to spend to hire 250 additional police officers in the new fiscal year, which begins July 1. Patrick said he wants to eventually add 1,000 new police officers to the streets, at a cost of $85 million.

"There are debts to society that have to be paid by people who break our laws, some of that by jail time, some of that by fees," Patrick said at a press conference at the State House. "I don't imagine it's going to be so onerous that it's impossible to pay, but I do think it's fair to have people who are at the center of causing and committing crime to help us pay."

Reacting to Patrick's announcement, advocates of prisoners' rights said the plan was unfair.

Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which represents inmates, said about 85 percent of convicted criminals in Massachusetts earn less than $11,000 a year at the time of their convictions. In prison, only about 10 percent of inmates work, earning $1.50 a day.

"While this may sound logical initially," Walker said of the proposed fee, "most defendants are indigent and are already assessed a number of fees. Those who are sent to prison have to pay to see doctors, and get haircuts, and who ends up paying? Their families."

"I'm dubious because disproportionately the people in the criminal justice system are people who don't have a lot of money," said Sarah Wunsch, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. "It seems to me imposing fees on people who don't have a lot of money is not the way to go."

Patrick, in a speech earlier yesterday to the Massachusetts Municipal Association, also promised to deliver a "modest increase" in state aid to cities and towns, mainly to pay for elementary and high school education. He also said he wants to hear ideas from local officials as he considers whether to abolish a property tax exemption for telecommunications companies and to legalize casino gambling or slot machines.

Finally, he suggested allowing cities and towns to join the Group Insurance Commission, the health insurance program for state workers, which he said would save communities millions of dollars annually.

"We didn't come here today with a big bag of free cash, nor a series of set mandates," Patrick told hundreds of local officials at the annual meeting of the association, which represents the interests of city and town governments. "We came with a few ideas about a grand bargain we want to make with you: what we can do, what we think you can do, and what we ought to do together to build stronger cities and towns and ultimately a stronger Commonwealth."

Pressed by local officials in a question-and-answer session, Patrick declined to say how much he would deliver in additional local aid, though he said the bulk would be funneled to schools. This fiscal year, the state provided about $4.9 billion in local aid, including $3.5 billion for schools. According to the municipal association, funding for grades K-12 has decreased by $682 million since fiscal year 2002, when adjusted for inflation.

Citing a looming budget gap that he says could top $1 billion, Patrick said affording an increase in state funding for local services would "be neither easy nor instant." State funding, in addition to schools, helps pay for trash collection, police and firefighters, and other services.

"Because the strength of our communities is central to everything else," Patrick said to applause at the Hynes Convention Center , "I will not decrease local aid. In fact, we plan a modest increase."

Patrick also pledged to support legislation that would allow cities and towns to hike the state's 5 percent meals tax to as much as 8 percent.

"Many cities and towns need alternative revenue sources, beyond property taxes, to support the services your residents want," Patrick told the local officials. "I trust you and your neighbors to determine whether a 1, 2, or 3 percent increment on lunch at the local pub is appropriate and fair."

Many local officials, including Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, have unsuccessfully pressured the Legislature to grant them the power to raise such taxes. Yesterday, they welcomed Patrick's support.

"That's essential," said Geoff Beckwith , executive director of the municipal association . "The local option tax for meals, we believe, is long overdue. Most communities in the country have the ability to diversify their tax base, beyond their local property tax, and in Massachusetts, we don't have that ability."

Critics said that among the items Patrick proposed yesterday, the meals tax seems most likely to generate opposition in the Legislature.

"It's families that end up paying those taxes, and that makes Massachusetts less affordable," said Senate minority leader Richard R. Tisei , a Wakefield Republican. "In Boston, they point out, it's tourists who end up paying a lot of the tax, but when you really boil it down, it's average families who want to go out for dinner, and it's additional costs that you're putting on them."

Patrick said he harbored "misgivings" about legalizing casinos because of their potential to increase crime and tax the poor. But he said he wanted to "hear all sides" as he makes up his mind.

He also said he wanted to hear from all sides as he considers repealing a property tax exemption for telecommunications companies. Patrick said the tax made sense to help the industry grow when it was in its infancy, but now he questions its merit. If the exemption were repealed, Menino said, Boston would be able to deliver an average of $200 in property annual tax relief to city homeowners.

"Our job is to consider whether that exemption is right today," Patrick said, adding he wanted to "balance all of the interests."

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.

Posted by lois at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)

WI: Gov. Orders New Panel on African Americans in State Prisons

Capital Times
Doyle orders new panel on blacks in state prisons
By David Callender
January 15, 2007
Gov. Jim Doyle today announced today that he will create a panel to study the high rates of incarceration among blacks in Wisconsin.

"Far too many of our citizens, particularly African-American males, are serving time in our prisons rather than learning in our schools or succeeding in the workplace," Doyle said in a draft of a speech he was set to deliver at today's Capitol celebration of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Doyle aides said he would provide details of the new commission, which had been sought by black lawmakers, when he releases his budget next month.
Wisconsin has the highest rate of African-American incarceration in the nation and is also among the highest in the nation for contacts between black youths and the criminal justice system, according to a report released last week.
Wisconsin also had the highest rate of Latino youth sent to adult prison at 50.8 per 100,000, far ahead of the national average of 7.4.
The report found that black youths were detained in Wisconsin at a rate 18.4 times that of whites, behind only South Dakota (47 times) and North Dakota (21.2 times).
Doyle's announcement came during the annual Capitol celebration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, which is the oldest such commemoration in the nation.
Doyle said the best way to celebrate King's life and legacy "is not just to remember his incredible words, but to emulate his progressive actions.
"It is not enough to simply state our support for the values we hold sacred in Wisconsin, we must fight for those values -- hard, honest work; a sense of community, our concern for others, and a commitment to educating future generations," he said.
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=114965&ntpid=1

Posted by lois at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

Editorial NY Times: Politicizing Prosecutors

January 15, 2007
Editorial
Politicizing Prosecutors

The Bush administration has appointed an extreme political partisan as the new United States attorney for Arkansas. Normally, the Senate would have vetted him, and quite possibly blocked his appointment. But the White House took advantage of a little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act, which allows it to do an end run around the Senate.

It is particularly dangerous to put United States attorneys’ offices in the hands of political operatives because federal prosecutors have extraordinary power to issue subpoenas and bring criminal charges. The Senate should fix the law and investigate whether such offices in Arkansas and elsewhere are being politicized.

H. E. Bud Cummins, the respected United States attorney in Little Rock, recently left office. He has been replaced on an interim basis by J. Timothy Griffin, who has a thin legal record but a résumé that includes working for Karl Rove and heading up opposition research for the Republican National Committee. Senator Mark Pryor, Democrat of Arkansas, wanted to raise concerns about Mr. Griffin’s appointment as part of the confirmation process. But he couldn’t because there was no confirmation process.

Mr. Pryor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, have accused the Bush administration of “pushing out U.S. attorneys from across the country under the cloak of secrecy and then appointing indefinite replacements without Senate confirmation.” The San Diego Union-Tribune has reported that San Diego’s United States attorney was asked to resign, and that even some of her opponents “said the supposed reasons she is being forced out are perplexing.”

There could be unsavory political reasons for putting a party operative in charge of federal criminal investigations in Little Rock, which has been home to two possible presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and former Gov. Mike Huckabee. But it is not necessary to leap to extravagant conclusions. United States attorneys are so powerful that their impartiality must be beyond question. One way to ensure that is to require them to submit to questions from the Senate, and face a confirmation vote.

Senators Feinstein, Leahy and Pryor have a bill to change the method for selecting interim United States attorneys back to what it once was: the federal district court in the jurisdiction would make the appointment. Congress should pass that bill, and take a hard look at how vacancies are being filled. There might not be fire where the senators see smoke. But Congress should not take any chances.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/opinion/15mon2.html

Posted by lois at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Ending the Prison Windfall

January 17, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Ending the Prison Windfall

The Census Bureau typically uses the decennial census to test data-collection methods that become routine later on. The 2010 census should include a test run at counting the nation's 1.4 million prison inmates at their permanent addresses instead of in prisons. That would help bring an end to a corrosive but little known practice that distorts the political process in virtually every corner of the country.

Inmates are denied the right to vote in all but two states. But state lawmakers treat them as residents of the prisons when drawing legislative maps, to inflate the head count in lightly populated rural areas where prisons are typically built. This creates legislative districts where none would ordinarily be, shifting political influence from the heavily populated urban districts where inmates live.

Once inflated, these towns and counties siphon an outsized portion of state and federal aid. Politicians in districts with prisons sometimes brag openly about the windfall, as they mock "constituents" who are powerless to remove them from office and are packed onto buses and driven hundreds of miles to their real homes the minute they leave the prison walls.

The Census Bureau was made pointedly aware of this problem last fall. A report it commissioned noted that counting inmates at prisons distorted the political process and raised legitimate concerns about the fairness of the census itself. That report, by the National Research Council, recognized that the methods would not be simple to change, but urged the bureau to seeks ways to do it.

Collecting and verifying residential information for prison inmates is a complicated job. But the report suggested a perfectly reasonable interim solution. The bureau could publish detailed counts of the prison populations, so that the inmates could be subtracted at redistricting time. These figures would illuminate corrupt redistricting committees that use prison counts to pad districts that fall short of federal population requirements.

The Census Bureau has a crucial role to play in putting and end to this despicable practice. The 2010 census is as good a time as any to get started.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/opinion/17wed3.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=sl
ogin

Posted by lois at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2007

Tx Civil Rights Review: Homeland Security Cites Problems with ICE Prisons

Texas Civil Rights Review
USA Inspectors Cite Problems with ICE Prisons
Date: Tuesday, January 16 @ 17:28:59 MST
Topic: Civil Rights in Texas--General

After an 18-month study (ending Jan. 2006) of five prisons used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in California, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, , the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General released the following summary on Dec. 22, 2006:

Regarding health care standards, we identified instances of non-compliance at four of the five detention facilities, including timely initial and responsive medical care [including improper treatment of hunger strikers in seven of eight instances; insufficient monitoring of prisoners on suicide watch in five out of 36 instances.]

Also, we identified environmental health and safety concerns at three of five detention facilities reviewed [including undercooked poultry two weeks after inspectors ordered the problem fixed; and when inspectors asked ICE to provide ladders and safety bars to prevent injuries from prisoners falling from top bunks, ICE replied that it wasn't required and would be too expensive.]

We identified instances of non-compliance with ICE Detention Standards regarding general conditions of confinement at the five facilities, including disciplinary policy, classifying detainees, and housing together detainees classified at different security levels [for some prisoners ICE had no files to show; and generally, on laundry day, prisoners usually sat around in their underwear for two-to-six hours while clothes were washed.]

Two facilities also had inadequate inventory controls over detainee funds and personal property.

We further noted that the ICE Detention Standard on Detainee Grievance Procedures does not provide a process for detainees to report abuse or civil rights violations.

In addition, two detention facilities did not issue handbooks specifically addressing detainee's rights, responsibilities, and rules; and three facilities did not translate handbooks and orientation material into Spanish and other prevalent languages.

See Treatment of Immigration Detainees Housed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Facilities [OIG_07-01_Dec06.pdf] http://tcrr.benezet.org/phpnuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=746

Posted by lois at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)

New Additions to the RCPP website: Comix From Inside and Writing From Prison

We are pleased to announce that the Real Cost of Prisons Project has added two new pages to our website:
Comix From Inside: http://www.realcostofprisons.org/comix/
Writing From Prison: http://www.realcostofprisons.org/writing/

For those of you who publish newsletters and other publications and/or who write or visit with men and women who are incarcerated, please let them know that we welcome their comix and essays. Please visit our website for details on how to submit work. We are seeking comix/cartoons that express a political/analytical viewpoint.

We encourage you to communicate with the cartoonists and make use of their work. You can view the images on line and you can download and save them by clicking on each cartoon. Many thanks to Winston Close, our webmaster, for making all of this possible.

Please visit these new pages and while you are at www.realcostofprisons.org we hope you will take a look at the wealth of papers, links to organizations, books and a link to our daily new blog. The news blog can also be accessed by going to www.realcostofprisons.org/blog. Both the blog and the website are now searchable.
Our website and the new pages are a work in progress. We ask you to help spread the word about the new pages and we ask you to link our site to yours.
Thanks for your help in getting the word out.
Lois Ahrens, Director
The Real Cost of Prisons Project

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

Prison Poster Project Is Seeking Illustrators

The Prison Poster Project is Desperately Seeking Illustrators

For the past 4 years, a collective of artists and activists on the outside have been working along side of artists and activists behind the walls to design a poster that could be used as an educational tool to raise awareness about the current state of the criminal IN-justice system. Together we have interviewed, studied, met, and dialogued about what to put in this poster and create it.

We are almost done! We desperately need more help illustrating, especially from women!

If you are currently locked up, like to draw, and would like to help out, please get in touch. Please also enclose a sample of your drawing style so we can figure out how best to fit you into the project. We are asking that all illustrators who participate send a drawing and a self portrait. Please send any drawing sample or letter of interest to:

The Prison Poster Project
PO Box 71357 Pittsburgh, PA 15213

If you are not incarcerated but know an artist who is, please put them in contact with us either by sharing our info with them or sharing their info with us. You can email their name, doc # and address to de_tritus@yahoo.com or call 412-802-8575 for more information.

All drawings are donations to the project. All people involved in creating the illustration will receive documentation of the project. The PPP is 100% volunteer and not for profit.

The drawing is a little like a quilt with a cross section of a prison, then illustrations in cells and rooms of the prison. If you decide you would like to participate you will choose or be designated a topic and hooked up with an outside collective member. The member will send you a template and ideas on the issue that were generated over the years. Some topics that still need to be illustrated are: protest from within, jailhouse lawyer, creating family on the inside, the INS, racism on the inside, tear gas, the visiting room, domestic violence survivor, issues specific to women, and the cafeteria. Please let us know if youʼre interested in illustrating any of these ideas.

Because art impacts us on a level that keeps us inspired, enlightened, and committed, we believe that this poster will be an extremely effective tool for educating and motivating people around criminal justice system issues. Art speaks a universal language, helping to build coalitions that transcend race, class, gender, and geographic lines, and making knowledge accessible to our diverse communities. We are creating a poster that is the combined effort of many different people, using art to cross prison walls and unify us in a struggle for a more just and compassionate tomorrow.

Posted by lois at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

NY Times: Op-Ed " The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars"

January 15, 2007, NY Times
Op-Ed Contributor
The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars
By BERNARD E. HARCOURT

Chicago

LAST August, a prison inmate in Jackson, Mich. — someone the authorities described as “floridly psychotic” — died in his segregation cell, naked, shackled to a concrete slab, lying in his own urine, scheduled for a mental health transfer that never happened. Last month in Florida, the head of the state’s social services department resigned abruptly after having been fined $80,000 and is facing criminal contempt charges for failing to transfer severely mentally ill jail inmates to state hospitals.

Ten days ago, the Supreme Court agreed to determine when mentally ill death row inmates should be considered so deranged that their execution would be constitutionally impermissible. The case involves a 48-year-old Navy veteran who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. In the decade leading up to the crime he was hospitalized 14 times for severe mental illness.

According to a study released by the Justice Department in September, 56 percent of jail inmates in state prisons and 64 percent of inmates across the country reported mental health problems within the past year.

Though troubling, none of this should come as a surprise. Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt — bed by bed — an enormous prison. During the 20th century we exhibited a schizophrenic relationship to deviance.

After more than 50 years of stability, federal and state prison populations skyrocketed from under 200,000 persons in 1970 to more than 1.3 million in 2002. That year, our imprisonment rate rose above 600 inmates per 100,000 adults. With the inclusion of an additional 700,000 inmates in jail, we now incarcerate more than two million people — resulting in the highest incarceration number and rate in the world, five times that of Britain and 12 times that of Japan.

What few people realize, though, is that in the 1940s and ’50s we institutionalized people at even higher rates — only it was in mental hospitals and asylums. Simply put, when the data on state and county mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on prison rates for 1928 through 2000, the imprisonment revolution of the late 20th century barely reaches the level we experienced at mid-century. Our current culture of control is by no means new.

The graph on the left — based on statistics from the federal Census Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services and Bureau of Justice Statistics — shows the aggregate rate of institutionalization per 100,000 adults in the United States from 1928 to 2000, as well as the disaggregated trend lines for mental hospitalization on the one hand and state and federal prisons on the other.

The numbers include only state and county mental hospitals. There were many more kinds of mental institutions at mid-century, ones for “mental defectives and epileptics” and the mentally retarded, psychiatric wards in veterans hospitals, as well as “psychopathic” and private mental hospitals. If we include residents of those facilities, from 1935 to 1963 the United States consistently institutionalized at rates well above 700 per 100,000 adults — with highs of 778 in 1939 and 786 in 1955. It should be clear why there is such a large proportion of mentally ill persons in our prisons: individuals who used to be tracked for mental health treatment are now getting a one-way ticket to jail.

Of course, there are important demographic differences between the two populations. In 1937, women represented 48 percent of residents in state mental hospitals. In contrast, new prison admissions have consistently been 95 percent male. Also, the mental health patients from the 1930s to the 1960s were older and whiter than prison inmates of the 1990s.

But the graph poses a number of troubling questions: Why did we diagnose deviance in such radically different ways over the course of the 20th century? Do we need to be imprisoning at such high rates, or were we right, 50 years ago, to hospitalize instead? Why were so many women hospitalized? Why have they been replaced by young black men? Have both prisons and mental hospitals included large numbers of unnecessarily incarcerated individuals?

Whatever the answers, the pendulum has swung too far — possibly off its hinges.

It would be naïve, today, to address any of these questions without also considering the impact of imprisonment on crime. One of the most reliable studies estimates that the increased prison population over the 1990s accounted for about a third of the overall drop in crime that decade.

However, prisons are not the only institutions that seem to have this effect. In a recent study, I demonstrated that the rate of institutionalization — including mental hospitals — was a far better predictor of serious violent crime from 1926 to 2000 than just prison populations. The data reveal a robust negative relationship between overall institutionalization (prisons and asylums) and homicide. Preliminary findings based on state-level panel data confirm these results.

The effect on crime may not depend on whether the institution is a mental hospital or a prison. Even from a crime-fighting perspective, then, it is time to rethink our prison and mental health policies. A lot more work must be done before proposing answers to those troubling questions. But the first step is to realize that we have been wildly erratic in our approach to deviance, mental health and the prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/opinion/15harcourt.html graph is at this url

Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”

Posted by lois at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)

Tx Senator wants to build and run TX prisons in Mexico

Gringo Senator wants to build and run Texas prisons in Mexico
Posted on Sunday, January 14 @ 13:11:28 MST by editor
By Steve Taylor
Rio Grande Guardian

AUSTIN - A lawmaker from north Texas has filed legislation that would allow the Texas Board of Criminal Justice to contract with private vendors to build and run prisons in Mexico.

SB 185, authored by Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, would allow the TBCJ to waive any legal requirements that would be inapplicable in Mexico.

Estes told the Guardian that the prisons would only house non-violent Mexican nationals serving time in Texas ’s correctional facilities.

“The prisons would be built to Texas standards but we could save money on both the construction costs and the staffing costs,” Estes said.

“I think the country of Mexico could look at it as economic development. It is very humane for the prisoners because they are going to be closer to their families and they would be in a Spanish-speaking environment.”

Estes said he came up with idea after hearing that the state of Arizona was studying a similar idea. He filed similar legislation late in the 79th Legislature but did not get a hearing.

Estes’s proposal was supposed to be studied in the interim by the Senate Criminal Justice committee but the panel, chaired by Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, had to cancel one of its hearings and no testimony was ever taken.

According to the TBCJ, around 10,000 of the 153,000 inmates in Texas prisons are foreign nationals. Of these 10,000 around 75 percent are Mexican nationals. Estes said his office was still researching how many of the Mexican nationals currently locked up are classified as non-violent.

“I think this is an idea worth studying,” Estes added. “We are always looking for ways, if we do build more prisons, to make sure the costs are kept low for the taxpayers.”

Posted by lois at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2007

FL: Prodded by Judge Legislature Allocates $17 Million to Mentally Ill People Incarcerated to Treatment

Mentally ill inmates to get help

By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published January 11, 2007

TALLAHASSEE - Prodded by an outraged Pinellas judge, the Legislature on Wednesday allocated nearly $17-million to move mentally ill patients from jails to treatment programs.

The stopgap measure will pay for 373 more treatment beds to ease a statewide backlog of criminal defendants found incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity.

"The fix is here," said the incoming secretary of the Department of Children and Families, Bob Butterworth.

With the state's 1,449 treatment beds filled to capacity, many inmates languish in county jails, despite a state law that requires them to be offered treatment within 15 days of being declared mentally incompetent.

The Department of Children and Families said the waiting list jumped by an unprecedented 16 percent this year.

At a special meeting, the 14-member Legislative Budget Commission voted to shift the extra money from a hospital inpatient services account that has had lower-than-expected caseloads so far this year.

The $16.6-million set aside Wednesday will pay for the beds only through June 30, when the current fiscal year ends.

DCF will add 233 beds at five state-run mental health treatment centers and will contract for another 140 less restrictive beds at local residential treatment programs.

Inmates will be sent to wherever the first available bed can be found, with nonviolent inmates sent to less restrictive sites.

"They will go where they can get services the quickest," said DCF spokeswoman Erin Geraghty.

Wednesday's vote set in motion a much bigger financial commitment by legislators.

Butterworth served notice that he will ask for $48.5-million more to continue the same number of new beds for a full year starting July 1.

Pinellas Circuit Court Judge Crockett Farnell found DCF in contempt of court in October and imposed $80,000 in fines on the beleaguered agency.

Decrying what he called the "arrogant activity" of state officials, the judge threatened to jail former DCF Secretary Lucy Hadi. That prompted former Gov. Jeb Bush to accuse the judge of a "temper tantrum."

But the judge's criticism brought a quick promise of more funding from the Legislature, and Butterworth cited criticism by Farnell, among others.

"As we know, the judges in the state are frustrated, as you are," Butterworth told lawmakers in what was just his third day as DCF secretary. "They've taken some action to get our attention - and they obviously have."

Records provided by the agency show that as early as 2002, DCF sought more money for treatment beds for the mentally ill. But the requests were repeatedly whittled down by Gov. Bush's office.

Gov. Charlie Crist, who took office Jan. 2 and inherited the backlog from Bush, praised the Legislature's action. "It sounds like the right thing to do to me," he said.

Crist said he expects lawmakers will find the additional $48.5-million to provide bed space on an annualized, or year-round, basis. "Don't they have a duty to?" he asked.

Butterworth, himself a former circuit judge, said former officials were wrong to question Judge Farnell's actions.

"You don't ignore a judge's order," Butterworth said. "I would not recommend it, and it appears that's what happened in Pinellas County."

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/11/State/Mentally_ill_inmates_.shtml

Posted by lois at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2007

Sheriff acknowledges strip searches illegal

Sheriff acknowledges strip searches illegal
BY KIMBERLY ASHTON STAFF WRITER
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
January 11,2007

Hampshire Sheriff Robert J. Garvey acknowledged Wednesday that the jail's former practice of strip-searching people awaiting court was unconstitutional.

NORTHAMPTON - Hampshire Sheriff Robert J. Garvey acknowledged Wednesday that the jail's former practice of strip-searching people awaiting court was unconstitutional.
But Garvey said that the searches were deemed necessary before the opening of the regional lockup. A federal judge this week preliminarily approved a settlement in which Garvey's department must pay $205,000 to those illegally searched during that time. The jail stopped the practice in November 2002, but before that time, the department routinely strip-searched everyone coming in, according to Howard Friedman, a Boston lawyer who represented the 90 or so people illegally searched from Jan. 18, 2002, to Nov. 7, 2002. He said that the sheriff's department was using procedures normally used on those in jail, not for those awaiting their first court appearances. In the federal lawsuit, Friedman included people who had been strip-searched after being arrested for crimes other than violent felonies or those that involved drugs or weapons. Defendants who were searched while being held in a civil finding of contempt of court or for failure to pay child or spousal support finding, a judgment or a fine were also included in the class-action suit. According to Friedman, each class member will get $1,500 or more. Class members must submit a claim form by June 22 to receive their reward.
Worthington resident Charles V. Ryan IV, 51, was the lead plaintiff in the case. He filed a complaint Jan. 18, 2005, or three years after he was arrested on a charge of violation of an abuse-prevention order and strip-searched before his arraignment. The charge was later dropped when the witness refused to testify. Ryan was far from the only person illegally strip-searched at the time. After the regional lockup opened at the jail in November 2002 - creating a separate facility to hold people immediately after their arrest - the sheriff's department stopped strip-searching people awaiting their first court appearances, according to both the sheriff and the group that sued him and his deputy. Garvey said Wednesday that before the opening of the regional lockup, those awaiting their first court appearance were strip-searched because they were held at the Hampshire Jail and House of Correction with the general population. He said that now "we don't strip-search people prior to appearance in court unless there is significant probability they have something that could hurt themselves or others." Since the complaint alleged a violation of constitutional rights, the case was handled in U.S. District Court in Springfield. Judge Michael A. Ponsor granted preliminary approval of the settlement Tuesday. Final approval will likely be in June, Friedman said. David Guarino, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office, which represented Garvey and Deputy Superintendent Patrick Cahillane, called the settlement "an appropriate disposition of the case." Ryan, reached at his Worthington home Tuesday night, said, "I'm happy that justice is being done, and I hope all the people who have been violated enjoy their small pittance."

Posted by lois at 04:33 PM | Comments (0)

Life After Prison Can Be Deadly, a Study Finds

January 11, 2007
Life After Prison Can Be Deadly, a Study Finds
By REUTERS

BOSTON, Jan. 10 (Reuters) — Being released from an American prison may be more dangerous than being in one.

Death and prison records from Washington State show that 30,237 convicts released from 1999 to 2003 were 12 times more likely to die from a drug overdose and 10 times more likely to be slain in a two-year period than the general population.

The study, to be published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, said the reason went beyond the bad habits and willingness to take risks that probably landed people in prison in the first place.

“We know this is a population that has a higher rate of smoking, higher rate of mental health problems, higher rate of chemical dependency, and more risk-taking behavior,” said Dr. Ingrid Binswanger, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Denver.

“But you might not expect the higher death rate to be as dramatic as it is,” said Dr. Binswanger, who led the study.

The danger peaks sharply “in the first few weeks of their transition back into their communities,” she added.

The high rate of drug overdose may have been caused by heroin or cocaine users who relapsed and overestimated the amount it takes to get high, not realizing that they had lost the tolerance they had before they were imprisoned, the study said.

More than 600,000 inmates are released from American prisons every year. An additional 7.2 million people are let go after being held in jails while awaiting trial or serving short sentences for misdemeanors. The United States has 2.2 million people behind bars, about a quarter of all the world’s prisoners.

Heart disease “is the second-leading cause of death in this population,” Dr. Binswanger said, maybe because prisoners smoke more, or because they may have other risk factors like diabetes or high blood pressure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/us/11prison.html

Posted by lois at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2007

Taser Unveils Latest Stun Gun

Taser unveils latest stun gun
New consumer model is cheaper, puts user in charge of completing background check
Andrew Johnson, The Arizona Republic
Jan. 9, 2007 12:00 AM

http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0109biz-taser0109.html

Taser International Inc. on Monday began taking online orders for its sleek new consumer stun gun that the company hopes will bolster its sales, which are driven mainly by its products for law enforcement agencies.

The Scottsdale-based stun-gun manufacturer unveiled its Taser C2 model Monday at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The show, which runs through Thursday, is where technology companies big and small showcase a new world of gadgets, software and tech services. Taser chose the venue, filled with fanfare, celebrities and high-tech superstars, to launch the device, which is small enough to fit in a purse and comes in black, silver, blue and pink.

The C2 is the successor to Taser's X26C model, a gun-shaped device released in 2004, and is the company's latest attempt to beef up sales by targeting the civilian market.

The company started taking orders online early Monday for the C2. It plans to ship the first orders in April.

Taser will sell two versions of the stun gun. One, which sells for $350, has a laser function. A version without the laser sells for $300.

Analysts say the new model contains several features that will increase a Taser's appeal to consumers and retail distributors.

In addition to costing significantly less than previous consumer models - the X26C costs about $1,000 - the C2 is equipped with a proprietary technology called SureCheck. The stun guns are inactive until a user completes a background check either online or by calling a phone number.

That feature should help the company expand distribution among retailers that previously did not sell Taser's consumer models because they did not want to have to deal with doing the background checks, said Eric Wold, New York-based managing director for Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. of San Francisco.

"A lot of these gun stores . . . don't want to take the time to go off the floor to do a background check to sell a Taser," he said.

Wold and Matthew McKay, a San Francisco-based analyst for Jeffries & Co. Inc. of New York, said the design of the C2 model, which is not much bigger than a cellphone, likely will appeal more to women.

"I think their key market on the consumer side is probably single women or husbands who travel a lot and want something in the house that the wife feels comfortable with," McKay said.

In a telephone interview Monday afternoon, Taser Chairman Tom Smith said the new model was designed for "individuals who don't want to have that threatening look of a firearm."

The C2 can reach a target up to 15 feet away and can stun a person for up to 30 seconds.

Past consumer models could shock a person for up to one minute, which critics said was too dangerous.

Such safety concerns in the past kept gun-shop operators such as Ron Sega from selling Taser's consumer products for fear of being named in a lawsuit.

"There was too much controversy and I didn't want to get into any trouble myself," said Sega, owner of Guns Etc. in Chandler.

Taser has sold about 130,000 units to consumers since 1994 and about 300,000 units to law-enforcement agencies since 1991, according to Smith.

Reach the reporter at andrew .johnson@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-82

Posted by lois at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

Frobes rates CCA as Best in the Business Services Category

The Best Of The Best
America's 400 Best Big Companies
Business Services & Supplies- Corrections Corp. Of America
Amanda Schupak 01.08.07
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0108/096b.html

Crime pays. At least for John Ferguson, chief of $1.3 billion (sales) Corrections Corporation of America (nyse: CXW - news - people ), the nation's largest privatized prison operator. If there's one thing Ferguson can rely on, it's that criminals are never in short supply and there aren't enough bars to put them behind. Ferguson's 23-year-old firm, in Nashville, Tenn., is the oldest company of its kind. And it has cells to spare. "We have seen this percolating demand for many years that we didn't sense other people saw," he says. "This company has prepared itself." Earnings per share are up 130% over the last 12 months.

Ferguson insists on staying ahead of demand, even if that means the occasional empty cell block. A strong balance sheet and steady cash flow buttressed $120 million in 2006 spending to expand existing slammers and build new ones. One 1,600-occupant prison opened this year in Arizona; as many as 10,000 beds are planned for the next year and a half. "[Its] business development pipeline continues to amaze us," says Jefferies & Co. analyst Anton Hie. Bring on the bad guys: These big houses have plenty of room.

Forbes Names CCA ''Best Managed Company'' in ''Business Services & Supplies'' Category

Last Update: 9:40 AM ET Jan 9, 2007

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=364D5E1B422143BA9E1B86A347456DB4&siteid=mktw&dist=nbs

NASHVILLE, Tenn., Jan 09, 2007 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) (CXW :44.47, +0.11, +0.2% ) , the nation's largest provider of corrections management services to federal, state and local governments, today announced that Forbes magazine has named CCA the Best Managed Company of its kind in America in Forbes' January 8, 2007 issue highlighting "America's 400 Best Big Companies."

CCA was listed among the 400 honored companies for the first time and was cited as the "best managed company" among 21 companies within the "Business Services & Supplies" category, one of 26 categories that made up the overall rankings.

"This ranking is a testament to the hard work of our entire CCA staff, from the corporate office in Nashville to the 16,000 employees at our 64 facilities nationwide," said CCA president and CEO John Ferguson. "We pride ourselves on the level of service and safety we promise our government partners and staff, as well as the offenders under our care, and this ranking by Forbes is further evidence that we are successfully delivering on that promise."

Forbes' "Platinum 400" list is produced following a "thorough review of financial metrics, Wall Street forecasts, corporate governance ratings and other public information." The "Best Managed" ratings also measured leadership, innovation, and execution. For further analysis, see www.forbes.com/platinum/.

SOURCE: Corrections Corporation of America

Corrections Corporation of America Louise Grant, 615-263-3106

Posted by lois at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

Congress Is Expected to Revisit Sentencing Laws

NY Times
January 9, 2007
Congress Is Expected to Revisit Sentencing Laws
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 ‹ Federal sentencing laws that require lengthy mandated prison terms for certain offenses are expected to come under fresh scrutiny as Democrats assume control of Congress.

Among those eagerly awaiting signs of change are federal judges, including many conservatives appointed by Republican presidents. They say the automatic sentences, determined by Congress, strip judges of individual discretion and result in ineffective, excessive penalties, often for low-level offenders.

Judges have long been critical of the automatic prison terms, referred to as mandatory minimum sentences, which were most recently enacted by Congress in 1986 in part to stem the drug trade. Now influential judges across the ideological spectrum say that the combination of Democratic leadership and growing Republican support for modest change may provide the best chance in years for a review of the system.

³With a changing of the guard, there should at least should be some discussion,² said William W. Wilkins, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan.

The House Judiciary Committee, under the new leadership of Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, is planning hearings on the laws, starting later this month or in early February. One of the first issues planned for review is the sentencing disparity between offenses involving powder and crack cocaine.

The possession or trafficking of crack brings much harsher penalties than those for similar amounts of the powder form of the drug. Mr. Conyers, a longtime critic of mandatory minimum sentences, favors treating both drugs equally.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has no immediate plans for hearings. But Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, also supports some changes in the sentencing policy for crack cocaine convictions (though more modest than Mr. Conyers and some other Democrats favor), and Judiciary Committee staff members say a serious Senate review of the issue is likely in the current Congress.

Many law enforcement officials support tough, automatic sentences and argue that weakening existing laws will cause an increase in drug trafficking and violent crime. Many judges say current laws have clogged jails and too often punish low-level offenders. Some judges also argue that automatic lengthy sentences give prosecutors an unfair bargaining tool that they can use to tailor charges and press defendants into plea bargains.

³These sentences can serve a purpose in certain types of cases involving certain types of offenders,² said Judge Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, who was appointed by President Bush, ³but when you apply them across the board you end up doing a disservice not just to individuals but to society at large.²

Several judges say that broad inclusion in the coming Congressional hearings on sentencing would mark a notable departure from Judiciary Committee activity under the former Republican chairman, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, who many judges say maintained an antagonistic stance toward judges.

³There was no question that judges were targeted under the Sensenbrenner committee for speaking out,² said Judge Nancy Gertner, a Federal District Court judge appointed by President Bill Clinton who teaches a course on sentencing policy at Yale Law School.

Judge Gertner and others point to the example of Judge James Rosenbaum, a Reagan appointee who, in 2003, faced a Congressional review of his sentencing decisions under a barrage of criticism that he and other federal judges were too lenient. Many in the judicial community argued that Judge Rosenbaum was singled out because he criticized a proposal to increase federal sentences in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.

Most judges shy away from direct formal involvement in legislative matters. But many say private interactions with legislators that do not focus on specific cases but on policy matters of concern to the judiciary are appropriate.

Judge Wilkins, a former legislative assistant to Senator Strom Thurmond, said he believed private conversations on mandatory minimum sentences with his own congressman, Representative Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina, helped change the legislator¹s position.

Mr. Inglis, once a supporter of tough automatic sentences, said during a 1995 House vote that he would never vote for them again and has since become a Republican leader on sentencing reform.

³I was delighted that he took a principled stand, and I would like to think I was of some benefit to him in getting there,² said Judge Wilkins, who served as the first chairman of the Federal Sentencing Commission, the body charged by Congress with developing sentencing guidelines and collecting and analyzing statistics.

Some judges have expressed displeasure with the system from the bench or in written opinions.

At a sentencing last January Judge Walter S. Smith Jr., of the Western District of Texas, was required to add 10 years to the already mandated 10-year sentence in a crack distribution case because a gun was found under the defendant¹s bed. During the sentencing, the judge stated, ³This is one of those situations where I¹d like to see a congressman sitting before me.²

In an impassioned written opinion in 2004, Judge Paul G. Cassell of the Federal District Court in Utah, who was appointed by President Bush, called the mandatory 55-year sentence he was forced to give a low-level marijuana dealer who possessed, but did not use or brandish, a firearm ³simply irrational.²

In the opinion, Judge Cassell recommended a commutation of the sentence by the president, noting that the sentence, with consecutive 25-year terms for firearm possession, was longer than those required for an airport hijacker, second-degree murderer or a rapist.

The Supreme Court declined last fall to hear the case. But an amicus brief urging the court to take the case included signatures from legal figures like William Sessions, the former F.B.I. director; Janet Reno, attorney general during the Clinton administration; and Griffin Bell, attorney general under Jimmy Carter.

Many opponents of mandatory minimum sentences would like to see a full repeal of the laws. ³After so many years of this, people have forgotten that we should be asking for the whole fix, not just little pieces,² said Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

But most legal, legislative and judicial experts agree that repeal, or even broad-ranging overhaul of existing laws, is unlikely. More probable is serious review of crack cocaine sentencing laws.

Currently, possessing five grams of crack brings an automatic five-year sentence. It takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to warrant the same sentence. Similarly disparate higher amounts of the drugs results in a 10-year sentence. The 100-to-1 disparity, opponents of the law say, unfairly singles out poor, largely black offenders, who are more likely than whites to be convicted of dealing crack cocaine.

At a sentencing commission hearing in November, Judge Walton, associate director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under the first President George Bush and a onetime supporter of tough crack cocaine sentences, said it would be ³unconscionable to maintain the current sentencing structure² on crack cocaine.

Mr. Sessions is a co-sponsor of a bill that would change the ratio for the two drugs to 20 to 1, increasing the amount of crack that brings a five-year sentence to 20 grams from 5, and lowering the powder cocaine trigger from 500 grams to 400 grams.

If judges say they are hopeful for new debate on sentencing policy, they are quick to add that they are not naïve. After all, many say, even politicians who are critical of current laws fear looking soft on crime.

³Candidly, the Democrats were never particularly courageous on this issue either,² Judge Gertner said. ³But at least now it seems judges may be encouraged to be a part of the discussion. And if asked to speak up, I think many will.²

Sabrina Pacifici contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/washington/09sentencing.html

Posted by lois at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Telephone Justice--" A Good Call in NY"

January 10, 2007
Editorial
A Good Call in New York

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York set an important national example this week when he announced that the state corrections department would back away from a longstanding policy of charging prison inmates and their families more than six times the going rate for collect calls made from prison.

Prisons all over the country began gouging inmates and their families when telephone companies started paying legalized kickbacks — called “commissions” — to the state prison systems in return for a monopoly on the service. These schemes place a huge financial burden on inmate families, who tend to be among the poorest in the nation, and who must often choose between paying phone bills and putting food on the table.

The Spitzer administration, which plans to waive its commission and renegotiate the current contract with its prison telephone carrier, estimates that the cost of a collect call from prison will drop by about half once the program goes into effect. That’s good as far as it goes. But the better solution would be to introduce a cheaper, debit calling system like the one used in federal prisons, where inmates use computer-controlled accounts to pay for calls.

The governor’s announcement didn’t come out of nowhere. Arguments against New York’s collect-call-only system were heard yesterday in the state’s highest court. At the same time, laws that would make the system fairer for inmates and their families are pending in the State Legislature.

Whatever the source, fair pricing for prison telephone service is important. In addition to unburdening poor families, it would encourage sustained contact between inmates and their relations. And that would make it more likely that the inmates would forge crime-free lives once they got out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/opinion/10wed4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2007

Itche Goldberg, 102; fixture in communist struggle and a teacher of Yiddish culture

Itche Goldberg, 102; fixture in communist struggle and a teacher of Yiddish culture
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post

January 9, 2007

Itche Goldberg, a Polish-born Jew who became a fixture in the communist struggle of the 1920s and '30s and later emerged as a writer, editor, publisher and teacher of Yiddish language and culture, died of cancer Dec. 27 in his New York home. He was 102.

After his family settled in Canada, Goldberg became involved in a Jewish fraternal group called the Workmen's Circle. He became a Yiddish instructor, initially in Canada and later in Philadelphia and New York. He was part of an ideological movement that used Yiddish to teach Jews about the international proletariat struggle.

He became a leading cultural figure in the International Workers Order, a communist-affiliated insurance and fraternal organization that had splintered from the Workmen's Circle.

He once said about the split, which occurred around 1930: "There was no question about our Jewishness or Jewish consciousness, and the Jewish consciousness led us very naturally to the Soviet Union. Here was Romania, anti-Semitic. Poland, which was anti-Semitic. Suddenly we saw how Jewish culture was developing in the Soviet Union. It was really breathtaking. You had the feeling that both the national problem was solved and the social problem was solved. This was no small thing. It was overpowering, and we were young."

Before the International Workers Order folded amid the communist witch hunt of the early 1950s, Goldberg spent two decades as cultural director of its Jewish section.

In that position, he edited several journals - including a children's publication with cartoons and stories - and oversaw secular Yiddish-language schools that peaked with 80,000 students in the United States and Canada.

He started a publishing concern for Jewish history texts and Yiddish songbooks, and in the 1970s and 1980s he taught Yiddish at New York's Queens College.

He also persevered in publishing Yiddishe Kultur, a literary and cultural magazine started in the late 1930s. He assumed the editorship in 1964, when his predecessor left for a kibbutz in Israel. Goldberg became a relentless fundraiser to maintain bimonthly publication, which became increasingly difficult. Yiddishe Kultur had a few hundred subscribers when it last went to press in 2004.

Eugene Orenstein, who teaches Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal and is a former student of Goldberg's, called his teacher one of the last links to a world that saw the blossoming of Yiddish culture in the West with the mass immigration of European Jews from the 1880s to the 1920s.

Besides promoting the work of modern Yiddish writers, many of whom he knew in the 1920s and '30s, Goldberg also translated varied works into Yiddish, from Latin classics to Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

Yitzhak Gutkind Goldberg was born in 1904 in Opatow, Poland. The family left for Warsaw in 1914, just before the start of World War I.

His father and older brother went ahead to Canada. Goldberg, his mother and four other siblings stayed in Poland six more years.

While they waited, Goldberg talked his way into a Hebrew teachers seminary in Warsaw. When the family was reunited in Toronto, where his father had become a junk dealer, Goldberg attended McMaster University in Ontario. Self-taught in English, he studied philosophy and economics until quitting school in his fourth year.

Goldberg gradually came to realize the horrors of Stalinist Russia and specifically the regime's murderous treatment of Jews. During his editorship of Yiddishe Kultur, Goldberg published a memorial issue every August honoring Yiddish writers executed under Stalin.

Goldberg was viewed as a far more avuncular figure in his later years and received a flurry of press attention as an eccentric and tenacious figure in a shrinking circle of Yiddish experts.

He believed that promoting Yiddish was critical to the survival of Jewish culture, especially as the language, estimated to have 12 million speakers in 1939, dwindled to half a million speakers.

"You get the impression that I'm full of fight?" he asked the New York Times in 2004. "I'm not really. I might as well tell you: I only have two dreams. One dream is that someone will knock on the door and I will open it and they give me a check for $150,000 for the magazine. Second dream is that someone knocks at the door and I open it up and he gives me a corned beef sandwich."

He is survived by his wife, Jennie Goldberg; two children, David Goldberg and Susan Goldberg, both of New York; two granddaughters; and two great-grandchildren.

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-goldberg9jan09,0,2044501.story?coll=la-home-obituaries

Posted by lois at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

NY: New Governor Ends Price Gouging by Phone Companies

Congratulations to the organizers!!!!

January 9, 2007
Spitzer Orders Sharp Cuts in Cost of Prisoner Phone Calls
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
NY Times

ALBANY, Jan. 8 — Gov. Eliot Spitzer struck an early blow at the policies of his predecessor on Monday, sharply reducing steep Pataki-era charges that relatives and friends of inmates in New York State’s prisons have had to pay on collect telephone calls from them.

The governor’s move, effective April 1, came one day before state lawyers were to appear before the state’s highest court to defend the old policy, under which inmates were charged far higher fees than the public would be for the same calls.

“In light of assuring that as much information is available to the court and plaintiffs as possible, we decided to announce it today,” said Paul Larrabee, a spokesman for Mr. Spitzer.

Since 1996, the telephone company that provides calling services to state inmates, currently Verizon, has been required to return more than half its profits to the state. The arrangement earned the state $16 million in 2005. The phone companies passed along those charges to people accepting inmates’ collect calls, in some cases tripling the price of those calls, according to prisoners’ rights groups.

The Pataki administration had aggressively defended the charges, arguing that they helped pay for services to inmates and extra security features to prevent prison phones from being used to commit fraud or other crimes.

But nonprofit groups have long described the practice as exploitative and counterproductive, saying that both prisoners and the public benefited when inmates could readily stay in touch with their wives, husbands and parents. They also argued that the practice essentially charged families for their relatives’ incarceration.

“They were taking advantage of the high price to cover the cost of programs and services that the prison system should be providing in any case,” said Robert Gangi, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit group that monitors conditions in state prisons.

Legislation to end the high charges had passed the Democratic-controlled State Assembly several times in recent years but had stalled in the Senate. Mr. Spitzer, however, signaled during last year’s gubernatorial campaign that he would change the policy if elected. Yesterday, he was warmly praised by advocates who had pressed for the change.

“This is a victory for all New Yorkers because increased contact with family members is proven to reduce recidivism rates after release,” said Annette Dickerson, coordinator of the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice, which pushed for the change. Ms. Dickerson is also the director of education at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed suit two years ago on behalf of prisoners’ families to end the charges.

Most states still charge their prison inmates higher rates for telephone calls than are paid by the public, often through direct surcharges or commissions. Mr. Spitzer’s move makes New York one of only a few that have ended the practice.

Under the arrangement that will take effect April 1, the state will not share in any revenue from the phone calls. Mr. Larrabee said that the cost of a 20-minute call would fall to about $3, from about $6.20. Inmates in New York prisons are allowed to make only collect calls.

Prisoner advocates also praised Mr. Spitzer for abolishing the high charges without abolishing any of the prison programs for which the fees helped pay. Those programs — including AIDS medications and family reunion programs — must now be paid for out of general revenues, another reason why Mr. Spitzer, who will soon present next year’s budget, made the announcement on Monday.

“We are preparing the state budget,” Mr. Larrabee said. “And we’re no longer going to have that revenue stream.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/nyregion/09calls.html

Posted by lois at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2007

5 minute radio interview about RCPP comic books

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wfcr/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1022240
5 minutes 1-8-07
(you’ll need sound)

Posted by lois at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)

"Convict Criminology"

Ex-convict spreads the word that education can transform prisoners' lives, like it did his
By GINA BARTON gbarton@journalsentinel.com (Milwaukee, WI) Dec. 30, 2006
Ricky Hendricksen lights up a cigarette at his family's home in New Lisbon.

"What I like about the woods is just the solitude. Coming out of the army and then prison it was so good to just go out there and just hear the sounds of nature. No one screaming or fighting or yelling about a card game," says Hendricksen. "The feeling of being surrounded by all the life and and natural beauty of creation is a far cry from the grey and depressing life that exists in prison it makes you wonder how you could ever have lived without knowing it."

Hendricksen was convinced by Stephen Richards to go to college. A few weeks ago, he was accepted at UW-Oshkosh.Although he received a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969, Stephen Richards' education was interrupted by the lure of marijuana - and a government sting operation.

Instead of a college degree, Richards got a federal prison sentence.

Nearly 20 years after his release, Richards is back in the classroom - and back in prisons.

Now a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Richards leads a national movement of some three dozen ex-convicts with advanced degrees. Through their writing and research, they advocate for change in the criminal justice system. Richards also works in Wisconsin prisons, hoping to convince a new generation of felons that education can save them, the way it saved him.

Richards, 55, grew up in a Milwaukee orphanage. The value of education became obvious as he watched the other kids in the orphanage turn 18 and go into the world with $5 and a cardboard suitcase. Their choices were to study hard enough to get the college scholarship, or hit the streets.

At Madison, Richards studied sociology. He said he sat in the aisles of the bookstore reading his assignments because he couldn't afford the books and sweet-talked girls out of their leftovers in the cafeteria because he didn't have the money for meals.

Some of the other orphans crashed permanently at Richards' off-campus apartment. They opened his eyes to how profitable it could be to sell marijuana in Madison in 1969, and he became a very successful dealer. Richards left school his senior year, choosing instead to travel and operate a jewelry business with his sister. In 1982, an old friend from his dealing days called from South Carolina and asked to borrow some money, Richards said. He agreed. According to court records, Richards showed up in Charleston with $180,000.

Richards learned later that he'd been caught up in a fake drug deal created by government agents. A jury convicted him of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana.

9 years, nine federal prisons

In 1984, Richards began serving a nine-year sentence. By the time he was released on parole three years later, he had been housed in nine federal prisons.

"I saw suicides and knifings and beatings and (corrections officers in) gun towers shooting people," Richards said. "Psychologically, it's difficult . . . .But that's what happens when you take away hope."

Richards saw himself start to change, too. One day, after he had been incarcerated more than two years, he bashed another man over the head with a metal folding chair for cutting in the cafeteria line.

"You become somebody else," he said. "You have to, to survive."

But Richards never stopped believing in the power of knowledge. He finished his bachelor's degree through correspondence while in prison. Upon release, he earned his master's at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and his PhD. at Iowa State University. Richards was working as an assistant professor at Northern Kentucky University when he got a letter from an inmate named Daniel Murphy, who was serving five years for manufacture of marijuana.

A childhood back injury nagged Murphy through high school and ended his college basketball career after a semester. The pain almost drove him to suicide in 1980, when he says he discovered relief from marijuana. He earned his degree and started a consulting business. When his dealer gave up selling pot in 1992, Murphy says he decided to grow his own. Federal agents discovered his crop the day after he planted it.

While incarcerated in federal prison, Murphy was stabbed three times.

He has just one way to describe the time he spent locked up: insanity.

Education brings change
As Murphy prepared to leave prison, he was determined to change the conditions for prisoners who came after him. The best way to do that, he decided, was to further his education. He was introduced to Richards through a contact at UWM, and Richards mentored Murphy through his master's degree and Ph.D. Murphy, 50, is now an assistant professor of criminal justice at Appalachian State University in North Carolina.

Richards and Murphy are among about three dozen professors and graduate students around the country known as convict criminologists. Rather than hiding their criminal pasts, they use them to inform their classes and their writing.

Like Murphy, some of them are advocates for prison reform. Some inspire students to make a difference through working for non-profit organizations, as defense attorneys or as corrections officers dedicated to rehabilitation.

"We know things about the criminal justice system and about the prison system that they don't teach in college, but need to be taught," Richards said. "One of them is how to get through it in one piece and be a better person."

Assigned reading for Richards' class at Oshkosh includes "Behind Bars," a book about prison life he wrote with a former corrections officer, and "Convict Criminology," which includes essays he, Murphy and other educated ex-cons wrote about their pasts.

"He tells you stories about when he was in the federal prison system, and he tells you the truths and exploits the lies that the books have told us," said Oshkosh senior Jenny Kohls.

Senior Sean Kuether agreed.

"I think one of the biggest lessons from Dr. Richards . . . is that many criminals or convicted offenders are regular people, who for one reason or another made decisions that resulted in their incarceration," he said. "This doesn't necessarily mean they are horrible people or that they should be shunned by the community."

Financial aid for felons
There aren't many options for prisoners who want to pursue higher education. The Wisconsin prison system began to offer college courses via satellite earlier this year, according to spokesman John Dipko. The classes, funded by a federal grant and taught in cooperation with Milwaukee Area Technical College, cost $30 each. Some prisoners also take courses by mail. Costs range from about $200 to $700.

Prisoners aren't eligible for federal student loans or grants. But once they get out, most felons can apply for federal financial aid. They usually get it because they have poverty-level incomes, Richards said.

Richards came to UW-Oshkosh in 2004. Earlier that year, Oshkosh criminal justice professor Christopher Rose had started a program at the Racine Correctional Institution to encourage inmates to apply to college when they got out. Richards was a natural addition to the program and helped expand it to the Oshkosh Correctional Institution, located just a few miles from the university.

Oshkosh students teach the class. Although the prisoners don't get college credit, they read the same "Convict Criminology" text as their university counterparts. They take tests, write papers and give oral presentations. The curriculum is designed to show prisoners whether they have what it takes to succeed at a university.

Each semester, Richards makes a guest appearance and tells his story.

"You have paid in full," he told a group recently. "When you get out, you, like every other resident of the state, are welcome to attend a university."

At the end of the course, the student teachers and UW professors help the inmates fill out college applications and financial aid forms.

"I know I want to pursue an education, that's real important," said Oxford inmate Aarus Mister, 27, who is taking the class. "I see education as real important for an ex-offender in terms of not coming back (to prison)."

Small successes
So far, 60 Wisconsin inmates have taken the course. Richards knows of three who have gone on to college. One of them is Richard Hendricksen, 24, of New Lisbon.

Hendricksen was raised to join the military and marry the girl he took to senior prom, except his life didn't work out that way. He was discharged from the Army when an old foot injury made it impossible for him to continue. His prom date dumped him. His brother was killed in a motorcycle accident, and his father died of leukemia.

"Me and some friends got a place and started partying," he said.=20

Five years ago, the group got high on Oxycontin and robbed a man. Hendricksen pleaded guilty to robbery with use of force and recklessly endangering safety. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

"I had never really thought about going to college," he said. "No one in my family had ever done it before."

Things changed when he met Richards, who assured him that he could attend college and promised to help.

"It was a whole world they opened the door to," he said.

When Hendricksen was released in May 2005, he says he couldn't get into a university because his high school grades had been so bad. So he took two courses at Western Wisconsin Technical College, earning a 4.0.

A few weeks ago, Hendricksen was accepted at UW-Oshkosh for the spring semester.

"My mom started crying, and I started a little bit," he said.

Although Hendricksen and Murphy are among a select few who have made it from prison to college, Richards says they are enough.

"I think it's worthwhile just to give them the bridge. That step. If they're able to cross the bridge and enter college, that's great," he said. "How many people get over the bridge, that's up to them."

Original Story URL: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=3D545012

Posted by lois at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Adams Museum Loans Historic Bible From Survivors of the Amistad for Deval Patrick Inauguration

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tuesday, January 2, 2006

ADAMS MUSEUM LOANS HISTORIC BIBLE FROM SURVIVORS OF THE AMISTAD FOR DEVAL PATRICK INAUGURATION
Deval Patrick will take oath of office on Bible presented to John Quincy Adams by the African captives he helped free in the Amistad 1841 Supreme Court case

BOSTON – The Patrick-Murray Inaugural Committee today announced that governor-elect Deval Patrick will take his oath of office using the Mendi Bible, a gift from the Amistad Africans given to John Quincy Adams after he secured their freedom in an historic case before the United States Supreme Court in 1841. The Bible will be on loan from the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, and will be displayed at the State House following the inauguration.

"This Bible comes from an extraordinary moment in the history of the Commonwealth, the nation and the world," said Beverly Morgan-Welch, co-chair of the Inaugural Committee. "The Amistad case was a giant step forward for the abolitionist movement and recognized the basic humanity of enslaved people in America. It is now fitting and proper that we honor it now as part of this historic inaugural."

The Amistad case dates to 1839, when a group of Africans from Mendeland near modern day Sierra Leone were kidnapped and sold illegally into the Spanish slave trade. Led by Cinque, they broke their bonds and overtook the crew of the Amistad off Cuba. Ordered to sail to Africa, captured crew members steered toward Africa during the day and turned back toward the Americas at night, eventually landing off the coast of New York.

Thus began a protracted legal battle accompanied by national media coverage and international intrigue. Spain pressured then-President Martin Van Buren to send the human cargo back to Cuba without a trial and Van Buren so feared the reactions of the pro-slavery South that he had the case appealed to the Supreme Court when a lower court ordered the 35 men and women freed.

Enter John Quincy Adams, the former president and congressman whose own father had helped found the United States on the principles of freedom. He was 73 when he took up the Africans' case and argued passionately before the court in winning their freedom. In gratitude, the freed Africans presented Adams with the Bible inscribed with a letter from Cinque and his colleagues.

Thursday's swearing in of the new governor will mark the first time the historic Mendi Bible has ever been used in an official ceremony in Massachusetts.

"One hundred sixty-six years after John Quincy Adams defended the Mendi People, T he Amistad story continues to engage generations, and compels us to look to the past as we engage in the present and formulate our vision for the future. The Amistad story is our reminder of the impact one individual can have on society and the importance of 'civic engagement.' These ideals of active citizenship, patriotism and the lifelong commitment of service to country, as celebrated at the Inauguration of Deval Patrick as Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are as relevant in 2007 as they were in l84l, and an important piece of our state's rich heritage," said Marianne Peak, Superintendent of the Adams National Historical Park in Quincy.

"The Mendi Bible is one of the most significant and moving pieces of history in the Adams family. It reflects the great determination and courage of a people who, after long suffering, were fortunate to find themselves befriended by an old man, a former President with a passionate belief in justice. We are tremendously pleased that the Mendi Bible continues to serve as a symbol of our nation's most precious and fundamental beliefs," said Benjamin Adams, president of the Adams Memorial Society and a descendant of John Quincy Adams.

The Mendi Bible is on exhibit at the Adams National Historical Park from April l9 to November 10.

Posted by lois at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)

"Incarceration Nation"

The Nation
January 5, 2007 (web only)
Incarceration Nation
Silja J.A. Talvi

Every year, American taxpayers fund an estimated $60 billion for our incarceration system. This system staples together a network of public and corporate-run jails, prisons, pre- and post-release centers, juvenile detention centers and boot camps. All together, these facilities hold well over 2 million human beings, locked away without public oversight or scrutiny.

Yet throwing money at the perceived scourge of criminality in the United States doesn't appear to have had the desired effect: Despite the staggering incarceration statistics, violent crime has actually begun to creep up over the last two years, according to the latest FBI Uniform Crime Report.

In the last several years, some signs have emerged of an increasingly organized movement of citizens, family members of the incarcerated, independent-minded judges and correctional or criminal justice experts--who stand in firm opposition to our punitive, nonrehabilitative incarceration system.

Viewed through an optimistic lens, the United States might genuinely be at the beginning of a trend toward real criminal justice reform. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have already paid far too high a price for shortsighted penological policies. Floridian Yraida Guanipa is among them. Guanipa spent the last ten and a half years locked in federal penitentiaries in Florida, locked away from her Miami community, her extended family and two young boys.

Her offense: She agreed to pick up a sealed package for a friend, which turned out to contain cocaine. Although Guanipa had never been arrested before--and had never been a drug user--she was hit with a thirteen-year "drug conspiracy" prison sentence on par with a sentence that a major drug trafficker would have received. Guanipa's good standing in the community, her lack of criminal background and the fact that she had a 1-year-old and a 2-year old had no impact on her sentence.

The story has become sadly familiar to me, particularly as I have spent the last few years corresponding with, meeting and interviewing women like Guanipa in jails and prisons across the country.

In the decade of her imprisonment, Guanipa witnessed two suicides; countless incidents of medical negligence; the brutality of prison retaliation; and the everyday reality of sexual relations between male guards and female inmates.

Guanipa became an outspoken advocate for other prisoners as a self-educated jailhouse lawyer, but most prisoners talk about retreating within themselves to try to survive the ordeal. Concern for collective well-being is difficult, if not impossible, when individual survival is on the line. "Unfortunately, that's what prison does to us," Guanipa explains. "It takes the human feelings out of our body, and we just try to survive."

Tasteless films like Let's Go to Prison notwithstanding, what really goes on in prisons is still a mystery to most Americans, as are the immeasurable collateral consequences of incarceration on families and communities. Arrest and incarceration are woven into the fabric of American life: Today, a black man has one chance in three of ending up in prison at some point in his life, and is more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college.

According to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the US prison and jail population hit a new high of 2,193,798 men and women at the end of 2005, representing a 2.7 percent increase over the previous year. A record number of more than 200,000 women are now doing time behind bars--an estimated 80 percent of whom are mothers. Analysis by the Women's Prison Association has shown that female incarceration has jumped 757 percent since 1977.

More than 95,000 juveniles are also in custody, held in the kinds of facilities that only seem to make their lives more troubled than they were to begin with. As one 14-year-old girl put it to me in Seattle's King County Juvenile Detention Center, "This place just teaches us to be better criminals. It's like a criminal training school."

One in thirty-two US adults are now under some form of correctional supervision. Although Americans only constitute 5 percent of the world's population, one-quarter of the entire world's inmates are contained in our jails and prisons, something that baffles other democratic societies that have typically used prisons as a measure of last resort, especially for nonviolent offenders.

But mass incarceration in America remains a nonissue, largely because of a lack of any serious or effective discourse on the part of our political leaders. At most, election season brings out the kinds of get-tough-on-crime platforms that have already given us misguided Three Strikes and mandatory-minimum sentencing laws.

But there are now a few signs that today's insatiable carceral state might eventually find it harder to find bodies to fill our already dramatically overcrowded facilities. In December, 2006, a federal judge gave Republican Governor Schwarzenegger until June 2007 to devise a real plan to relieve severe overcrowding in California's thirty-three prisons. Designed to hold no more than 81,000 men and women, California's state prison system is overflowing with more than 173,000 inmates who are often crammed in eight-person cells or can be found sleeping on packed-to-capacity gym floors. A New Year's weekend riot at a Chino State Prison involved hundreds of inmates and sent more than two dozen to the hospital. Schwarzenegger has already authorized shipment of California inmates to private prisons in other states as well as more money for building new prisons. Thankfully, this approach has failed to pass muster with the federal court that could step in to order early release of prisoners unless more productive solutions are found to further alleviate overcrowding.

"I think the climate [for reform] has opened up," says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy organization. "The issue is less emotional and politicized right now. "

Part of the reason for the slight climate shift has to do with the fact that taxpayers are growing increasingly tired of throwing money into fiscal sinkhole of multibillion-dollar corrections budgets. (California's corrections budget is a whopping $8.75 billion, yet two-thirds of prisoners still end up back in prison.) And then there is the fact that adult and juvenile violent crime rates have, until recently, been on an overall decline since 1993, and the hysteria generated by the crack cocaine epidemic has finally died down to a dull ebb.

As the public has slowly gained an understanding of serious drug abuse as a health and addiction issue, millions of American voters have signaled their own dissatisfaction with the one-size-fits-all-punishment model, voting for treatment diversion programs in a number of states, including the highly successful Proposition 36 in California.

Civil rights/liberties organizations ranging from the ACLU to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (the organization was instrumental in reversing convictions resulting from the Tulia, Texas, drug round-ups of primarily black citizens based on the uncorroborated accusations of one police officer), have made it clear that the grossly disproportionate incarceration of people of color and poor people should be an urgent, front-burner issue for the country as a whole.

In December, 2006, the subject of what it might take to dismantle the American carceral system brought some 500 attendees to New York City. The conference, "Punishment: The U.S. Record," was organized by The New School for Social Research. The event brought together the likes of renowned Princeton sociologist Bruce Western, US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner and Stephen Bright, president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights, in a unified call for radical, systemic change in the criminal justice system.

From Judge Gertner's perspective, this change necessitates a "re-education" of the judiciary, reclaiming their independence in a criminal justice system that has favored strict guidelines over judicial discretion--especially in drug cases--since the passage of the Reagan-era Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, the law that established the 100-to-one crack-to-powder cocaine sentencing disparity.

With a new Democratic majority in Congress, a number of pending bills do seek to right some of the legislative wrongs of the past. Democratic Representative Charles Rangel has introduced HR 2456, the Crack -Cocaine Equitable Sentencing Act, introduced in 2005 and still in committee, which would equalize the drug-quantity ratio and eliminate the mandatory minimum for simple possession. Even some conservatives have moved forward on criminal justice reform. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions's S 3725, the Drug Sentencing Reform Act, introduced in 2006, would reduce the drug quantity ratio to a twenty-to-one disparity and mandatory sentence for simple possession to one year.

Marie Gottschalk, author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, cautioned progressives to remember that most political leaders have been slow to enact any significant reforms for fear of seeming weak on public safety issues. In some cases, she said, some of the most regressive legislation and leaps in incarceration numbers have actually occurred under Democratic stewardship, as was the case under former California Governor Gray Davis (with his unapologetically strong allegiance to the state's prison guard union, CCPOA) and President Clinton's signing of the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, which severely limited legal recourse for prisoners to appeal and their ability to plead for relief for abuses suffered while incarcerated.

While many people working in corrections take their jobs seriously, abusive or negligent behavior is a fact of prison life, as are sexual exploitation and violence, the use of restraint chairs, and chemical and electric weapons. Racism and race-based housing has contributed to major prison riots; extended use of supermax-style isolation cells; and shoddy and/or life-threatening medical care are all common problems. Add to this the fact that more than half of all prison and jail inmates report struggling with mild to severe mental-health problems, whose periods of incarceration only tend to exacerbate pre-existing problems.

Back at FCI Coleman in Central Florida, the relief that accompanied Guanipa's move to a halfway house last month--and her eventual release to the "free world" six months from now--is tempered by the knowledge of those she's leaving behind to face the day-to-day struggles of prison life. "The hardships we endure here will be part of our lives when we are released," she says.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/incarceration_nation

Posted by lois at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)

Now the Real Work Begins on the Hill as Black Caucus Gets its Best Seat at the Table Yet

Date: Friday, January 05, 2007
By: Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Melanie Campbell, head of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, watched Thursday’s swearing-in of members of the Congressional Black Caucus and thought, “It feels good to be black in America.”

The CBC enters the 110th Congress packing the greatest strength since its inception in the 1970s. The group includes 43 members and several in powerful leadership positions as part of the new Democratic majority.

“To see people like John Conyers become head of the Judiciary Committee, and to see Charlie Rangel of New York, who was there in the beginning (of the CBC) reach this pivotal moment as head of Ways and Means, was special,” Campbell told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “It’s not just historical, but it also takes our empowerment to another level. Now the real work begins.”

In addition to Rangel and Conyers’ appointments, CBC members Bennie Thompson of Mississippi will head the Homeland Security Committee and Juanita Millender-McDonald of California will head the House Committee on Administration. Also, Rep. James Clyborn of South Carolina will have the third highest rank in the House serving as majority whip. Also several CBC members are expected to pick up key sub-committee appointments.

Witness Influence As Seen Through the Experience of Infiniti. Watch Shirley Jo Finney's Film "The Inspiration" now. Infiniti.com/black AP Video

While Democrats and black party members have a strong base of power as the session begins, some observers caution that obstacles are still ahead.

Political analyst Ron Walters said while CBC members are in the best positions they have had in the House, there still is reason for caution.

“Under normal circumstances, we could say they are in good position to get things done,” Walters told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “But there is a Republican president who will be standing ready with a veto pen. Also, there are more Blue Dog conservative Democrats than there are CBC members.”

There are 44 Blue Dog Democrats, the conservative right wing members of the Democrat Party who sometimes vote with Republicans.

“They will always have the worry of someone not voting with you,” Walters said. He said the committee chairmanship nomination of CBC member Rep. Alcee Hastings was rejected because "moderates didn’t favor that appointment.”

Nancy Pelosi, the first woman elected Speaker of the House, applauded Rangel, Conyers and other CBC members in her remarks at the group's ceremony, which was moderated by Michael Eric Dyson.

"I see the pride in the eyes of Charlie Rangel and John Conyers, who were there at the start," Pelosi told the Congressional Black Caucus. "And now we will call them, 'Mr. Chairman.'"

Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick of Detroit, who will lead the CBC in the 110th session, said CBC members will work to advance the Democratic Party agenda, which includes many of the concerns of urban and rural blacks.

“In the first 100 hours, we’re going to address the high cost of prescription drugs for our seniors. “We’re going to work to make higher education more affordable,” Kilpatrick told BlackAmericaWeb.com, in an interview prior to Thursday’s ceremonies.

“We’re going to take back America, for America and America’s children," Kilpatrick said.

Democrats and CBC members are positioned at the table to direct both America’s domestic and international agendas, Kilpatrick said. “We want to end the War in Iraq as quickly as possible in a successful way,“ she said, adding that America must get beyond the point where it does not talk to its enemies. “If you have enemies, it’s time to talk,“ she said.

A CBS poll in 2005 showed that 81 percent of blacks oppose President Bush’s decision to go to Iraq, compared with 51 percent of whites.

“More than $400 billion has been spent on the Iraq war," Kilpatrick said. "You want to tell me we couldn’t use that money here at home?"

The Democrats’ agenda for the upcoming session will be a test for 2008, according to Walters.

“The Democrats in next two years want to key up popular issues they can run on in 2008 and win back the White House,” Walters said. “If that happens, then they will get a chance to do much of what they have talked about.”

Kilpatrick says that while members may have some differences on issues, they are on the same page on the major initiatives.

“We have different players, but we’re all one family,” she said. “We had a big win this fall. But the real win will come in 2008.”

Posted by lois at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2007

AZ: Men incarcerated in CA transferred to private prison

Arizona: CA inmates transferred to CCA.
01.07.2007

600 Calif. cons going to Florence
Quiet move of overflow offenders to private prisons causes concern By George B. Sánchez ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Within one month, Arizona will be home to nearly 600 California convicts.

Outside of California news reports, there was no announcement of the interstate transfer, which began late last month and will continue through early February, prompted by massive overcrowding in California prisons.

But the quiet move is raising concerns among various groups in Arizona and California.

While housing of out-of-state inmates is not new to Arizona, the issues raised - public safety, oversight and private profit - remain the same since the practice began in Arizona five years ago. Chief among the worries is that the state will have no oversight of the men because they'll be held at a private prison in Florence that has had serious problems with prison gangs in the recent past.

The convicts' destination is the Florence Correctional Center, a medium-security, private prison owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America. The company has four prisons in Arizona: Florence; the Central Arizona Detention Center, also in Florence; and two in Eloy. Another is currently under construction in Eloy. The publicly traded company oversees about 70,000 inmates - men, women and juveniles - in 65 facilities in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

As at any other prison, there have been problems at Florence.

In 2001, Hawaii's Department of Public Safety reported that a gang called the United Samoan Organization had control of the Florence site. Hawaii's then-Department of Public Safety Director Ted Sakai wrote the Corrections Corporation alleging that prison officials depended on gangs to govern the facility.

Two years later, 221 Hawaiian inmates were moved from Florence to Corrections Corporation's Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Okla . Hawaiian DPS reports from 2003 and 2004 cited continued concerns of drug dealing, violence and tension among Hawaiian gang members.

Louise Grant, spokeswoman for Corrections Corporation of America, said those problems have been solved.

"Here it is, almost six years later and we continue to serve Hawaii, even more so than in the past," she said.

New staffers and policies were installed at Florence to address those concerns, Grant said, although she cited no specific example or details.

Others aren't convinced.

"Just about anybody in Arizona should be concerned about who we have here and how they're being handled," said Caroline Isaacs, program director of American Friends Service Committee of Arizona in Tucson, a Quaker group that works for social justice.

Latest transfers last month

The latest transfer began on Dec. 21, when 38 California inmates boarded a bus bound for Florence. With weekly arrivals, 560 are expected to arrive by the beginning of February, said Bill Sessa, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Officials from the agency signed contracts worth more than $51.6 million with Corrections Corporation and The GEO Group Inc. to send their inmates to the companies' prisons across the country, beginning with the Corrections Corporation facility in Tennessee, then moving to Arizona.

Both companies have prisons in Arizona that already have been used to hold inmates from other states, including Hawaii, Washington and Alaska, as well as federal detainees.

California inmates will not be released in Arizona, Grant said, because they will be returned to California communities.

The GEO Group has 63 prisons and residential treatment facilities in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. On Dec. 12, it announced the opening of a 1,000-bed Central Arizona Correctional Facility, also in Florence, which will house medium-security sex offenders from Arizona.

Tixoc Munoz, executive president of the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association, said the union wasn't aware of the new arrivals. Though it won't affect members because they don't work in private prisons, Munoz said the influx will affect many other people.

"We wish this didn't happen," he said. "We've got more than 30,000 inmates in the state. You're adding more inmates to the state and that's more responsibility."

The union opposes the state use of private prison facilities, he said, though seven of Arizona's 17 prisons are private.

"We believe it is the state's responsibility to administer punishment," Munoz said.

Arizona's practice of shipping inmates to private prisons has not been without problems since it began in 2002.

Currently, 1,433 Arizona inmates are at Correction Corporation's Diamondback facility in Oklahoma. It costs $47.65 a day per inmate, said Katie Decker, spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Corrections. The state also has contracts with two private prisons run by The GEO Group, Decker said.

Arizona has 5,000 more inmates than the department is budgeted for, Decker explained.

"We just don't have enough beds," she said. "You just can't put felons out on the street."

In 2004, more than 2,000 inmates were sent to two out-of-state facilities. More than half went to Diamondback in Oklahoma. Another 864 were sent to the Reeves County Detention Complex in Pecos, Texas, owned by The GEO Group.

Inmates sent to Texas went on hunger strikes and purposely fought other inmates, hoping to be returned to Arizona.

In July 2004, more than 300 Arizona inmates in Oklahoma returned after a fight involving as many as 475 prisoners, some of whom were armed with baseball bats, fire extinguishers and two-by-fours.

California overcrowding

The transfer of the California inmates is the result of the Prison Overcrowding State of Emergency Proclamation signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Oct. 4.

All 33 of California's prisons are overcrowded. There are approximately 174, 000 inmates in California, Sessa said, at least 25,000 more than the system's capacity. About 20,000 inmates are housed in gyms, day rooms "and other facilities not designed for housing," Sessa said. Fifteen hundred inmates sleep in triple-bunk beds.

The proclamation allowed California corrections officials to immediately contract for out-of-state housing outside the regular bidding process. It also allowed the governor to suspend state law that required inmates' consent for transfer, which means that after those inmates willing to leave are shipped out, others could be forcibly moved.

That could include illegal entrants, inmates paroled outside California, inmates with limited family or support systems in California and "other inmates as deemed appropriate by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary," the proclamation says.

"Right now all of our inmate transfers are voluntary," Sessa said.

Indeed, a survey found that 19,000 California inmates expressed an interest in transferring to an out-of-state prison.

The changes have faced some opposition.

The California Correctional Peace Officers' Association and the Service Employees International Union Local 1000 filed a lawsuit to prevent the transfers.

"We don't believe they have the authority to ship people out involuntarily," said Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, a Northern California-based legal advocacy group.

First for California

Schwarzenegger's proclamation marks the first time California has exported its inmates to other states to serve time.

The first group of inmates - 80 in all - was shipped out Nov. 3, flown to West Tennessee Detention Facility, a Corrections Corporation prison. The trip is the subject of a short video produced by the California corrections officials to persuade other inmates to follow suit.

Citing better weather and less crowded conditions, along with the desire for something different, the wide-eyed and smiling inmates boast of better food, spacious environs, access to educational programs, cable television and exercise equipment.

"You really feel, I wouldn't say equal, but like a human being in here," one inmate says.

There haven't been any problems with the Tennessee group, said Grant, the Corrections Corporations' spokeswoman.

"We have not had any issues whatsoever in West Tennessee," she said. "We've had a lot of positive feedback."

Specter, with the prison law group, said his office got one complaint from the Tennessee group, about dental care.

Isaacs, with the American Friends Service Committee, has monitored the private prison industry in Arizona. She said a for-profit prison can mean cutting corners at the expense of safety. Then, she said, recapturing private prison escapees inevitably involves support from local and state law enforcement agencies, which puts those officers - and the public - at risk.

On May 4, Christopher Breiland, 36, escaped from Florence West, a private prison operated by The GEO Group. He was caught nine days later, after crashing a car into another vehicle in a Phoenix police chase.

Private prisons, Isaacs said, must be a public-safety concern.

"This is only going to continue on all these fronts: out-of-state contracts with private prisons, sending our inmates out of state and taking out-of-state inmates in," she said. "It really would behoove us to take a close look at this."

http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/163539

Posted by lois at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2007

Charles Colson's complaint

Jan 05,2007
Charles Colson's complaint
by Bill Berkowitz
Bend Weekly News, Bend, OR
Opponents of faith-based prison programs are enabling terrorists, says Watergate felon Charles Colson

Those opposed to faith-based prison projects are blind to the threat of terrorism in the "homeland" from former inmates who have converted to Islam while in America's prisons, Charles Colson, one of President Richard Nixon's key operatives during the Watergate years, recently charged in one of his BreakPoint commentaries.

Stung by a federal district court judge's decision that his InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a faith-based prison program operating in Iowa's prisons is unconstitutional, Colson, is using a recent report about the growing threat of Islamic terrorists being recruited in U.S. prisons, to argue that support for his faith-based prison program is essential to preventing terrorist attacks in this country.

In his BreakPoint commentary titled "What's Hidden in the Shadows: Radical Islam and U.S. Prisons", Colson, who founded Prison Fellowship Ministries after serving time in prison for Watergate-related crimes and recently retired as its head, warned that a terrorist attack in the homeland could be spearheaded by "home-grown Islamist radicals" who are converting to Islam while in prison.

"I don't usually make predictions," Colson wrote, "but here's one I’ll venture: If, God forbid, an attack by home-grown Islamist radicals occurs on American soil, many, if not most, of the perpetrators will have converted to Islam while in prison."

He pointed to "Out of the Shadows: Getting Ahead of prisoner Radicalization", a report produced by researchers from George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute and the University of Virginia's Critical Incident Analysis Group, that concluded that "the U.S....is at risk of facing the sort of homegrown terrorism currently plaguing other countries." The basis of that risk, is America's "large prison population."

According to the report, "With the world's largest prison population (over 2 million -- 93 percent of whom are in state and local prisons and jails) and highest incarceration rate (701 out of every 100,000), America faces what could be an enormous challenge -- every radicalized prisoner becomes a potential terrorist recruit."

"Radicalized prisoners" within this population "are a potential pool of recruits by terrorist groups," the study says. The report notes that the absence of "monitoring by authoritative Islamic chaplains" permits "materials that advocate violence [to infiltrate] the prison system undetected."

Some of the materials that the newly converted receive urge Muslim prisoners "to wage war against non-Muslims who have not submitted to Islamic rule." One former employee of an Islamist group told a Senate committee, "I know of only a few instances in which prisons rejected the literature we attempted to distribute--and it was never because of the literature's radicalism."

Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) has called the situation "an emerging threat to our national security."

While not getting into it in any thorough way, the report also acknowledged the presence in prisons of right-wing homegrown extremists "which have an extensive history of terrorists attacks."

"Out of the Shadows" recommends the establishment of a "Commission to investigate this issue in depth." It calls for "an objective risk assessment...to better understand the nature of the threat," in order to "address this issue now, rather than [managing] a crisis later."

Although the report does not go into details regarding evangelical Christian-focused faith-based prison programs, Colson does. He said that he has been warning about the potential terrorist threat from Muslims radicalized while in prison since 2001. He believes that recent court decisions against his faith-based prison projects have exacerbated the problem, and that greater government support for Christian faith-based prison programs are the way to go.

Colson directly attacks groups that have opposed his InnerChange Freedom Initiative. "The largely unimpeded spread of radical Islam through our prisons coincides with increased opposition to the one really successful antidote--that is, the presence of Christianity," Colson wrote. "An obvious example is the lawsuit against our prison program in Iowa. Programs like ours are working. We have studies to prove it. And they are the best solution to the alienation and rage that fuels conversions to radical Islam, as well as gangs and other hate groups inside the prisons. Making it harder for organizations like Prison Fellowship to operate within prison walls leaves jihadists and other radical groups as the only game in town."

Colson singles out Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for special condemnation. "Unfortunately, opponents like...Lynn...are blind to this, which puts more than the program at risk--because, as we saw in the case of the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, groups that are now operating in the shadows of our prisons are a real danger to us."

"Colson's comments were astonishing," Lynn told me in a telephone interview. "When I read it I could hardly believe what I was reading.

"There literally appears to be no level that Charles Colson will not stoop to these days. In this political climate, calling someone an aider and abettor of terrorism is the worst thing you can call somebody. He seems to have run out of any sensible arguments so he is turning to lies and character assassination."

Lynn is no stranger to vilification by conservative Christians. At this year’s Value Voters Summit, both James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, and Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, "took shots at Americans United.” The two leaders “grip[ed] about an AU project to send letters to houses of worship in 11 states … targeted by the Religious Right, warning them that they could endanger their tax-exempt status if they endorse or oppose candidates for public office," Americans United's Jeremy Leaming reported.

The Rev. Herb Lusk "suggested that Lynn [who attended the Summit] should not be discussed further. ‘The enemy is out there,' Lusk bellowed. 'We know who our enemy is. The more you call the enemy's name, the larger he becomes.'" Despite Lusk's suggestion, Pastor Rick Scarborough, the President of Vision America and a proponent of the so-called War on Christians, "blasted Lynn for opposing church-based politicking. For good measure, Scarborough called the separation of church and state a 'bald-faced lie.'"

Lynn, whose recently published book is titled "Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom" (Random House, 2006), thinks that Colson's playing of the terrorism card is clearly a sign of desperation.

"He realizes that his programs are on shaky ground because of the Iowa decision," Lynn pointed out. "He can't make a legal argument; in fact, in the 38 months during which the case was pending Prison Fellowship never presented the success of the InnerChange program because he did not want that evidence to be subject to cross examination by our side."

Colson's charge that opponents of his faith-based prison programs are enabling terrorism is "shocking, despicable and inflammatory" Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization that has filed several suits against government sponsored faith-based programs, told me in an October telephone interview from San Francisco where her organization was holding its convention. "It's a gross insult to people who are opposed to Colson's faith-based programs to link them with terrorism."

Gaylor said that prisoners ought to have "compassion-based initiatives and not faith-based initiatives. The government should provide educational opportunities and job training programs so that prisoners can get decent paying jobs when they are released."

Colson's commentary also pointed to "studies" that "prove" that faith-based prison programs like his "are the best solution to the alienation and rage that fuels conversions to radical Islam...inside the prisons." However, one of the key studies frequently referred to by Colson, and his organizational spokespersons, has been criticized for playing fast and loose with both its methodology and its conclusions, according to Claire Hughes a correspondent for The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy.

In late August, Hughes wrote that "A study completed three years ago by the University of Pennsylvania Center for Research on Religion in Urban Civil Society on Prison Fellowship's InnerChange Freedom Initiative and touted by the Bush Administration showed that after two years out of prison, only eight percent of InnerChange graduates were re-incarcerated, compared to 20 percent of inmates in the general population. But," Hughes pointed out, "the study drew criticism for defining 'graduates' as those who had obtained jobs. When other program participants were included, the data, as reported in the studies, showed that InnerChange participants were more likely to be re-incarcerated than the general population of ex-prisoners."

http://www.bendweekly.com/print/1755.html

Posted by lois at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

OK: Spavinaw Debates Prison Plan

Spavinaw debates prison plan
By RHETT MORGAN World Staff Writer
1/5/2007

SPAVINAW -- Angel Green has no health insurance and works two jobs to make do, so talk of industry in her small Mayes County town of Spavinaw -- even if that industry is a private prison -- excites her.

"A lot of people here are retirees," Green said of residents who are lured here by the community's scenic waterside setting on Spavinaw Lake.

"What they don't understand is that there is a younger generation here that is living at the poverty level or below."

A standing-room only crowd of least 130 people turned out Thursday evening for a town meeting to discuss whether the community will embrace a private prison.

Leaders of the Florida-based GEO Group Inc. told the audience that the company is considering expanding its for-profit facilities.

Although it is looking at several sites, the company has proposed erecting a 1,000-bed prison in Spavinaw, a move that GEO claims would generate 200 jobs.

State Rep. Doug Cox, R-Grove, said Thursday that a prison in Spavinaw could boost the economy in the town of 600 people.

"I view this as an industry that doesn't pollute the water, doesn't pollute the ground, doesn't cause the air to smell," he said.

Cox said more than 25 percent of residents in his legislative district
receive food stamps and that at
least 50 percent have no health insurance.

Don Houston, senior vice president of the GEO Group, told the crowd that if the prison is located in Spavinaw, it would generate jobs that average $10 an hour and that one-third of the employees wouldn't be corrections officers.

"We're 18 months away if they said go tonight," Houston said. "We're at the point of just talking to you."

Frank Smith is a national field organizer for Private Corrections Institute, a nonprofit watchdog group that speaks out against private prisons. The Kansan said the Mayes County town isn't large enough to support a correctional facility.

"They will manipulate anybody they can to get what they want," he said. "They are interested in a profit. They are not interested in the community."

Spavinaw has only three businesses and, according to the Oklahoma Tax Commission, monthly sales tax revenues there have averaged about $2,100 over the past year.

Many of the residents must drive to nearby towns to work.

"You can't get a flat fixed or an oil change or nothing around here," resident Floyd Littlefield said.

Some attendees worried about whether the community's public safety would be compromised by a minimum- to medium-security prison. Others spoke openly about GEO's commitment to hiring local people.

"This town is dying," William Smoke said. "It needs help bad."

Smoke used to run the local tag agency before it had to shut down about three years ago.

He and his wife, Deborah Smoke, own two homes in Spavinaw, but they now live in Tahlequah, where she works at a hospital, she said.

"This is a great thing," said Deborah Smoke, a former Department of Human Services employee. "We need jobs."
http://www.tulsaworld.com/NewsStory.asp?ID=070105_Ne_A9_Spavi28718

Posted by lois at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

The Other Rocky: Salt Lake City's Visionary Mayor" by Sasha Abramsky

"Anderson has restructured the city's criminal justice system and, suspicious of the tenets of the war on drugs, thrown the Just Say No DARE program out of the city's schools. Instead of pushing for more and more low-end offenders to be sent to jail or prison, he has built one of the country's most innovative restorative justice programs, for which he was nominated for a second World Leadership Award -- in December the judges in London announced that Stuttgart, Germany, had edged Anderson's city for the prize."

The Other Rocky: Salt Lakes City's Visionary Mayor
By Sasha Abramsky, The Nation
Posted on January 6, 2007, Printed on January 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46195/

Standing at the top of the imposing stone staircase leading up to the entrance to City Hall on a blustery late August day, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson finishes his speech denouncing George W. Bush, a man he calls "the most dangerous President the country's ever had," a leader he believes has precipitated an "incredible moral crisis" for America. Then, with no police escort, no men with guns protecting him, he bounds down the steps and descends into the five- or six-thousand-strong crowd.

He's instantly mobbed. Hundreds of people, gathered to protest the presence of Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice at the American Legion convention in the nearby Salt Lake Palace, push toward him. Many appear desperate simply to catch a glimpse of the thin, medium-height, silver-haired man in the black suit, pressed white shirt and black-and-white-striped tie. They strain forward to shake his hand, to pat his back, to hug him, to talk with him or simply to throw words at him.

"You've got enormous balls!" a woman cries out. Without batting an eye, Anderson, in his deep bass voice, retorts, "Word's got out."

With his chief of staff, Sam Guevara, running ahead and turning back to snap digital photos, Anderson -- who claimed to have spent more than thirty hours hunched in front of his computer honing his speech -- joins the back end of the demonstration as the crowd proceeds up State Street to the federal building. He detours briefly to argue with some middle-aged women heckling him with bullhorns (at the urgings of state Republican Party leaders, thousands of the state's residents have been calling City Hall in recent days to protest Anderson's planned participation in the demonstration) and then continues walking. At the federal building, protest leaders deliver a petition to the offices of Utah's senators, urging them to begin impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush.

"You should run for President," people keep telling him, as they mill around in front of the heavily guarded federal building. Mindful that this is his last year in office, Anderson doesn't pooh-pooh the sentiment or issue exaggerated disclaimers. Instead he answers, carefully, that you need money to run, that you need a state machine backing you -- which, in a place as virulently conservative as Utah, known until fairly recently as "the Mississippi of the West," is not going to happen for Anderson -- that you need to know when to shut up and not speak your mind. Successful national politicians listen to handlers and spin doctors, and that's something he won't do.

Clearly, the 55-year-old mayor, a lapsed Mormon with more than a hint of the charismatic preacher about him, has given serious thought to the possibility of trying to become President Ross "Rocky" Anderson. But he's realized that despite the current unpopularity of Republican machine politicians, given the contours of the contemporary electoral system and primary process, a man such as himself can't win. "I'd be torn to pieces," he replies to one of his supporters. "If I thought I could win, I would. This country certainly needs leadership."

In the mid-1990s Rocky Anderson, a successful local attorney and a longtime community activist who sat on the boards of several leading nonprofit organizations in Salt Lake City, ran for an open Congressional seat. To the dismay of Utah's conservative Democratic Party machine, Anderson, who first made ripples in local politics back in the 1970s, when he worked as an attorney with Planned Parenthood to open up Utah's restrictive antiabortion and anticontraception laws, won the primary. In the general election, however, he lost. Shortly afterward, he decided to run for mayor of Salt Lake City, and in 1999 he achieved an upset victory as a doggedly populist, anti-machine candidate.

Over the past seven years, Anderson has transformed the city. While outsiders who know little of the nuances of Utah politics might assume this nerve center for the Church of Latter Day Saints to be a bastion of conservatism, among those who track urban policy trends the city has become synonymous with some of the most creative urban government thinking in the country. In 2005 Anderson became a founding member of the New Cities Project, a group linking progressive mayors from around the country, and one that holds meetings twice a year on the fringes of the US Conference of Mayors.

There is a sort of Camelot-in-the-Wasatch feel to Salt Lake City these days. Many of the mayor's younger staffers, plucked out of activism and into administration by the activist city government, call to mind the Clean-for-Gene college kids who campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968: Dressed smartly, coiffed to a conservative T, many are having their first experience inside the halls of power.

Like his city, the grandiose religious and civic architecture of which points to ambitions for greatness lacking in most midsize urban centers, Anderson thinks big. He has pushed to implement the Kyoto Protocols locally, mandating that all city buildings use energy-efficient light bulbs, replacing SUVs in the city fleet with hybrid cars -- his personal car is a Honda Civic that runs on compressed natural gas -- almost doubling the city's recycling capacity in one year and starting a program to recapture and use for electricity generation the methane produced at the city's water treatment plant and landfill. "Global warming," he avers, "is clearly the most urgent issue facing our planet -- we have an enormous moral obligation to change government policy and incorporate changes in our business and our government and our individual lives. Kant's categorical imperative has never been more applicable."

Largely because of his policies around global warming and the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions locally, in 2005 Anderson was honored with a World Leadership Award in the category of environmental work. In November the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives brought Anderson to a summit at the Sundance Resort, in Utah, to discuss with other mayors ways to reduce urban usage of fossil fuels.

The Salt Lake City mayor has also changed the way city officials interact with their constituents, making his administration one of the most accessible in the country. Once a month, on a Saturday morning, Anderson and his staff, dressed casually, will walk around different neighborhoods, talking with locals and holding open mikes where residents can air their concerns.

On Wednesday evenings every few weeks the mayor makes himself available for "one-on-ones" with his constituents. "He has the ability, if there's a social boundary, to break through it," says community liaison staffer Gwen Springmeyer, a longtime probation officer who initially felt the mayor was too out of kilter with the mainstream but who has since become a diehard fan.

During the 2002 Winter Olympics, despite the concerns of security experts, the mayor opened up the third floor of City Hall for parties, bringing together world-class athletes with some of the poorest of Salt Lake City's residents. He also rented out the Jewish Community Center for two more parties for locals. In passing, friends mention that he's been known to invite homeless people to sleep in his house.

Anderson has restructured the city's criminal justice system and, suspicious of the tenets of the war on drugs, thrown the Just Say No DARE program out of the city's schools. Instead of pushing for more and more low-end offenders to be sent to jail or prison, he has built one of the country's most innovative restorative justice programs, for which he was nominated for a second World Leadership Award -- in December the judges in London announced that Stuttgart, Germany, had edged Anderson's city for the prize.

Mental health courts now channel mentally ill criminals into mandatory treatment programs rather than dumping them behind bars; a misdemeanor drug court similarly replaces punishment with treatment; and the city now has one of the most active victim-offender reconciliation programs in America. People arrested for driving under the influence or soliciting prostitutes are sent through a comprehensive course of counseling rather than automatically being handed criminal records.

"I had the most unorthodox interview of my life," Sim Gill, Salt Lake City prosecutor for the past six years, recalls. When Anderson contacted him, Gill, originally from Chandragar, India, was a deputy DA for Salt Lake County and had built a reputation for thinking outside the box when it came to sensible punishments for criminal defendants. "We sat and discussed the meaning of life for the next hour, and ethics, and social responsibility. We connected on a principle of community service; he's very passionate about wanting to solve community problems. The question isn't whether we can fill up our jail beds. The question is, are we filling them up with the right kind of people? Jail should be a place we [only] put people who are a risk to our community."

On other fronts, Anderson has gone out on a limb to defend gay rights and has been an outspoken opponent of wholesale sweeps against illegal immigrants. He has turned the city into one of America's top relocation centers for refugees from war-torn spots of the world.

And last but not least, he has repeatedly taken on big developers, from "sprawl mall" advocates to those in favor of unregulated suburban growth in the large Salt Lake Valley region surrounding the 182,000-strong city itself.

"You do not expect this [these policies] to be coming out of this municipality, out of this state," Gill says. "And therein lies the hope of our political agency. That's what's wonderful about democracy. It is the freedom of dialogue to take hold. The landscape of democracy is always fertile to conversation, and has to be. Anderson's raising issues that need to be talked about. People forget: Democracy requires an ongoing dialogue."

In the corner of the mayor's office in a large cage is a green parrot. (The bird's name is Cardoso, and while Anderson has managed to teach him to do a chicken imitation, so far he's had no luck getting the bird to talk.) On the wall opposite Anderson's desk is a four-image montage of John Kennedy, painted by psychedelic art guru Peter Max. In the outer conference room is another Max quartet, this one a series of images of Anderson, whom the artist counts as a friend. Other objects of note in the office: a photo of City Hall with a gay pride flag hanging on the flagpole outside, a replica of the Olympic rings, articles on Anderson's election victories, a snapshot of the mayor with then-President Bill Clinton.

More than thirty years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of Utah, Anderson studied political philosophy, religious philosophy and ethics. He read books by Sartre and other existentialists, and, he remembers, he had a "powerful epiphany. We can't escape responsibility, there's no sitting out moral decisions, and whenever we refuse to stand up against wrongdoing we're actually supporting the status quo."

Three decades on, the angst of the existentialist student has been channeled into a nova burst of political energy and fury. "I really despise what politics has become in this country," he says. "Our elected officials are normally not leaders. They don't inform themselves. They're not driven by any particular passion on these issues."

He's speaking before the Republicans took a beating in the midterm elections, but his criticisms -- of soundbite politics, of decisions via focus groups -- aren't simply leveled at Karl Rove and his acolytes. "You can point to maybe two or three people in national politics that you can remotely call leaders." His list is somewhat eclectic: Robert Byrd, Russ Feingold, Joe Biden and Mitt Romney. At the top, however, is the Hamlet figure of Mario Cuomo, the quintessential philosopher-politician whose larger-than-life persona hovered in the background over the Democratic Party in the 1980s and early '90s.

"He's elevated the conversation about a range of issues," says Robert Newman, dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah and a friend of the mayor's -- they are in a book club together, in which they have read such books as "A Problem From Hell", The Devil in the White City and The Brothers Karamazov. "A lot of people have been very thirsty for that here," says Newman. "His strongest legacy is, we have a not just behind-the-scenes mayor but a mayor who is front and center nationally and internationally. Rocky speaks from the heart. And people respond that way. There's a very visceral reaction to Rocky, whether it's positive or negative."

When Anderson proposed a law stating that the city would favor doing business with companies that paid a living wage to their employees, the conservative state legislature did an end run around this by passing a bill prohibiting municipalities from making contract decisions based on such criteria. He is, according to senior staff, often at loggerheads with councilmen, state legislators and the governor. Some go so far as to say that anything he supports, the legislature will oppose.

For Jeff Hartley, executive director of the Utah Republican Party, Anderson's style, his willingness to critique the Mormon Church, his defense of locally unpopular themes like gay marriage, make him, quite simply, "bombastic. The majority of Utahans take offense at his tone and style. The fact that he'd invite Cindy Sheehan and her brand of anti-Bush campaigning to the state -- it seemed quite wrong to a lot of people."

In response to such sentiments, the mayor told the August demonstrators -- who had stood through a series of mediocre warm-up speeches while they waited for him to get onstage -- "Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism. A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to sit down and be quiet in the name of politeness."

The Bush Administration, he continued, was "an oppressive, inhumane regime that does not respect the laws and traditions of our country, and that history will rank as the worst President our nation has ever had." Quoting Teddy Roosevelt, he declared that silence in the face of injustice "is morally treasonable to the American public."

When I ask Hartley whether he thinks that it's Anderson's actions instead that border on the treasonous, there's a long pause. Finally he says, "It's one thing to be antiwar, but to do it in a way that undermines respect for the President emboldens the enemy -- it makes them think, Why shouldn't they fight against what we're trying to accomplish overseas? Anderson's language is incredibly inflammatory."

Countering Hartley, sculptor and architect Steven Goldsmith -- who first met Anderson in the 1970s -- believes the mayor's combination of intellectual rigor and straight talking has made him something of "a folk hero of the American West."

When Anderson was elected mayor in 1999, Goldsmith was brought aboard as the city's planning director, with the goal of rejuvenating the downtown -- in part by using money leveraged around the upcoming winter Olympics -- by expanding the light-rail system, encouraging the creation of vibrant restaurant dining hubs, creating from scratch a premier jazz festival and helping to bring cutting-edge cultural events and speakers to town. The city even instituted a citywide book club. "Once Rocky emerged," the architect recalled, "you couldn't help but listen to this thinker. People attached themselves to Rocky's voice."

Seventy-three-year-old Robert Archuleta, the mayor's now-retired adviser on minority affairs and a longtime organizer among lower-income and minority Utahans, once gave Anderson a statue of Cervantes's Don Quixote, as well as a poem he'd written titled "Don Quijote, el Alcalde?" (Don Quixote, the mayor?). "He kinda reminds me of him. He's fearless," says Archuleta, a short man sitting in his small Westside home on the poor side of town, wearing a white vest, suspenders and gray trousers, his white hair a mass of curls. "When he sees something that is wrong and needs to be fixed, he's just fearless." Another senior employee quotes a Jack London poem, using its description of man as a meteor as a metaphor for the mayor.

"It's a great lesson in social discourse," says Goldsmith of his friend's tenure. "It's a great lesson to the kids of the city to stand up and do what's right. He addresses the social conscience of this community, and there's nobody else here to fill it."

The mayor's combination of pragmatic quality-of-life policies as well as ambitious, even utopian, programs around environmental issues has won him many enthusiastic fans. And his ability to improve Salt Lake City's infrastructure and make local government far more responsive has won him support even among people who do not necessarily sympathize with his outspoken prognostications on national and international politics. That's the formula that has allowed him to win two mayoral races, despite vocal opposition from most of Utah's political leadership.

With only a year left in office for Rocky Anderson, where does he go from here? In a more rational system, Anderson, having more than demonstrated his leadership during eight years in the mayor's office, would be a strong candidate for national office -- a viable presidential contender, perhaps, and certainly Cabinet-level material. He would, for example, make a strong Secretary of the Interior.

But despite the success of a new breed of Democratic populists in the November midterms, generally America's political system still gives a tremendous edge to machine-backed candidates. Given that he lacks the backing of state and regional party groups -- or, to rephrase it, has the misfortune of being a strong liberal in a state and region with conservative party machines -- could a man like Anderson, who plans to work on environmental and human rights issues once he leaves City Hall, ever make his way to Washington today?

As we move beyond the midterm elections, gratifying though they were for progressives, and into the next presidential election cycle, that's a crucial question. Clearly, there are leaders of tremendous moral and intellectual caliber out there -- Anderson's example shows this, as does the rise of many strong liberals in the incoming Congress.

But can the same system that catapulted Bush into the White House raise those people to national prominence at an executive level? Is today's system flexible enough to allow the emergence of national leaders and Cabinet secretaries who are thinkers as well as politicians, men and women of principle as well as ambition? Perhaps, but Anderson and others like him face an uphill path. After all, we have grown used to seeing candidates who appeal to the lowest common denominators in our politics win.

Rocky Anderson will likely never attain national office; but perhaps his most important legacy will be showing the country that voters, in some places, do make lofty choices when presented with truly inspiring candidates.

Sasha Abramsky is the author of Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House (The New Press, 2006).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/46195/

Posted by lois at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2007

Op-Ed: This is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad

Op-Ed
This Is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad
By MIKE MALES
The New York Times
Published: January 3, 2007
San Francisco

WHEN releasing last week¹s Monitoring the Future survey on drug use, John P. Walters, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, boasted that ³broad² declines in teenage drug use promise ³enormous beneficial consequences not only for our children now, but for the rest of their lives.² Actually, anybody who has looked carefully at the report and other recent federal studies would see a dramatically different picture: skyrocketing illicit drug abuse and related deaths among teenagers and adults alike.

While Monitoring the Future, an annual study that depends on teenagers to self-report on their behavior, showed that drug use dropped sharply in the last decade, the National Center for Health Statistics has reported that teenage deaths from illicit drug abuse have tripled over the same period. This reverses 25 years of declining overdose fatalities among youths, suggesting that teenagers are now joining older generations in increased drug use.

What the Monitoring the Future report does have right is that teenagers remain the least part of America¹s burgeoning drug abuse crisis. Today, after 20 years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions of arrests and imprisonments in the war on drugs, America¹s rate of drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, crime and social ills stand at record highs.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of Americans dying from the abuse of illegal drugs has leaped by 400 percent in the last two decades, reaching a record 28,000 in 2004. The F.B.I. reported that drug arrests reached an all-time high of 1.8 million in 2005. The Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal agency that compiles statistics on hospital emergency cases caused by illicit drug abuse, says that number rose to 940,000 in 2004 ‹ a huge increase over the last quarter century.

Why are so few Americans aware of these troubling trends? One reason is that today¹s drug abusers are simply the ³wrong² group. As David Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale and historian of drug abuse, points out, wars on drugs have traditionally depended on ³linkage between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society.² Today, however, the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white, middle-aged Americans. This is a powerful mainstream constituency, and unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave threat to the nation.

Among Americans in their 40s and 50s, deaths from illicit-drug overdoses have risen by 800 percent since 1980, including 300 percent in the last decade. In 2004, American hospital emergency rooms treated 400,000 patients between the ages 35 and 64 for abusing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, hallucinogens and ³club drugs² like ecstasy.

Equally surprising, graying baby boomers have become America¹s fastest-growing crime scourge. The F.B.I. reports that last year the number of Americans over the age of 40 arrested for violent and property felonies rose to 420,000, up from 170,000 in 1980. Arrests for drug offenses among those over 40 rose to 360,000 last year, up from 22,000 in 1980. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 440,000 Americans ages 40 and older were incarcerated in 2005, triple the number in 1990.

Yet drug officials seem fixated on paper-and-pencil surveys of drug use by teens. In releasing its survey last week, the Office of Drug Control Policy trumpeted that ³America¹s balanced strategy to reduce drug use is working.² Representative Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican who has been a top supporter of federal antidrug efforts, says ³the Bush administration is doing very well² on this front because ³drug use, particularly among young people, is down.²

But, some may say, don¹t teenage drug use rates predict future drug problems? To the contrary: 30 years of experience shows that fluctuations in the percentage of youths who report using drugs on surveys has almost nothing to do with the harm that drug abuse causes (addiction, disease, injury, death, crime, family and community distress), either in adolescence or later in life.

I compared teenage drug use trends reported annually by Monitoring the Future since the 1970s with trends for other behaviors and with federal crime, health and education statistics. In years in which a higher percentage of high school seniors told the survey takers they used illicit drugs, teenagers consistently reported and experienced lower rates of crime, murder, drug-related hospital emergencies and deaths, suicides, H.I.V. infection, school dropouts, delinquency, pregnancy, violence, theft in and outside of school, and fights with parents, employers and teachers.

The data also contradict Mr. Walters¹s claim that generations reporting lower rates of drug use enjoy ³less addiction, less suffering, less crime, lower health costs and higher achievement.² For example, baby boomers rarely used illegal drugs as youths. In 1972, the University of Michigan researchers who carry out Monitoring the Future found that just 22 percent of high school seniors had ever used illegal drugs, compared to 48 percent of the class of 2005. Yet as that generation has aged, it has been afflicted by drug abuse and its related ills ‹ overdoses, hospitalizations, drug-related crime ‹ at far higher rates than those experienced by later generations at the same ages.

It¹s time to end the obsession with hyping teenage drug use. The meaningless surveys that policy makers now rely on should be replaced with a comprehensive ³drug abuse index² that pulls together largely ignored data on drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, crime, diseases and similar practical measures.

A good model is the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs¹ fledgling drug abuse index, which I helped compile and which aims to pinpoint which populations and areas are most harmed by drugs, both legal and illicit.

Few experts would have suspected that the biggest contributors to California¹s drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated, middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and Latino teenagers. Yet the index found exactly that. These are the sorts of trends we need to understand if we are to design effective policies.

The United States¹ drug abuse crisis has exploded out of control. Scientifically designed strategies are urgently needed to target the manifest drug-caused damage that current policies are failing miserably to address.

Posted by lois at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

The New Yorker: Million Dollar Blocks

The New Yorker
Talk of the Town

CRIMINAL JUSTICE DEPT.
RAP MAP
by Lauren MacIntyre
Issue of 2007-01-08
Posted 2007-01-01

From water pipes to porn shops, cartographers have charted almost every aspect of local urban life, giving rise to a sort of cottage industry the New York City specialty map. The latest and one you are not likely to see unless you run in criminal-justice circles is a rendering of the city that breaks down, block by block, the home addresses of all New Yorkers incarcerated in a given year. This map won’t get you from Century 21 to the Met. But it does reveal that more prison-bound Bronx residents lived in walkups than in any other type of building that Staten Island is the most law-abiding borough, and that Brooklyn nicknamed “the borough of churches” ran up the state’s highest bill in prison costs.

Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based Justice Mapping Center, collaborated on the project with an architect named Laura Kurgan, at Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab. “What started out as a scholarly inquiry has turned into a national initiative,” said Cadora, whose team has mapped twelve cities so far. Their New York is a digital crazy quilt of “bright-against-black”: the areas least touched by incarceration in 2003, the year they chose to study (Riverdale, Bay Ridge, the West Village), appear black and gray; those more so (Coney Island, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Hell’s Kitchen) neon orange.

Recently, the mapmakers gathered at Columbia, and Cadora, a substantially built man with a fondness for Camel Lights, turned the face of his laptop to reveal the map. “Zero-value areas ”places where no one went to prison were shaded black. “You see them crop up all across the city, but they never make up an entire neighborhood,” he said, invoking what might otherwise be a bragging point among New Yorkers: “There is always something going on somewhere.” The exceptions? “What I jokingly call ‘the Mafia neighborhoods’ of South Brooklyn,” he said, “where you’ve got one or two guys going away from an entire neighborhood. Also, this.” He pointed to a dark strip of the Upper East Side*the blocks in the Seventies and Eighties that border Central Park.

Just above was Harlem, the area with the highest rate of incarceration in the city: forty-four people from a single block along East 120th Street headed upstate. Such high-density spots are known as million-dollar blocks, because it takes upward of that in state expenditures to pay for their residents’ lockups. They are, unfailingly, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods Brownsville, the South Bronx, and South Jamaica among them great splashes of orange, by the map’s gauge.

Cadora and his team calculated every block’s prison costs by multiplying the minimum sentence of each incarcerated person by his estimated annual prison fees ($32,400), then adding these numbers together. By this logic, a serial killer on Fifth Avenue who gets a life sentence could make up his own million-dollar block. The borough with the most million-dollar blocks is Manhattan (“mainly because the blocks are so small”); the city’s most expensive block in 2003, a housing project along Harlem River Drive, not far from Yankee Stadium, cost the state $6.2 million and had forty-nine of its six hundred and eighty-nine male residents put behind bars.

The map’s data are largely gleaned from prison entry forms. Early in the study, Cadora noticed that an inordinate amount of people gave the same home address, in Queens. Curious, he looked up the address and found not a residential building but an institution: Rikers Island. Why so many New Yorkers would call a jail known as the House of Pain home is “a whole ’nother story,” Cadora said. “A lot are probably homeless, and one of the hugest problems for anyone coming out of prison is finding a place to live.” Cadora and his team believe that their map depicts a system spending millions to imprison people but little on the communities to which they return.

Cadora clicked on a map of New York State that charted the migration patterns of Brooklyn criminals: thousands of lines sprang from Kings County to prisons all over Attica, Watertown, Great Meadow. The image was striking, like a bird’s spread wing. (“We’ve had art galleries ask to exhibit the maps,” Kurgan said.) Cadora has been pleased by the reaction of legislators. “It’s no longer just about getting tough or being soft on crime,” he said. “It’s ‘What are we going to do about Bed-Stuy?’ ”

Posted by lois at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2007

MI: Of Jobs and Prisons

Of jobs and prisons
Jackson Citizen Patriot (MI)
Sunday, January 2, 2007

Even as Jackson County continues to lose hundreds of manufacturing jobs, there remains a stable, growing, source of employment -- the state Department of Corrections. We were reminded of that the other day when corrections officials indicated they'll hire 240 corrections officers statewide by May, and 700 by the end of 2007.

Well, don't hold your breath.

True, prisons are a huge part of the Jackson County economy. Our five state prisons house 7,835 inmates and provide employment to 2,400-plus corrections officers. The pay isn't mincemeat, for wages start at about $30,000. And it's also true that the new jobs are being projected to replace retiring officers, plus others who are promoted or leave their jobs. Jackson Community College is offering a fast-track program to help prepare area job seekers.

The question, however, is whether there'll be funds with which to hire the new officers. Seven hundred officers at $30,000 each represents a $21 million annual expense -- plus the cost of benefits. Even though those officers are needed, the state is struggling with budget deficits. One thing that worsened the budget situation was overspending by three state departments -- one being the corrections department.

As the budget crisis worsens, which is projected to occur, here's the
dilemma: Shall the state use available funds to hire hundreds of new corrections officers or consolidate prisons by double-bunking inmates where possible? Is Michigan's future in prison growth or in education? Some of those new jobs likely will be filled, but we'd bet that 700 new prison jobs is not what the people of Michigan consider a top priority when the budget crisis argues on behalf of downsizing and restraint.

http://www.mlive.com/news/jacitpat/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1167755778280460.x
ml&coll=3
C2007 Jackson Citizen Patriot

Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

Suicides Increase for Those in Isolation

Can this possibily be a surprise to anyone?

Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Prisons link suicides by inmates to isolation
Solitary confinement appears to play role in uptick of deaths

BY KEVIN JOHNSON
Gannett News Service

The number of suicides in the nation's largest state prison systems is ticking upward, and authorities in California and Texas are linking the increase to the rising number of inmates kept in solitary confinement.

In California, which has the largest state prison system with about 170,000 inmates, there have been 41 suicides this year, the most in at least six years and a 17 percent increase from 2005. Although an estimated 5 percent of California's inmates are housed in solitary confinement -- also known as "administrative segregation" -- 69 percent of last year's suicides occurred in units where inmates are isolated for 23 hours a day, and about half the suicides this year were committed in such units, according to state Department of Corrections records.

In Texas' prison system, which has 169,000 inmates, there have been 24 suicides this year, up from 22 in 2005. Most of the inmates who killed themselves were in some form of solitary confinement, said John Moriarty, inspector general for the prison system.

Texas prisons also are reporting a big increase in attempted suicides: 652 so far this year, compared with 559 in 2005. The number of attempted suicides this year is the most in nearly a decade, according to state prison records. Statistics on attempted suicides in California prisons were not immediately available.

The figures from California and Texas are fueling a debate over whether solitary confinement is the best way to control or punish violent or dangerous inmates, particularly those who are mentally ill.

More than 70,000 of the 1.5 million inmates in state and federal prisons are kept in isolation, a reflection of prisons' get-tough policies that are designed to separate rival gang members and those who have gotten into fights while behind bars.

Isolated inmates typically have significant restrictions on visitors and get little help in dealing with the psychological problems that can be caused by isolation. They usually are allowed out of their cells for no more than an hour a day to exercise alone; their exposure to television and reading material also is limited.

"Are we housing the mentally ill in prison facilities?" Moriarty asks. "I think the answer is yes. But I don't know if that's the best place for them to be."

Moriarty said stress from isolation and increasing numbers of inmates with long sentences have contributed to the rise in suicides.

"Length of sentence is a big factor. There is this despair about not getting out."

The increase in inmate suicides in California has triggered recent changes in segregation units. In October, guards began checking inmates housed in solitary confinement every 30 minutes, rather than every hour, said Shama Chaiken, the state prison system's chief psychologist for mental health policy.

Some segregation cells also will be modified to remove shelving, vent openings and other features that offenders could use in hangings, the most common form of suicide in California prisons, Chaiken said. This month, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced plans to spend $1 billion for 10,000 beds in prison medical and mental health units.

A few jurisdictions have credited expanded mental health programs with reducing prisoner suicides. After Kentucky set up a mental health program for those in the state's 83 county jails in 2004, suicides in the jails fell 47 percent, according to The (Louisville) Courier-Journal.

There have been 13 suicides this year in the 188,000-inmate federal prison system, the same total as in 2005. Florida, the third-largest state system with 90,000 inmates, has had nine prison suicides this year; it had eight last year.

In Oregon

In Oregon's prison system, which has more than 13,000 inmates, there have been three suicides this year. All three deaths occurred in housing units where inmates are separated from the general prison population and isolated in their cells for at least 23 hours a day.

Two inmates killed themselves at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. The other suicide occurred at the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario.

Perrin Damon, a spokeswoman for the Corrections Department, said a review of all suicides and attempted suicides by inmates during the past five years found that the majority occurred in segregation units. The agency is exploring policy changes to decrease the likelihood of suicide by segregated prisoners, she said.

-- Alan Gustafson, Statesman Journal
Copyright 2007 Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070102/NEWS/701020317/1001

Posted by lois at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2007

NY: "A Man Down, and a Stranger Makes A Choice"

January 3, 2007
A Man Down, and a Stranger Makes a Choice
By CARA BUCKLEY

It was every subway rider’s nightmare, times two.

Who has ridden along New York’s 656 miles of subway lines and not wondered: “What if I fell to the tracks as a train came in? What would I do?”

And who has not thought: “What if someone else fell? Would I jump to the rescue?”

Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker, faced both those questions in a flashing instant yesterday, and got his answers almost as quickly.

Mr. Autrey was waiting for the local at 137th Street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan around 12:45 p.m. He was taking his two daughters, Syshe, 4, and Shuqui, 6, home before heading to work.

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled a few steps to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared.

“I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Mr. Autrey lay on Mr. Hollopeter, pressing him down, his heart pounding. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time.

Five cars rolled overhead before the train stopped, passing just inches from Mr. Autrey’s head, smudging his blue knit cap with grease. Mr. Autrey heard onlookers’ screams. “We’re O.K. down here,” he yelled, “but I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father’s O.K.” He heard cries of wonder, and applause.

Power was cut, and workers got them out. Mr. Hollopeter, a student at the New York Film Academy, was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. He had only bumps and bruises, said his grandfather, Jeff Friedman. The police said it appeared that Mr. Hollopeter had suffered a seizure.

Mr. Autrey refused medical help, because, he said, nothing was wrong. Then he dropped off his two young daughters before heading to his night shift. “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help,” Mr. Autrey said. “I did what I felt was right.”

Posted by lois at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2007

The Autobiography of Tiyo Attallah Salah-El

The Autobiography of Tiyo Attallah Salah-El (Paperback)
by Tiyo Attallah Salah-el. November 2006.

Prison abolitionist, writer and organizer and activist Tiyo Attallah Salah-El has written his autobiography which includes his early life in Pennsylvania, the life he lived which led to his incarcerated for the last 35 years in SCI Dallas, PA, becoming a Quaker, a vast and extensive correspondence and organizing work and writing on behalf of prison abolition.

Can be ordered through Amazon

Posted by lois at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)