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March 30, 2007

NY Review of Books: The American Prison Nightmare

Volume 54, Number 6 • April 12, 2007, NY Review of Books

The American Prison Nightmare
By Jason DeParle

Punishment and Inequality in America
by Bruce Western
Russell Sage Foundation, 247 pp., $29.95

Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons
by John J. Gibbons and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, co-chairs
Vera Institute of Justice,122 pp. (available at www.prisoncommission.org)

Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy
by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen
Oxford University Press, 359 pp., $29.95

1.

Among the many jarring sights I have witnessed as a reporter writing about poverty, one of the saddest involved a father, a son, and a maximum security prison outside Joliet, Illinois. The son, a voluble thirteen-year-old named Dwayne, wasn't a bad kid but had become increasingly troublesome in class. His father had been locked up since Dwayne was five, but still had influence with the three children he had left behind. Or so their mother hoped. Alarmed at her difficulties controlling the family, she looked to the sound of a father's voice to set things straight. It was a two-hundred-mile round trip from their home in Milwaukee, and I had the only car.

The Stateville Correctional Center is a gloomy fortress with high concrete walls that could serve as a prison movie set. About half its inmates were in for murder, including Dwayne's father, a low-level crack dealer who had acted as the lookout during an attack on a rival in which a teenage girl was accidentally killed. Eight years later, Dwayne's mother still missed him too much to settle down with another man. Dwayne claimed to give him little thought, though a school essay suggested otherwise. He had written about an abandoned mouse who was surrounded by predators, only to realize the abandoned creature was himself. "That's about my Daddy!" he said.[1]

After sleeping through the drive, Dwayne struck a pose of boredom as we approached the main cell block, while his mother looked stoic and his siblings seemed alarmed. A guard led us to a room ringed by vending machines where a worn-looking prisoner said he was thankful for the rare chance to see his kids. I left them to a private visit, and when they reappeared Dwayne was sobbing and the others looked like they had witnessed a death. "They miss their father," was all their mother could say. They piled in for a mournful ride home, a study in how many lives can be linked to one prison cell.
NYR-Oxford Conference

Bruce Western makes a crucial point at the start of his important book, Punishment and Inequality in America: "If prisons affected no one except the criminals on the inside, they would matter less." But with more than two million Americans behind bars, the impact of mass incarceration is impossible to contain. Their fate affects the taxpayers who support them, the guards who guard them, the families they leave behind, and the communities to which they return. Not even the war in Iraq escapes the reach of prison culture; Sergeant Charles Graner, the villain of Abu Ghraib, worked as a Pennsylvania prison guard.

Everyone is affected, but not equally. Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in the same age group. Whites with only a high school education get locked up twenty times as often as those with college degrees. Among the many impediments to reform has been the gap between the people who make criminal justice policy—mostly educated whites who favor imprisonment, especially during twelve years of Republican congressional control—and those who live with the consequences.

There is another impediment to reform: mass incarceration seems to have made the streets safer. The vast increase in the prison and jail population from about 380,000 in 1975 to 2.2 million today overlaps with equally stunning declines in crime. The homicide rate in the 1990s fell by 43 percent. Many critics of incarceration argue (a bit too quickly) that crime would have fallen without the prison boom. Perhaps. Still the value of safer neighborhoods is immediate, while the costs of excessive imprisonment are theoretical and vague.

Western's achievement—a large one —is to make them less vague. He identifies mass incarceration as a major cause of modern inequality, with large and uncounted collateral effects. Imprisonment does more than reflect the divides of race and class. It deepens those divides—walling off the disadvantaged, especially unskilled black men, from the promise of American life. While violent criminals belong in jail, more than half of state and federal inmates are in for nonviolent crimes, especially selling drugs. Their long sentences deprive women of potential husbands, children of fathers, and convicts of a later chance at a decent job. Similar arguments have been made before, but Western, a Princeton sociologist, makes a quantitative case. Along the way, his revisionist account of the late 1990s detracts from its reputation as an era of good news for the poor. Its appearance coincides with several other instructive new studies of American incarceration.
2.

For much of the twentieth century, about one American in a thousand was confined to a cell. The proportion of Americans behind bars started rising in the mid-Seventies, and by 2003 had done so for twenty-eight consecutive years. Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe.

The penal population grew because crime increased; because the number of police and prosecutors grew (which raised the odds of punishment); and because policymakers, disillusioned with the ethos of rehabilitation, imposed tougher penalties. The increase in severity occurred on the front end with longer sentences and reduced judicial discretion to shorten them, and on the back end by making fewer prisoners eligible for early release.

Meanwhile, the "war on drugs" led to the arrest of growing numbers of small-time users and dealers. By the late 1990s, 60 percent of federal inmates were in for drug offenses. The result is an ever-growing prison system, populated to a significant degree by people who need not be there. It was no liberal advocate but Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy who offered a damning view of criminal justice in the United States: "Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."

Despite the crackdown, white men with college degrees are only slightly more likely than previously to end up in prison. Among black men with college degrees, the odds of imprisonment have fallen. But by 2000, high school dropouts of either race were being locked up three times as often as they had been two decades before. And racial disparities have become immense. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts are now prisoners or ex-cons. This, Western warns, has resulted in "a collective experience for young black men that is wholly different from the rest of American society."

Much about black underclass life is tragic, but the racial imbalance in the prison population is particularly extreme. For example, while blacks are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, they now go to prison eight times as often. We are used to thinking of prison as at least partially a byproduct of the larger tragedy of poverty; Western depicts it as a cause. Through mass incarceration, he writes, "the poor are made poorer and have fewer prospects."

This happens in part because an inmate's earnings prospects fall. Most men in their twenties and thirties experience rapid earnings growth, as their skills and contacts expand. Those in prison atrophy and leave stigmatized. Devah Pager, a Northwestern University sociologist, conducted an experiment in which pairs of otherwise identical men applied for jobs with one identifying himself as an ex-con. The disclosure of a prison record reduced the chances of getting a second interview by half for whites and by two thirds for blacks. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Western estimates that a prison record reduces a man's annual earnings by 30 to 40 percent, through less work and lower pay. For the average black man, the lifetime loss comes to $86,000. (Whites, with more to lose, lose more: $114,000.)

Incarceration taxes family life, too, leaving disadvantaged men with even weaker prospects as husbands and fathers. A prison record reduces a black man's chances of getting married by 11 percentage points. Married or not, most jailed men have kids, making the prison boom a growing source of disadvantage for young people. As the gloomy trip to the Joliet prison made clear, the whole family does the time. From 1980 to 2000, the number of children with fathers behind bars rose sixfold to 2.1 million. Among white kids, just over 1 percent have incarcerated fathers, while among black children the figure approaches 10 percent.

It may be tempting to view these men—dope sellers, petty thieves—as fathers in name only, with few ties to their kids. But nearly half are living with their children at the time of their arrest. And the perpetual surprise about bad parents is how much their children need them anyway. In marginalizing so many men, in the cause of stabilizing their community, the prison boom risks destroying the communities it aims to save. Mass imprisonment, Western writes, "may be a self-defeating strategy for crime control."

There is a rejoinder, of course— locking them up makes streets safer, especially the streets of poor neighborhoods. Western acknowledges that "the 1990s crime drop provided a remarkable improvement in public safety and quality of life, particularly for the disadvantaged." But his analysis gives the prison boom just 10 percent of the credit. The theory is partly one of diminishing returns: we are locking up people who pose little threat, and keeping others long past their most dangerous years (typically ending in their mid-thirties). And prison time, Western says, can turn minor offenders into hardened criminals, through the influence of other inmates and the denial of later opportunities.

My own sense is that Western may be underestimating the role that increased imprisonment has played in reducing crime. A fivefold increase in prison rates is a huge change; it may have had effects that statistical models missed. Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and William Spelman of the University of Texas have each done statistical analyses that give rising incarceration about a third of the credit for reduced crime.[2] Whatever the number, one can accept that imprisonment has helped reduce crime, while appreciating Western's disclosure of the costs and sharing his sense that the urge to incarcerate has gone too far.

The 1990s were said to be a time when rising tides finally did lift all boats. Western warns that part of the reason, statistically speaking, is that many poor men have been thrown overboard—the government omits prisoners when calculating unemployment and poverty rates. Add them in, as Western does, and joblessness swells. For young black men it grows by more than a third. For young black dropouts, the jobless rate leaps from 41 percent to 65 percent. "Only by counting the penal population do we see that fully two out of three young black male dropouts were not working at the height of the 1990s economic expansion," Western warns. Count inmates and you also erase three quarters of the apparent progress in closing the wage gap between blacks and whites.

Western is not just tinkering with the numbers. He is rewriting one of the era's major story lines. "This is the first recovery in three decades where everybody got better at the same time," President Clinton said just before leaving office. "I just think that's so important." Punishment and Inequality in America shows that among one vital group of the poor, the opposite was true: as official unemployment hit record lows, joblessness among young black dropouts rose to record highs. The prison expansion reflected inequality. The prison expansion created inequality. The prison expansion hid inequality from view.
3.

Given how many people they affect, one would expect prison conditions to draw more scrutiny. While two prison stories have made recent news, both prisons were overseas—at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Hoping to direct interest back to the US, the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York policy institute, convened what it called the first national commission on prison conditions in three decades.

The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons was presented as a left–right affair, with Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, the former attorney general, occupying the Democratic half of the co-chairmanship, in partnership with John J. Gibbons, a Republican and former federal appeals court judge. With money from, among others, the Ford Foundation, twenty commissioners held four regional hearings with ninety-eight witnesses and issued its unanimous report in June 2006. Confronting Confinement is notable less for the originality of what it says than for showing the continuing need to say it.

The report tells us that America's prisons are dangerously overcrowded, unnecessarily violent, excessively reliant on physical segregation, breeding grounds of infectious disease, lacking in meaningful programs for inmates, and staffed by underpaid and undertrained guards in a culture that promotes abuse. What is more, prisoners' ability to legally challenge their living conditions has been curtailed by a congressional roadblock called the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which has cut in half the number of inmates filing civil rights complaints.

There is some good news. Since 1980 the murder rate inside prisons has fallen more than 90 percent, which should give pause to those inclined to think that prisons are impossible to reform. But programs for inmate education, training, and drug treatment have been made scarce. (If policymakers were once too credulous about rehabilitation, they are now too dismissive.) And physically separating some inmates from the rest of the population (often in conditions amounting to solitary confinement) has become a punishment of first resort, leading to what the commission called "tortuous conditions that are proven to cause mental deterioration." From 1995 to 2000, the number of inmates in isolated cells rose 40 percent to 81,000. Despite the decline in homicide, serious violence is common and recordkeeping so poor it often escapes notice. As the commission met in Los Angeles for its final hearing, two thousand prisoners at the North County Correctional Facility erupted in a race riot.

Like Bruce Western, the authors of Confronting Confinement emphasize that few of the problems inside prisons truly stay confined. Ninety-five percent of those who go in also come back out. The problems that arise inside prisons, the authors write, go home "with prisoners after they are released and with corrections officers at the end of each day's shift." The most obvious example involves the 1.5 million people who are released from prisons and jails each year with an infectious disease—tuberculosis, hepatitis, HIV, and drug-resistant staph infections. They are a threat to everyone, but especially to the minority neighborhoods from which they are disproportionately drawn. Meanwhile, the increasing number of prisons that require inmates to pay for part of their own medical care, an innovation intended to deter malingerers, has been found to reduce clinic visits by up to 50 percent.

Some of the worst news is the most familiar: prisons are the modern mental wards. By the most conservative estimate, the mentally ill account for 16 percent of the prison population, or about 350,000 people on a given day; their true numbers may be twice as high. Aside from adding to their misery, their presence in such large numbers makes cell blocks harder and costlier to police. The solution is not merely to improve the woefully inadequate mental health treatment of prisoners. It is "to improve and expand community mental health treatment" on the other side of the prison walls. But how many blue-ribbon panels have already told us that?
4.

Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, who understand the vastness of the jailers' reach, follow the story out of the cell and into the voting booth. Locked Out examines how the disenfranchisement of felons shapes American democracy—hardly a hypothetical matter in an age of split electorates and hanging chads.

The subject caused a stir in 1998 when a prophetic report by two advocacy groups, the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, showed that four million Americans had lost the right to vote. "This is an issue that can potentially affect some elections," warned Marc Mauer, a coauthor, with a prescience he could not have grasped.[3] Surprised at how little was known about the practice of disenfranchisement, Manza and Uggen, sociologists at Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota, set out to investigate it. Exacting and fair, their work should persuade even those who come to the subject skeptically that an injustice is at hand.

"Disenfranchised felon" is a term that encompasses three groups. Some 27 percent are still behind bars. Others, 34 percent, are on probation or parole. And the largest share, 39 percent, are what the authors call "ex-felons," whose sentences have been served. Voters are least receptive to letting the first group vote and most receptive to the last. But state practice varies greatly. Maine and Vermont offer ballots to those still behind bars; thirteen states strip the franchise not only from current prisoners but also from probationers, parolees, and some or all ex-felons. By Election Day 2004, the number of disenfranchised felons had grown to 5.3 million, with another 600,000 effectively stripped of the vote because they were in jail awaiting trial. Nationally, they made up less than 3 percent of the voting-age population, but 9 percent in Florida, 8 percent in Delaware, and 7 percent in Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia.[4]

We often hear that the transgressions of felons are so severe that they forfeit the moral right to vote. Yet as with many aspects of criminal justice, the United States is out of step with its international peers. At least twenty democracies, including Canada and Israel, allow current prisoners to vote. More to the point, the United States is out of step in this matter with its own historical logic, by which it has been making its democracy progressively more inclusive. We have, over many years, found fit to enfranchise the landless, African-Americans, women, and eighteen-year-olds, and we admit into the polling place any number of others whose political judgments might be compromised—addicts, illiterates, the heavily medicated. But not if they once were caught selling a bag of dope.

Manza and Uggen write with an appealing evenhandedness, searching out arguments that challenge their own. They find few people articulating the case for felon disenfranchisement, which appears to thrive more as practice than theory. Still, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, now the Republican minority leader, made the case on the Senate floor in 2002, while defeating a Democratic effort to let ex-felons vote in federal elections:

States have a significant interest in reserving the vote for those who have abided by the social contract that forms the foundation of a representative democracy. We are talking about rapists, murderers, robbers, and even terrorists and spies. Do we want to see convicted terrorists who seek to destroy this country voting in elections? Do we want to see "jailhouse blocs" banding together to oust sheriffs and government officials who are tough on crime?

The authors do not dismiss worries about "jailhouse blocs." They simply find no evidence that such blocs have ever formed. (Rape, murder, and robbery, the crimes McConnell cites, account for about 8 percent of felonies, while drug crimes account for a third.) They do find evidence that disenfranchisement is linked to the less hypothetical problem of race. The more African-Americans a state contains, the more likely it has been to ban felons from voting. Tracing the statutes' history in states such as Virginia and Florida, Manza and Uggen find that they were enacted along with grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests as "another means through which the African American vote was restricted."

The practice continues to skew the racial composition of the voting rolls today. By denying the vote to felons, the average state disenfranchises 2.4 percent of its voting-age population—but 8.4 percent of its voting-age blacks. In fourteen states, the share of blacks stripped of the vote exceeds 10 percent. And in five states (including Kentucky), it exceeds 20 percent. Focusing on black men, Marc Mauer has estimated that felony laws keep nearly one in seven from voting nationwide. (See chart)

Do felons care? The authors warn against overestimating felon apathy. Locked Out estimates that about 35 percent of disenfranchised felons would vote in presidential elections (compared to 52 percent of the general public). Indeed, the authors attach such importance to the franchise that they see it as a crime-prevention strategy—part of the "civic reintegration" needed to weave "former criminals back into the fabric of law-abiding society." Anything that builds civic interest is welcome, but Manza and Uggen offer little evidence for the thesis that voting heals.[5] While it would be nice if voting builds character, that is not the reason to give felons the vote. The reason is that to do otherwise—to exclude 5.3 million people from the rolls—is to offend the principle of universal suffrage and undermine democratic legitimacy.

However much voting matters to felons, their voting matters to the country. If felons were allowed to vote, the United States would have a different president. Disproportionately poor and black, felons choose Democrats in overwhelming numbers —giving them between 70 percent and 85 percent of their votes in presidential elections. Had they been allowed to vote in 2000, the authors estimate, Al Gore's margin in the popular vote would have doubled to a million. If Florida had allowed just ex-felons to vote—those who can claim to have paid their debt to society—Gore would have carried the state by 30,000 votes and with it the electoral college. (This estimate uses conservative assumptions: a 27 percent turnout with a 69 percent Democratic preference).

Nor is the impact limited to the presidency. Manza and Uggen find that seven modern Republican senators owe their election to laws that keep felons from voting: John Warner of Virginia (1978), John Tower of Texas (1978), Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (1984), Connie Mack of Florida (1988), Paul Coverdell of Georgia (1992), Jim Bunning of Kentucky (1998), and Mel Martinez of Florida (1998). According to the authors' estimates of turnout and candidate preference among the disenfranchised, four would have lost even if only the ex-felons in their states had voting rights.

These represent a small share of the four-hundred-plus elections held since 1978. But since the Senate has been so closely divided, a fuller enfranchisement might have shifted some years of partisan control to the Democrats. (This outcome depends on how long one assumes the Democratic victors would have held the seat.) It certainly would have bolstered the Democrats' power in the minority. Consider just one result of Senate legislation—the upward distribution of wealth through the Bush-era tax cuts—and one sees anew how mass incarceration abets inequality.
5.

In December, Senator Sam Brownback announced he was running for president. A few days later, the conservative Kansas Republican chose to spend the night in a cell at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. "We don't want to build more prisons," he said. "We don't want to lock people up." He was there to advertise his support for the prison's religious programs. Still, his move represented, to say the least, a break with past presidential campaign practice, which includes advertising the crimes of a black rapist (George H.W. Bush), executing a brain-damaged man (Bill Clinton), and mocking the fears of a soon-to-be-executed woman (George W. Bush).

The current President Bush, who as governor oversaw 152 executions in Texas, made a surprising proposal in his 2004 State of the Union speech, when he called for a modest expansion of services to help newly released prisoners. "America is the land of second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life," he said. The bill for expanding services is still pending, but it has support among religious conservatives influenced by the account of personal redemption put forward by Charles Colson, the Watergate felon turned prison minister.[6]

A few months earlier, at the urging of Colson and other religious conservatives, a Republican Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which monitors and guides state efforts to eliminate sexual assaults on prisoners. As the law was signed, Colson argued in a column that "whatever a prisoner may have done, he is still created in the image of God, a being whose dignity is to be protected."[7]

As the rape bill was heading to President Bush's desk, Justice Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, chided the members of the American Bar Association for their failure to show more interest in prisoners' fates. He warned,

A decent and free society, founded in respect for the individual, ought not to run a system with a sign at the entrance for inmates saying, "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here."[8]

Elsewhere on the conservative landscape, several right-of-center think tanks have attacked the prison boom as wasteful of dollars and lives. The Texas Public Policy Foundation recently called for an expansion of parole, which "recognizes that inmates may change."[9] And the new Democratic Congress, with the support of federal judges to the left and right, is talking of hearings to reexamine mandatory sentencing laws.

The US remains a law-and-order society in a law-and-order age. But with skillful leadership modest change may now be possible. The commission on prison safety report got a plug from a Washington newspaper—not from the Post but from the editorial page of the conservative tip sheet The Washington Times. Prisoners deserve punishment, it said. "But we shouldn't forget that a vast majority will also be returned to society, which has as much at stake in their rehabilitation as they do."[10]
Notes

[1] I was following Dwayne's family for my book about the welfare system: American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (Viking, 2004).

[2] Other possible explanations include changes in demographics, an improved economy, an expanded police presence, gun control laws, the shrinking impact of crack, and perhaps most controversial, the legalization of abortion.

[3] Tamar Lewin, "Crime Costs Many Black Men the Vote, Study Says," The New York Times, October 23, 1998.

[4] Although most prisoners cannot vote, they do subtly affect elections through the drawing of legislative districts. Those districts are based on the decennial Census, which counts prisoners as residing where the prison is located. Since inmates largely come from inner cities and prisons are often rural, Manza and Uggen argue that "this practice results in a small but measurable transfer of political power and money from urban centers to rural towns." They note that 60 percent of Illinois's prisoners come from Cook County, though only 1 percent are incarcerated there.

[5] Manza and Uggen cite data from a single source, the Youth Development Study, a longitudinal panel in St. Paul, Minnesota. Among people with arrest records, 12 percent of those who voted were rearrested, compared to 27 percent of nonvoters. But once they controlled for other factors, like race and sex, the differences were not statistically significant. Still, the authors call the pattern "suggestive."

[6] For an interesting look at the importance of conservative evangelicals to criminal justice reform, see Frank O. Bowman III, "Murder, Meth, Mammon, and Moral Values: The Political Landscape of American Sentencing Reform," Washburn Law Journal, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Spring 2005). Through them, Bowman, a former federal prosecutor, argues, "Republican politicians ...can be brought to see that taking the Gospels seriously means forgiveness of at least some criminal sinners and the possibility of redemption for those sinners in this life as well as the next."

[7] Chuck Colson, "Jesus' Special Interest: Prison Rape and the Law," Townhall.com, September 4, 2003.

[8] Anthony M. Kennedy, speech at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, August 9, 2003.

[9] Marc Levin, "The Role of Parole in Solving the Texas Prison Crowding Crisis," Policy Perspective, November 2006.

[10] "Snapshots Behind Bars," The Washington Times, June 8, 2006.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20056?email

Posted by lois at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)

CT: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in 4 state prisons

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in 4 state prisons

March 29, 2007, Boston Globe

NEW LONDON, Conn. --Four cases of a strain of bacteria that resists certain antibiotics have been reported in four Connecticut prisons, the state Department of Correction said.

Though the number is small, Federal Bureau of Prisons guidelines say more than two cases of the bacteria, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), qualify as an outbreak. It is characterized as contagious, blister-like sores.

Brian Garnett, spokesman for the Department of Correction, said two cases were confirmed at York Correctional Institution in Niantic and one each at Bergin in Storrs and Osborn in Somers.

About 19,000 inmates are incarcerated in Connecticut..

Garnett said the problem is under control and that confirmed cases have been reported to the state Department of Public Health. He said it is not uncommon for MRSA to be transmitted by newly arrived offenders.

Local 391 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and some inmates say MRSA cases are being improperly diagnosed as spider bites.

Charles Fallis, spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control, said MRSA spreads through skin-to-skin contact, crowded living conditions and poor hygiene. Caught early, MRSA is treatable with antibiotics, he said.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2007/03/29/antibiotic_resistant_bacteria_found_in_4_state_prisons/

Posted by lois at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2007

NY: Marie La Pinta's Brother May Be Free Soon

Newsday
Killer of abusive husband may go free

BY TOM MCGINTY AND HERBERT LOWE
March 28, 2007

Leonardo Crociata was sentenced again Wednesday as a murderer -- but only after the victim's son and Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota said they hope Crociata is set free soon.

Crociata, 73, had served 23 years in prison for the 1983 shooting of his sister's abusive husband when State Supreme Court Justice Robert Doyle vacated his murder conviction earlier this month. Crociata then pleaded guilty to murder and yesterday in Riverhead Doyle sentenced him to 15 years to life, making him instantly eligible for parole.

"Thank you very much," Crociata said through an Italian interpreter. "I thank the court and the district attorney for what you did for me."

Crociata then turned toward the gallery -- where his wife, Lucy, children and a number of other family members from Brooklyn were sitting -- and said, "Thank you, everybody."

Two years ago, Doyle also overturned the murder conviction of Crociata's sister, Marie La Pinta, 71, for the killing of her husband, Michael La Pinta, in their West Islip home. Crociata was convicted of pulling the trigger and sentenced to 25 years to life.

During the scuffle, Marie La Pinta hit her husband with a baseball bat. Marie La Pinta helped her brother dump the body at the Babylon landfill.

As with Crociata's sister, Doyle ruled that Crociata was denied a fair trial because he was represented by the same law firm as his sister and was not notified by the trial judge of the conflict of interest. Doyle said the conflict "affected the nature of the defense" offered on Crociata's behalf.

Marie La Pinta, who was released in May 2005, did not attend yesterday's hearing. Her son, Anthony La Pinta -- a Hauppauge attorney who helped free his mother -- said his mother stayed home to avoid the media spotlight.

Spota said in a statement his office has already sent a letter on Crociata's behalf to the parole board. "I believe that his further incarceration serves no legitimate societal or correctional purpose," Spota said. "I hope the board agrees."

During Thursday's hearing, Anthony La Pinta spoke in a different role for him -- as a relative of the murder victim.

He said credit for the professional success he and his brother have had belongs "not only to my mother, but also to my uncle, who have been stabilizing factors to us from behind the walls of the penitentiary."

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lisent0329,0,7219504.story?c
oll=ny-top-headlines

Posted by lois at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Craig Gilmore speaks at rally against Gov's prison plan

Anti-prison activists rally against governor's plan
By Andy Furillo - Sacramento Bee
Published 11:15 am PDT Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Anti-prison activists rallied on the Capitol's west steps Wednesday
morning, expressing opposition to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans
to add 78,000 beds to the state prison and county jail systems. The
activists also called for the release of thousands of prisoners and
support for a bill that would eliminate life terms with no
possibility of parole for some youth.

"Let our people go home, and stop putting more of our people in
prison in the first place," speaker Craig Gilmore of the California
Prison Moratorium Project told the crowd of about 150. Schwarzenegger
has proposed expanding existing prisons, building new county jail
space, adding "re-entry" facilities for short-term inmates and
constructing new prison hospitals to ease overcrowding in the state
correctional system.

Some 172,000 inmates are currently being housed in space designed for
about half that many. About 16,000 prisoners are sleeping in gyms,
dayrooms and other facilities not meant to house inmates.

Another rally was scheduled for the afternoon by the Coalition for
Effective Public Safety, which also organized the morning event.
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/145516.html

Posted by lois at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Unlock Safe Savings on Prisons

Unlock safe savings on prisons
March 26, 2007
Detroit Free Press
State Senate Republicans have rejected closing any prisons as part of
spending cuts to erase a $900-million shortfall in the current state
budget. That's their prerogative, but it shouldn't stop Gov. Jennifer
Granholm from moving forward with her sound and sensible plan to shut
down the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility in Jackson.

Fortunately for the state, the governor doesn't need the
Legislature's permission to grant commutations, release nonviolent
offenders who have served their time, or close an unneeded prison.
Closing Southern Michigan by July will save the state $35 million a
year.

As part of her plan to take $122 million from Corrections, Granholm
has proposed commuting the sentences of 500 "medically fragile"
inmates who are too old or too sick to pose a risk. The state also
will release up to 5,000 minor, nonviolent offenders who have already
served their minimum sentences. Once on parole, they will get
increased supervision and assistance under the Michigan Prisoner Re-
entry Initiative. Neighboring states, with lower lock-up rates and
less crime, have also used low-cost, community alternatives to
incarceration.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, said Friday that
Republicans would propose ways to save money on Corrections without
closing prisons. But at least 80% of the department's budget goes to
running institutions. Closing them is the only way to save big money.

With a record 51,500 inmates and one of the nation's highest
incarceration rates, Michigan spends nearly $2 billion a year, or $5
million a day, on prisons, more than it spends on higher education.

The state can no longer afford it. Granholm can and should use her
rightful authority to make a small dent in Michigan's costly and
bloated prison system.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070326/
OPINION01/703260308/1068/OPINION

Posted by lois at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2007

Today's college applications are screening for criminal offenses and bad behavior.

A different kind of admissions process
Today's college applications are screening for criminal offenses and bad behavior.
By Kathy Boccella
Philadelphia Inquirer, March 27, 2007

Along with SAT scores and extra-curricular activities, college-bound students increasingly are being asked to divulge information that may not be so flattering: their arrest and discipline records.
Since late summer, the Common Application, a form used by about 300 institutions, has asked students and guidance counselors whether the applicant has ever been convicted of a crime or disciplined at school.

Kids with rocky pasts may not make it beyond 12th grade.

In an effort to weed out troublemakers before they hit campus, colleges with their own forms also are requiring prospective students to disclose behavioral black marks. More, including Temple, Rowan and Rutgers Universities, are contemplating it.

The University of Pennsylvania put its admissions policy under review after the discovery in January that a 25-year-old child molester taking graduate courses was commuting from his Bucks County prison cell. Saint Joseph's University will ask about applicants' misdeeds beginning next year.

"It's an issue that's exploding," said Timothy Mann, dean of student affairs at Babson College, who is writing his doctoral dissertation on the subject.

The debate over whether to screen and for what is contentious. Opponents cite privacy issues and the risk of penalizing offenders twice. Education encourages rehabilitation, argues the United States Student Association, the nation's largest student group.

"Are we now putting institutions of higher education in the position of dispensing post-judicial punishment?" Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers asked.

Offenders can still slip in. "No background check is foolproof," cautioned Stephanie Hughes, a professor at the University of Northern Kentucky and security expert who owns RiskAware, which runs background checks on college employees.

Federal law prevents most schools from releasing educational records - including disciplinary information - without a parental OK. Counselors can leave the questions blank, a spokesman for the Common Application said. And schools don't always know about the trouble students get into off campus.

Where Mark McGrath, president of the New Jersey School Counselor Association, works, the few kids who have had an incident tend to admit their wrongdoings.

"We try to put it in the best light we can" on the application, said McGrath, a counselor at Lawrence High School in Lawrenceville, N.J. "We're the advocates for the child."

Access to more accurate information and increased expectations about college involvement in students' lives have spurred the trend toward preadmission screening, Mann said.

Though campus crime has not appreciably increased since 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Education, a few high-profile crimes committed by students with rap sheets have led institutions to reexamine their admissions process. The Common Application added its inquiries at the request of schools concerned about liability, executive director Rob Killion said.

Students are warned not to omit information. If they're caught lying, they're disqualified. Administrators believe most comply.

A single after-school detention or graffiti incident isn't what schools look for, anyway.

"We have 9,000 applications and there are eight counselors," said Matt Middleton, assistant director of admissions at the College of New Jersey in Ewing, where students are asked about suspensions and criminal convictions. (No one has copped to the latter.) "We're lucky if we can get more than five to 10 minutes with an application."

A "history of serious misbehavior" is what Villanova University looks for, said Stephen R. Merritt, dean of enrollment.

Several states have taken stricter measures. A new law criticized by privacy advocates forces Virginia colleges to reveal names and birth dates of incoming students so police can cross-check sex-offender lists. If there's a match, the school and local police are told and the offender has three days to register with authorities after moving to campus.

Virginia State Police Lt. Tom Turner said authorities expect to check 80,000 to 100,000 names annually.

In North Carolina, additional precautions have been implemented since students with rape and larceny convictions committed two unrelated murders at the state university in Wilmington in 2004.

In addition to being asked about their pasts, applicants to the University of North Carolina's 16 campuses are checked against a national database of suspended or expelled college students. Those who trigger suspicion are investigated, Leslie Winner, general counsel for the 200,000-student system, said. As a result, 84 applicants were denied entry last fall.

Schools generally ask for a letter of explanation and consult counselors and others when a problem is reported. Though juvenile records are sealed, colleges can run criminal background checks on those 18 or older.

"There's really no need for a university to take a risk," said Joan McDonald, vice president of enrollment at Drexel University, where no more than 10 applicants a year report misdeeds. Serious offenders aren't invited to join the school's 5,000 or so incoming freshmen.

Each school has its idea of a deal-breaking offense, Hughes, the owner of RiskAware, said. Even with murder, she advises not to jump to conclusions.

"What if they were defending themselves?" Hughes said.

"We look at it on a case-by-case basis," said Mark Lapreziosa, associate vice president of enrollment at Arcadia University, which uses the Common Application and which may revise its own form.

"We look for students showing growth or having learned" from their mistakes, he said.

So far only two students have disclosed arrests, one for drugs and the other theft. They never completed their applications, but options Arcadia considered were requiring them to live off-campus and to keep in close contact with administrators.

"If it was a crime of violence we would have to think seriously," Lapreziosa said.

Pennsylvania State University, which has asked students about their criminal pasts since 1991, received an application in 1999 from a man in his 30s who noted an assault conviction. That confession and information the school received from another source prompted an investigation that revealed more time served for manslaughter and sex crimes.

The man was arrested again - on a gun charge - while the background check was underway.

Even in less dramatic cases, the guidelines are obvious: You can't put the campus at risk, said Joe Puzycki, the school's senior director of judicial affairs. Penn State could not say how many students a year it rejects for security reasons.

Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, worries that risk aversion may lead to overzealous enforcement. If getting arrested once was a consideration 35 years ago, he says, "an awful lot of people would never have gotten into college . . . maybe even presidents."

Last year, Justin Layshock got a 10-day suspension from his Hermitage, N.J., high school for creating an online parody of the principal. When he told Penn State, his application was put on hold, said Walczak, who is representing Layshock in a suit against his old school district.

Layshock let his application lapse after getting into a school where he applied pre-prank. With less luck, he could have lost out entirely, Walczak said.

Connie Clery would rather err on the side of caution. She founded Security on Campus after her 19-year-old daughter, Jeanne, was killed by a fellow student during a robbery at Lehigh University in 1986. The Jeanne Clery Act requires all colleges to disclose crime on and around their campuses.

"You never know who's going to be in the room next to you," said Clery, of Bryn Mawr, who has lobbied for background checks for everyone from faculty to students. "This is a violent culture and it extends onto all college campuses."

Something as benign as theft, the No. 1 campus crime, Clery said, can lead to violence, as it did in her daughter's case.

"If you lose one child, there's nothing in the world that can compensate for that and no way you can get over it if you're a parent," she said. "Why risk it?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Common App Rap Sheet
The Common Application, accepted at the following local colleges, requires students to detail all criminal convictions and serious school disciplinary actions.

Arcadia University

Bryn Mawr College

The College of New Jersey

Drexel University

Haverford College

Juniata College

Lafayette College

La Salle University

Lehigh University

University of Pennsylvania

Saint Joseph's University

Swarthmore College

Ursinus College

Villanova University

Source: www.commonapp.org

Posted by lois at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2007

KS: Few funds for parolee drug abuse treatment

Sun, Mar. 25, 2007
Few funds for parolee drug abuse treatment
BY TIM POTTER
The Wichita Eagle
At the same time that the Kansas Department of Corrections is emphasizing efforts to help thousands of parolees succeed after release from prison, it is funding substance abuse treatment for only a fraction of them.

Although experts say that generally two-thirds of offenders have a history of substance abuse, the department has provided no money for community-based substance abuse treatment for two budget years in a row.

So substance abuse -- one of the biggest problems among offenders and a threat to public safety -- is receiving some of the least funding from the department at a time when the investment might count the most, experts say.

Parolee substance abuse is particularly important to Wichita. A November 2006 Department of Corrections document titled "Offender Risk Reduction and

Reentry Plan" notes that Wichita has the most parolees and that substance abuse is one of their biggest problems.

As of Monday, there were 5,621 parolees statewide, including 1,317 in Wichita -- and the numbers are generally rising, because parolees are being sent back to prison at a lower rate even when they repeatedly violate conditions of their parole, including the prohibition against drug use.

The department says it has embraced the idea that the best way to solve parolees' problems is to work with them in the community, yet for years now it has cut programs to help offenders prepare for release and succeed afterward.

In any effort to help parolees survive life after prison, substance abuse treatment after prison has "got to be key," said Ron Iacovetta, a Wichita State University associate professor who studies corrections issues.

For many offenders, substance abuse is "the ingredient that triggered a lot of crime to begin with," Iacovetta said.

Peter Ninemire spent 10 years in federal prison for marijuana cultivation, then went on to earn a master's degree and now works as a substance abuse counselor in Wichita. Ninemire said treatment in the community is crucial because outside prison is "where the rubber meets the road."

It's in the community where released convicts encounter obstacles, stresses and bad influences, Ninemire said. "Anybody can talk a good game in prison," he said, because there is so much structure there.

Police say drug addiction is what drives many offenders to break into homes and steal things. And it figures heavily in domestic violence, one of the most common crimes with one of the widest impacts on society.

But the sad irony, Ninemire said, is some people think that treating parolees' drug and alcohol addictions is soft on crime when in fact it is "the best anti-crime tool that we have."

Iacovetta said the department's budget is "a clear indication so far that they're not appropriating the funds to deal with the problem."

"To say they're doing it, and to end up doing it, is actually two different things," he said."... It takes money first."

Five years ago, the Department of Corrections joined a highly publicized forum at WSU to share its plans for helping parolees to re-enter communities in ways that helped them and protected the public. But since then, funding for offender programs -- in prison and after release from prison -- dropped steeply, then stayed flat.

The governor's office is proposing the first significant funding increase in years. There's no guarantee the Legislature will approve it, although there appears to be support.

The department provided the funding data in response to questions The Eagle has raised over Alfred Brown, a parolee with a history of drug abuse who was charged last month with nine counts of sex crimes against two Wichita girls.

Optimistic outlook

The department head, Secretary of Corrections Roger Werholtz, said he hopes funding will start improving over the next year with the increase proposed by the governor's office.

So far, the department has developed and promoted detailed plans for parolee reintegration, gotten its staff to embrace the approach and begun reintegration efforts on a pilot basis, Werholtz said.

Treatment funding has fallen over the past seven years as a result of painful budget cuts the department made, Werholtz said.

The department can't restore the money in one year; it will be sought in phases, Werholtz said.

Department spokesman Bill Miskell said the agency "would like to have more money" for substance abuse treatment.

Without money set aside to treat parolees, Miskell said, "most of the offenders who are on supervision in Kansas now who need evaluation and treatment for substance abuse are accessing the same limited community resources that many other people are accessing. Those are limited."

Parolees typically pay for treatment the same way anyone else does; often it's on a sliding fee scale, said Frances Breyne, a department spokeswoman.

At the same time, many parolees have difficulty getting and maintaining jobs. Even paying a $20 treatment fee can be difficult for them, Ninemire said.

An explanation of the treatment and funding challenge can be found in a February 2004 document by the Offender Reentry Task Force, a joint project of the city of Wichita, Sedgwick County and the Department of Corrections. It notes that in fiscal year 2001, "62 percent of the releasing offenders had received substance-abuse treatment while in prison. However, due to budget reductions, the majority of the substance-abuse treatment available in the prisons has been eliminated....

"Today there are not treatment services available in the community, beyond very limited transitional therapeutic community programs... ."

Things have improved since then, Werholtz said, with substance abuse counseling available at the day reporting center in Wichita for up to 100 offenders, and at a day reporting center in Topeka, which treats up to 40 offenders. A Shawnee County re-entry program provides access to treatment services for up to 50 offenders.

One of the Wichita parolees who was sent to a day reporting center and received substance abuse counseling is Alfred Brown, 56. According to a parole officer's log and other records, Brown, who had been convicted of felony drug crimes, tested positive for cocaine five times within one month in 2005 while going to the day reporting center. He sporadically attended treatment, records show. Last month, prosecutors charged Brown with sex crimes against two girls.

Treatment options

Werholtz also noted other treatment services available in communities for people needing substance abuse help. One of the programs is through the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. There is some treatment for motorists who have four or more DUI offenses. And under a 2003 law, Senate Bill 123, drug treatment is mandatory for people convicted of drug possession who have no history of violent crime, but it's not designed for parolees.

Beverly Metcalf, who heads Mirror Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides substance abuse treatment and community-based correctional services across the state, said she worries that parolees may not be getting treatment because funding has been cut so much in recent years and because the treatment system has limited slots.

Metcalf said she wonders if part of a lack of support for funding is a general misconception that treatment doesn't work.

Ninemire, the former offender who now helps offenders as a substance abuse counselor, said that, unfortunately, a parolee's best chance for getting treatment is to get into trouble and be ordered to the day reporting center or some other treatment program.

The biggest need, he said, is residential drug treatment, "where we could give people more than three days in detox... because many people need longer interventions." Without longer-term care, he said, "they don't even stand a chance."

Goal is to restore money

According to figures the Department of Corrections provided to The Eagle, in fiscal year 2005, only $155,071 out of the $29.4 million budget for community-based programs went specifically for substance abuse treatment.

In fiscal 2006 and in the estimated budget for the current budget year -- fiscal 2007 -- there was no money budgeted for substance abuse treatment.

The governor's office has requested $460,000 for fiscal 2008, and Werholtz said he is optimistic the Legislature will approve it. A separate proposal would increase funding for prison-based substance abuse treatment from around $1 million in the current budget to nearly $1.4 million.

Rep. Michael O'Neal, R-Hutchinson, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed that it appears there is legislative support for more funding.

"We have to step up to the plate and get some funding there, and I think the timing is right," said O'Neal, who has served on a task force dealing with corrections issues.

"The best policy is a safe re-entry program," O'Neal said.

It appears that inmates get good support while in prison, he said.

"What they really need is help on the outside," he said.

In the late 1990s, department figures show, funding rose sharply for the full range of programs to help offenders prepare for release and be successful after leaving prison. The programs included vocational, academic and special education and treatment for sex offenders and substance abuse.

But starting in fiscal 2001, the funding plummeted before leveling out in fiscal 2004 through 2007.

Although funding would increase sharply under proposals for fiscal 2008, even if the money is approved, it would be significantly below the levels of the late 1990s.

The goal, Werholtz said, is to restore programs that were gutted.

http://www.kansas.com/213/v-print/story/28182.html
© 2007 Wichita Eagle and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.kansas.com

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Seeking Justice In The Drug War

Seeking Justice In The Drug War
Marc Mauer and Kara Gotsch
March 12, 2007, Tompaine.com

Marc Mauer is the executive director and Kara Gotsch is the director of advocacy of The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C.

Twenty years ago fears about crack cocaine addiction and its associated violent trade plagued urban communities across the country. Newscasters used words like “crisis” and “epidemic”—later shown to be overblown—to describe the impact of crack. The political hysteria that ensued led Congress to pass the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law’s mandatory penalties for crack offenses were the harshest ever adopted for low-level drug offenses.

Two decades later, a new consciousness about the impact of the war on drugs, the costs of incarceration to urban communities and the effectiveness of drug treatment has emerged among public officials. At a time of political change in Washington and a renewed interest by the United States Sentencing Commission in addressing the issue, Congress may be on the verge of mending the crack injustice.

When Congress established drastically different penalty structures for crack and powder cocaine it did so believing that crack cocaine was more dangerous than powder cocaine and posed a greater threat to communities. The drugs are pharmacologically identical, however, with the primary difference between them being their production and means of consumption. Despite the similarities, defendants convicted with just five grams of crack cocaine, the weight of less than two sugar packets, are subject to a five-year mandatory minimum sentence under the law. The same five-year penalty is triggered for powder cocaine only when an offense involves 500 grams, 100 times the minimum quantity for crack.

Under mandatory sentencing, average sentences for crack cocaine offenses are three and a half years longer than for offenses involving powder cocaine. Sentences for crack cocaine are also two years longer than for methamphetamine and five years longer than for heroin.

The impact of the crack cocaine provisions has been troubling on two counts. First, they have created a significant racial disparity in prosecutions and confinement. Along with disproportionate law enforcement practices that target black communities, the crack sentencing policies have resulted in 80 percent of crack cocaine defendants being African American despite the fact that a majority of crack cocaine users in the U.S. are white or Hispanic. The crack penalties are the main cause of a 77 percent increase in the average federal prison time served by African Americans for a drug offense between 1994 and 2003, compared to an increase of 28 percent for white drug offenders.

Second, a serious misdirection of federal resources has emerged. The crack law fails as an effective drug strategy by inappropriately targeting low-level offenders. While the federal courts are normally expected to focus on high-level drug operations, nearly three-quarters of federal crack cocaine defendants have only low-level involvement in drug activity, such as street-level dealers, couriers or lookouts. This pursuit of low-level offenders diverts resources away from the most troublesome contributors to the illegal drug market—drug kingpins and importers. As noted by the Sentencing Commission in its 1997 report to Congress, “[h]igh penalties for relatively small amounts of crack cocaine appear to be misdirecting federal law enforcement resources ...”

In November, the commission revisited the controversy regarding crack and powder sentencing at a public hearing where judges, medical professionals and criminal justice analysts all called for reducing the penalties for crack. This month the commission is seeking public comment regarding the sentencing law, and by May 1, the commission is likely to again ask Congress to fix the unfair sentencing disparity for offenses involving crack cocaine. It has urged Congress to do so three times since 1995, but previously met resistance from both Democratic and Republican administrations.

This year bipartisan interest in addressing crack sentences may finally spur Congress to enact policy reform. Most notably, Senator Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., introduced legislation last year to lessen the inequality in crack cocaine sentences. Although a step in the right direction, it does not go far enough. The proposal would raise the trigger amount for the five-year mandatory minimum to 20 grams from five grams, but lower the trigger threshold for powder cocaine, thus subjecting more cocaine defendants to a mandatory minimum sentence while still harshly punishing many low-level crack defendants. Senator Sessions, who is likely to reintroduce his legislation, is right to seek reform of the 20-year-old law, but harsh mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses should not be applied to any low-level drug defendants. Since state law enforcement agencies can and do prosecute these drug offenses, federal encroachment in this area is unwarranted.

An alternative to Sessions' bill was introduced in January by Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. His legislation would equalize the penalties for powder and crack cocaine by raising the quantity of crack that triggers a five-year mandatory sentence to 500 grams. This approach would eliminate the unjustified disparity in sentences for crack and powder and reduce the number of low-level drug offenders sentenced to harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Such a proposal deserves serious consideration by Congress.

With champions for criminal justice reform like Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., heading the judiciary committees in Congress, the opportunity to redress the misguided crack sentencing policy is upon us. Hearings before both committees are long overdue in this arena and would provide the necessary evidence to dispel the misinformation and hysteria that clouded the public debate on crack cocaine in the past. These myths have done a disservice to developing responsible drug policy, while exacerbating the tragic racial disparities that plague our prison system. Now is the time for congressional attention and action.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/12/seeking_justice_in_the_drug_war.php

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

March 25, 2007

AL: counties with state prisons say they are being burdened by an unexpected side effect of the Community Notification Act

Mar 25, 2007
Ala. counties with state prisons say they're burdened by act

By DESIREE HUNTER
Associated Press Writer
Officials in counties with state prisons say they are being burdened by an unexpected side effect of the Community Notification Act, which requires sex offenders to give authorities a valid address 45 days before their sentence ends.

Under the act, failing to give a residential address that isn't at least 2,000 feet away from a school or childcare facility is a Class C felony. And offenders whose addresses don't comply must remain jailed in the county where the violation occurred until they have a valid address.

That usually means offenders - and their costs - are transferred to county jails, said Sonny Brasfield, assistant executive director for the Association of County Commissions of Alabama.

"They're released from the state prison and as they walk into the parking lot, a sheriff's car is already there to pick them up and take them straight to the jail," he said in a recent interview. "The law makes no provision for them to come back and say 'Sorry, I didn't know my address was bad.'"

"They're not going back to inmates to say this address doesn't work - there's not a way for the inmate to correct his problem," Brasfield said.

County officials say there needs to be some recourse for inmates who are homeless or unknowingly give an address that has become invalid while they were incarcerated. Inmates who are homeless are considered violators and charged with felonies because they don't have a valid address to give.

Ron Smith, chairman of the Bullock County Commission, said so far seven inmates have been taken to the county's jail under the act and the same has happened in St. Clair and Barbour counties, which are home to other state prisons.

Smith said something needs to be done soon to change the act.

"I think that's unconstitutional because what are we holding them on? Suppose they never find a good address?" Smith said. "Suppose he was staying with his mother and God forbid his mother died? Now he doesn't have a place to go. We get no money for housing the state inmates and for a poor county like us, we're going to suffer."

Inmates taken to the county jails are kept there until they have a date to go before a grand jury on the felony charge.

Bullock County Sheriff Raymond Rogers said jail officials worked with family members and community assistance programs to get valid housing arrangements for four of the seven sex offenders who have been affected by the act at his jail. The remaining three are homeless and are still in the Bullock County Jail, he said.

"The longest one I ever kept in my jail was for four months," Rogers said. "Their loved ones don't want them. I have to keep calling the county they live in trying to help them find a place. It's kind of like the jail is turning into a halfway house and we don't have the people or the money for that."

Prisons Commissioner Richard Allen said the corrections department is aware of the problem and he's offered to keep the sex offenders in the state prisons while they wait for their grand jury appearance.

But Attorney General Troy King, who pushed hard for passage of the act last year, said a better idea is to force all sex offenders to serve their full sentences instead of giving them less time for good behavior and parole.

King acknowledged the problem would still exist once the offenders served their full sentence, but said it would give them more time to find a valid address. He said the cost of keeping them in county jails is worth it to keep sex offenders off the streets longer.

"We put people in prisons to punish them. I think most people would say if I can keep a predator away from my children, away from hurting my grandchildren by paying to keep them in prison, I'll pay to keep them in prison," he said. "Yes, we're spending (taxpayer) money, but I don't think anybody would say that's not a good investment."

Allen said plans are already in place to expand programs that help inmates transition from prison to life outside the corrections system. Part of the program will be assisting inmates with housing and that will help them avoid giving addresses that aren't in compliance, he said.

Bullock County attorney Johnny Waters said he's eager to see what will be done to resolve the problem.

"You may have a man who's been in prison for 15, 16 years on a rape charge. Now his family's disowned him, momma and daddy says he can't live with us, and he's got no other family. He doesn't even hardly have bus fare to get home," Waters said. "What does somebody in that scenario do? Nobody can answer that question for me. He's basically thrown to the wind.

"There's pros and cons to the law. Mainly it's to keep people protected and I can understand that side of it. But on the other side you've got a person trying to do right. Somewhere there's got to be a better answer."
http://www.timesdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070325/APN/703253178&cachetime=5
Copyright © 2007 TimesDaily

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

March 24, 2007

New Report: Legal Loophole Leads to Exploitation of Youth in Adult Jails

New Report:
Legal loophole leads to explosion of youth in adult jails; Abuse and isolation rampant; Majority heald for non-violent crimes

Incarcerating youth as adults does not reduce crime and disproportionately impacts youth of color; New campaign calls on Congress to ban use of adult jails for youth under 18

Washington, D.C. - March 21, 2007- Despite a federal law that prohibits the incarceration of youth in adult correctional facilities, the number of young people held in jails across the country has exploded by 208 percent since the 1990s, according to a new report released today at the national press club by the Campaign for Youth Justice. States exploit a loophole in federal law, which was designed to protect youth from the proven dangers of adult jails but only applies to youth in the juvenile justice system. Congress is considering the reauthorization of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) this year, and advocates are asking that all youth under 18 be protected from incarceration in adult facilities.

"Federal law exists to protect youth from being locked up in adult facilities, but too many youth are falling through the cracks," said Campaign for Youth Justice executive director Liz Ryan. "We want Congress to close the loophole, and make sure every young person is treated the same. No youth under 18 should end up in an adult jail before they've even had a trial-it's bad for youth and doesn't protect communities."

The Consequences Aren't Minor: The Impact of Trying Youth as Adults and Strategies for Reform presents research, statuary analysis, and case studies to highlight the problems with the policies and practices that treat young people as adults in the justice system. The study examines the laws and data in seven key states: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin. An estimated two hundred thousand youth end up in the adult system each year, and 40 states allow or require the jailing of youth in adult facilities before they ever go to trial.

Youth prosecuted as adults are often held in adult jails for months or years, even though most are charged with nonviolent offenses, the report demonstrates. A 17-year-old girl in Wisconsin, for example, served 75 days as a in an adult jail for violating probation by stealing a neighbor's bicycle. In Chicago, a 17-year-old boy was arrested for "armed robbery" after he took a schoolmate's gym clothes, and was detained at the Cook County jail for several weeks.

Data shows that tens of thousands of young people end up in the adult system for non-violent offenses. In 2003, over half the youth in California's adult system were prosecuted for misdemeanors and less than 30 percent received a prison sentence, suggesting that the majority of youth could be safely handled in the juvenile justice system. Of the 8,000 young people who enter Connecticut's adult court system, the vast majority are arrested for non-violent offenses. In 2002 almost 14,000 17-year-olds were admitted to Wisconsin's adult jails but only 15 percent of these youth were arrested for violent crimes.

Research-including studies funded by the U.S. Justice Department-show that sending youth to the adult criminal justice system doesn't work to reduce crime. In one study comparing the recidivism of youth waived to criminal court in Florida with those retained in juvenile court, the research found that those in the "adultified" group were more likely to be re-arrested and to commit more serious new offenses; they also re-offended more quickly.

The laws are not evenly applied, with youth of color and those without access to adequate legal counsel more likely to end up in adult correctional facilities. Nationwide, three out of four young people admitted to adult prison in 2002 were youth of color. In Florida, Wisconsin, California, Connecticut, Illinois and North Carolina, youth of color represented nearly or more than 7 out of 10 youth in the adult justice system. Youth of color in Illinois make up just one-third of the general population, but in some jurisdictions make up 9 out of 10 young people in the adult system.

The report notes that juvenile judges are frequently excluded from the decision to prosecute youth as adults Instead, prosecutors and state laws determine which youth end up in the adult system, no matter how minor the nature of the offense. In 15 states prosecutors rather than judges have the discretion to send youth to the adult system. In other states, laws have lowered the age by which a youth ends up in the adult court, or they are automatically transferred based on the nature of the charge.

"As a former prosecutor and head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, I have had the opportunity to witness first hand the impact of trying and sentencing youth as adults," said Shay Bilchik, director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform and Systems Integration at the Public Policy Institute of Georgetown University. "While I once supported these laws, their virtual unbridled use has negatively impacted too many young offenders with whom the juvenile justice system could have done a better job in rehabilitating and promoting public safety and youth development. States need to seriously consider reforming these laws, providing strict guidelines and reintroducing the role of the judge in making these jurisdictional determinations."

Jails are not designed to safely hold youth, who are either incarcerated in cells with adults, or separated in forms of isolation that can lead to depression or even suicide. Studies show that youth who are incarcerated in adult facilities are more likely to suffer abuse, become mentally and emotionally ill, and may be rearrested and commit more serious offenses than youth who benefit from the treatment, counseling and services available through the juvenile justice system. A recent Zogby poll conducted for National Center on Crime and Delinquency finds that 7 in 10 respondents felt that putting youth under age 18 in adult correctional facilities makes them more likely to commit future crime.

"The problem is that we are sending too many youth to the adult court who can be safely and more effectively handled in the juvenile justice system," said Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators. "We have more information and evidence on what works than ever before. Now, we just need to keep this population in the juvenile justice system so they can benefit from all the advances in services and treatment."

The report urges policy makers to take advantage of the shift in public opinion and new adolescent brain development research that inspired the Supreme Court to end the death penalty for minors. The report calls for a ban on the incarceration of youth in adult jails or prisons, and in the rare cases where the seriousness of a crime warrants consideration of prosecution in the adult system, a juvenile court judge should make the decision rather than prosecutors or state law.

"Young people need opportunities to turn their lives around, but these policies rob them of their futures," said Roneka Jenkins, who is 16 years old and attends Thurgood Marshall Academy. "We need to give youth the education and skills to get good jobs and contribute to society. That's best for everyone."

About the Campaign for Youth Justice
The Campaign for Youth Justice (C4YJ) is dedicated to ending the practice of trying, sentencing and incarcerating youth under the age of 18 in the adult criminal justice system. Learn more at www.campaign4youthjustice.org.

About the Justice Policy Institute
The Justice Policy Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to ending society's reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems. Learn more at www.justicepolicy.org.

Posted by lois at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

Texas, Addressing Sexual Abuse Scandal, May Free Thousands of Its Jailed

March 24, 2007
Texas, Addressing Sexual Abuse Scandal, May Free Thousands of Its Jailed Youths By RALPH BLUMENTHAL, NY Times

HOUSTON, March 23 — Battered by a sexual abuse scandal in its juvenile justice system, Texas may soon free most of the 4,000 jailed youths who have served their minimum sentences but who are still being held, in many cases for reasons that are undetermined.

Under plans announced Friday by the special master whom Gov. Rick Perry appointed to supervise the tarnished Texas Youth Commission, the cases of all juveniles who have served more than the nine-month minimum — 93 percent, by some accounts — will be reviewed by a panel of civil rights advocates, prosecutors and a youth official, reporting to a state judge. Unless the Youth Commission, which runs the state’s youth detention centers, can demonstrate that such juveniles pose a danger to the community, they will be released.

“The burden is on the state,” Jay Kimbrough, the special master, said in Austin at a briefing for reporters. “I have seen enough and heard enough.”

Mr. Kimbrough’s move is the latest turn in a case that broke last month with news that a Texas Ranger investigation in 2005 had corroborated sexual contacts between boys at the West Texas State School, in Pyote, and two top supervisors, who then resigned without charges filed.

Youth Commission facilities are permitted on their own to extend sentences for misconduct, but parents of some young inmates say those decisions are often made capriciously, sometimes in retribution for the filing of grievances. And lawmakers suggested at a hearing last month that some youths had received lengthened sentences for refusing to have sex with corrections officers.

The approach announced Friday was described by Will Harrell, executive director of the Texas office of the American Civil Liberties Union, as groundbreaking and “huge.”

Mr. Harrell, who will serve on the review panel along with representatives of the N.A.A.C.P. and the Hispanic rights group Lulac, said that “this is all going to happen fast.” He and Mr. Kimbrough said the panel could be in place within weeks.

The announcement came as federal officials confirmed an unrelated inquiry into accusations of sexual abuse at a federal center for detained illegal-immigrant children in South Texas. The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that a staff member suspected of molesting children at that center, the Texas Sheltered Care facility in Nixon, east of San Antonio, had been fired and that the F.B.I. had turned the case over to Texas prosecutors.

Johnny Sutton, the United States attorney in San Antonio, confirmed in a statement that his office “worked with the F.B.I. investigating the allegations of improper sexual contact between a staff member of Texas Sheltered Care and minors who were housed at the facility.” But Mr. Sutton added: “We reluctantly concluded that the federal government did not have jurisdiction over any felony offenses allegedly committed. Because the most serious offense which might be brought by this office would at most be a misdemeanor, these allegations may be more effectively addressed by state authorities.”

The shelter is in Gonzales County, whose sheriff, Glen A. Sachtleben, said he was aware of the case but had not been officially notified that the F.B.I. had turned it over to state authorities. Calls left with the local district attorney were not returned.

In the meantime, all 72 children at the shelter have been moved to other locations, said a statement issued late Friday by Joshua Trent, associate director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Back in Austin, Mr. Kimbrough announced the forced resignation of another high official of the Texas Youth Commission, Ray Worsham, amid a continuing criminal investigation into “the unauthorized redaction of documents” sought in the investigation of sexual abuse. Mr. Worsham had only recently been promoted from the chief abuse investigator of the commission to inspector general.

Mr. Kimbrough also announced that Jerome Parsee, the superintendent of the Youth Commission facility in Marlin, which receives all juveniles who are entering the detention system, had just been arrested on charges of falsely telling investigators that he was unaware of any accusations of sexual abuse there.

The Youth Commission’s board of directors resigned under pressure last week, and many other top officials have been ousted.

Families of incarcerated youths have long questioned the procedures by which sentences are extended, sometimes for seemingly minor infractions. Some parents spoke out at a State Senate hearing on Feb. 27 where Senator Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat from McAllen, said, “We found out a lot of youths are kept seven, eight months longer than required, and we want to know why.”

“If a young person refuses to have sex with a supervisor,” the senator added, “they deduct a point, and they’re required to stay longer.”

Mr. Kimbrough, who has visited some detention centers by motorcycle in recent days, said Friday that with extension of sentences as well as hiring and other matters, “there is no centralized procedure: each institution does its own thing.”

He said the six-member sentencing review panel — made up of representatives from the rights groups as well as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, and the Youth Commission — would check the files of each juvenile held longer than nine months. If a compelling reason to hold the youth is not evident, the panel will require the Youth Commission to persuade a judge to do so.

Most could be released outright, Mr. Kimbrough said, or others to halfway houses. But he said he had no wish to increase the burdens of parole officers. Releasing inmates would also take pressure off overburdened facilities, which now have a youth-to-staff ratio of 14 to 1, more than twice the national average, he said.

Genger Galloway, whose son Joseph has complained of having been sexually molested in detention, voiced delight over the sentencing reviews. “I think it’s great, past time,” she said. “Joseph, I’ve been assured, will be getting out in 30 days. He’ll be coming home.”

Staci Semrad contributed reporting from Austin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/us/24youth.html

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

March 22, 2007

CT: Teens In Adult Jails A State Specialty

"State Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, one of the leading proponents of the Raise the Juvenile Age bill, said the state can't keep spending millions on prisons to support a correction system that has basically become a "bottomless pit." The Youth Justice report said that returning 16- and 17-year-olds to the juvenile justice system would result in a $3 savings for every dollar spent."

CONNECTICUT NEWS

Teens In Adult Jails A State Specialty
March 22, 2007
By COLIN POITRAS, Courant Staff Writer

Connecticut locks up more minors in adult prisons than any other state in the nation, increasing the likelihood that those teens will be repeat offenders and increasing their risk of abuse, depression and untreated mental illness, a national report released Wednesday said.

With violent juvenile crimes declining throughout the U.S., states are reducing the numbers of those under 18 who are incarcerated in adult jails. But Connecticut's incarceration levels have gone up, according to the report produced by the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign for Youth Justice.

State judicial officials say the numbers are higher because Connecticut is one of only three states that automatically prosecute children 16 and older as adults. New York and North Carolina are the others.

But Connecticut officials admit the rising numbers are also due to a shortage of suitable programs for children ages 16 and 17 - a situation some lawmakers and advocates want to change by passing a law raising the age for being treated as an adult to 18. The bill is expected to go to a vote before the General Assembly's judiciary committee in the next two weeks.

Hector Glynn, executive director of the Bridgeport-based Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, said Connecticut's incarceration of minors in adult prisons and lack of programs for troubled youths comes close to "state-sanctioned child abuse."

"We believe to a large degree that this comes very close to a human rights violation," Glynn said Wednesday. "Treating kids as adults and locking them up, if any parent were to do this, it would be considered child abuse."

Connecticut was one of seven states whose criminal prosecutions of juveniles were reviewed as part of the Youth Justice study. The others were California, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin. The Campaign for Youth Justice is dedicated to ending the practice of trying, sentencing and incarcerating those younger than 18 in the adult criminal justice system.

One of the study's key findings was that Connecticut led the nation in the number of youths under 18 incarcerated in adult prisons with 383 in 2005, the last year for which comparative statistics were available. New York was second with 223.

According to the federal Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of children incarcerated with adults in Connecticut went up 19 percent between June 2004 and June 2005, while they declined in most states.

"Connecticut's policy is really concerning," said Liz Ryan, Campaign for Youth Justice's executive director. "It's really behind the rest of the nation in terms of its treatment of 16- and 17-year-olds in the adult prison system, and its numbers of incarcerated young people are going up while the rest of states' numbers are going down."

The national study found that most children pushed into the adult criminal justice system wind up there for nonviolent offenses. In Connecticut, 96 percent of the approximately 13,000 youths entering the adult criminal justice system each year come there for nonviolent offenses, the study showed.

The prosecution of offenders under 18 as adults is particularly damaging to youths of color, the report said. In Connecticut, blacks and Latinos constitute less than 30 percent of the total youth population but they make up 80 percent of the young men in the adult correction system, the report said.

The Youth Justice report also said locking youths up with adults does not make communities safer. The report cited a study comparing recidivism of youths waived to adult criminal court in Florida with those retained in juvenile court. The study found that those in the adult group were more likely to be rearrested and commit more serious new offenses.

Some states, including Wisconsin and North Carolina, have set up separate facilities in the adult prison system for youths prosecuted as adults. But in Connecticut, youths charged as adults are sent to the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire, a high-security prison for inmates up to age 21. Inmates under 18 constitute about 2 percent of the total inmate population in adult prisons, which means the system has 50 adult inmates for every minor.

Critics charge that youths in adult prisons are exposed to potential sexual and physical abuse and have much less access to counseling programs suitable to their age. The lack of services was highlighted in July 2005, when 17-year-old David Burgos of Bristol committed suicide at Manson while being held on a probation violation.

William Carbone, director of court support services for the state judicial branch, admitted the state lacks services to divert 16- and 17-year-olds from adult prisons when they get into trouble with the law. It is something judicial officials are working hard to change, he said.

As one of the examples of the hurdles court officials face, Carbone said current state law does not allow 16- and 17-year-olds to access services through the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. They must be 18 to be eligible.

"Our services for 16- and 17-year-olds are minimal," Carbone said. "So when you're faced with someone who has committed a crime and been convicted, if you don't have programs appropriate for that age group, you're going to see more of them incarcerated."

State Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, one of the leading proponents of the Raise the Juvenile Age bill, said the state can't keep spending millions on prisons to support a correction system that has basically become a "bottomless pit."

The Youth Justice report said that returning 16- and 17-year-olds to the juvenile justice system would result in a $3 savings for every dollar spent.

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-juvage0322.artmar22,0,827892.story?coll
=hc-headlines-local

Posted by lois at 09:26 PM | Comments (0)

Muslim News: Groups allege racial, religious discrimination in state's prisons

The Muslim News
USA: Groups allege racial, religious discrimination in state's prisons
21-03-2007
the day.com Connecticut:

Four groups are seeking an investigation into policies and attitudes directed toward Muslims and other minorities in the state's prison system.

The groups have drafted a letter to Commissioner of Correction Theresa Lantz and said they are looking for more organizations, Muslim and non-Muslim, to sign on before they send it next week.

The action follows The Day's report Saturday that a photograph of Bilal Ansari, the Muslim chaplain, or imam, at J.B. Gates Correctional Institution in Niantic, was defaced with Wite-Out and written over with a racial epithet last month.

The photograph was in the chaplain's locked office, Department of Correction spokesman Brian Garnett said Tuesday. He said the department has referred the matter to state police for a criminal investigation.

Abdullah T. Antepli, coordinator of Islamic Chaplaincy & Interfaith Relations for the Hartford Seminary, said the Connecticut Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Coalition of Connecticut, the Berlin Mosque and the Harmony Foundation represent more than a dozen Islamic organizations.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg on this racial issue,” Antepli said. “This is not an individual unique incident. This is systemic.”

Garnett said he would not comment on a letter the commissioner had yet to receive.

According to documents obtained by The Day, at least four of 18 Muslim chaplains working within the Department of Correction have alleged racial and religious discrimination. Three have filed, or are in the process of filing, complaints with the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.

A total of 68 chaplains serve all denominations in the prison system, according to the department.

“Bilal's case is not unique, not individual at all. We have had people say to them, 'Oh, I hope you are not going to bomb us today.' Or, 'How is Osama Bin Laden?' As if they are buddies. They are subjected to constant humiliation,” Antepli said.

As drafted, the letter also asks for diversity training in concert with the Islamic organizations in order to “avoid litigation.”

“It seems that this discrimination comes from fellow staff and upper management and is tolerated, perhaps even propagated, on every level,” the letter states.

Among the “discrimination” issues claimed in the letter are:

• Daily harassment, humiliation and intimidation of Muslim chaplains and volunteers.

• Failure to hire a sufficient number of Muslim chaplains.

•Failure to provide chicken, beef and lamb slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law to Muslim inmates.

• Failure to hire female Muslim chaplains in addition to men. Women cannot lead the Friday prayer services but could provide other religious support. Other religions are represented by both male and female chaplains, such as Catholic nuns.

• Failure to provide places to pray that have no images, such as pictures of saints.

Attorney Rabia Chaudry, spokeswoman for the Connecticut chapter of CAIR, said her organization hopes the letter will draw attention to what the organization sees as a civil rights issue.

“We want to get some response from the administration, the governor, the commissioner, whoever it is that can get these issues resolved,” she said.

Muslim chaplains who came forward this week said they are organizing in preparation to bring suit against the state for what they said is a DOC practice of targeting those individuals who complain of racial or religious bias.

“Unfortunately, the Muslim community ... is very scared,” Antepli said. “But this issue brought all of us together, finally.”

•••••Sufu Hashim, a Muslim chaplain who has worked in various prisons around the state, has been asked to sign an agreement that he will not sue the state, following a complaint he made about the Department of Correction — or be fired.

Hashim is fighting a 3-year-old DOC practice that directs the chaplains to hold more than one Jumah prayer service on Fridays.

“They're trying to get us to go against our religious law to do things we weren't supposed to do. Friday is a special day. Once they conduct one service, that's it,” Hashim said.

The chaplains have agreed, they say, “under duress” to continue the practice on a temporary basis and have asked for a permanent Islamic council to advise the DOC on Islamic issues.

The department is using Muslim chaplain Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan as its adviser for Islamic affairs and is not interested in creating such a council. Antepli said Islam is the only faith for which matters are directed by a DOC employee, rather than an outside expert or religious organization.

“For each faith, the agency holds twice annual, full-day denominational meetings,” Garnett said Tuesday. “We feel that this and the Religious Services Unit chain of command are appropriate and effective at addressing any issues.”

Antepli said Tuesday he has volunteered the services of both the Hartford Seminary and the Muslim Coalition of Connecticut, the largest umbrella organization for Muslims in the state, to serve the DOC free of charge.

“The door is always shut in our faces, slammed in our faces. We have never been able to have any civilized conversation with these people,” he said.

Hashim said that he and other Muslim chaplains in the system have been “set up.” He said that, in his case, an inmate asked someone on the outside to deliver a book to his office, along with body oils that are used by Muslims to prepare for holy services and are, by DOC directive, to be purchased through the commissary.

Hashim said a prison emergency response team asked him to surrender his keys and stand by while they searched his office and his desk in search of the contraband oils and book.

He said he has heard of similar incidents, especially after Sept. 11, 2001.

Another chaplain claims in a complaint to CHRO to have had to answer for the content of a sermon he gave in 2003.

“During a religious service (Jumah), I mentioned the immorality of the war (which was taking place),” the imam writes in his complaint, “and that the Pope as well as the Bishops in the U.S. had also spoken out against it. The inmates were very upset over the bombings and loss of life among the civilians. I as the Islamic Chaplain had to address these issues as they look toward me to make sense out of these crises ... some staff took exception to my denouncing the morality of the war and reported me.”

Garnett denied accusations that the DOC targets individuals who complain.

“The Department of Correction does not target individuals for investigations, nor does it retaliate against those who bring complaints,” Garnett said Tuesday. “Investigations (in this context) are conducted when it is alleged that the safety and security of our correctional facilities may be at risk, due to the actions of an individual not being in compliance with our Administrative Directives.”

James Outlaw, an officer with the Connecticut NAACP and president of the Brass Keys, a statewide organization for minority correctional officers, said both organizations are behind the Muslim chaplains “100 percent.”

The Muslim News
http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/news/news.php?article=12487

Posted by lois at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2007

Living Like a Refugee: Peggy Diggs Takes a Design Problem to Prison

Go to this URL for the entire article and the pictures of what has been created.

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Through a partnership with the City of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, Diggs made arrangements to meet with a group of 15 men in maximum security at Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia. MAP had been working with these particular prisoners for some years, and when Diggs visited with them in January 2005 she found them eager to participate in her project. She obtained funding from Creative Capital Foundation to "explore notions of design and function of objects we're all familiar with - with materials and expectations we have of them, concrete problem solving and design for particular groups of users."

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

Expanded Syringe Access Program in NY State to Expire...contact your Senator NOW

ESAP expires this September and needs to be renewed - the state Assembly passed a bill which would make ESAP permanent, but the Senate's version only extends ESAP through September, 2008.

We need everyone to contact their state Senators about this as soon as possible - the Senate bill could be voted on any day now. Below & attached is an action alert from NYAC. Please forward widely, and let me know what you hear.
Daniel Raymond
Policy Director
Harm Reduction Coalition

The Expanded Syringe Access Program (ESAP) was created in 2000 to provide injection drug users with access to sterile syringes in pharmacies without a prescription. The law was evaluated by the State Department of Health, as required in the initial law, and found to be a huge success: it greatly expanded access to sterile syringes, helped reduce HIV infections related among injection drug users, and did not result in any increases in illegal behavior, crime, or unsafe disposal. In 2003, based on this study, the Legislature and Governor Pataki agreed to extend the law for four more years.

On September 1 of 2007, the law will once again expire unless it is extended by the Governor and Legislature. Based on findings gathered over the past seven years, the Spitzer Administration proposed making the law permanent. In their one-house budget bill the Assembly concurred. Unfortunately, the Senate limited the extension to only one year.

Given the dire health implications of sharing contaminated syringes-and the seven years of unblemished success of ESAP-NYAC agrees with the Governor and Assembly that the law should become permanent. To urge the Senate to concur with the Assembly and Governor, please fax the attached letter to your local Senator and Senator Bruno. Directions for submitting the letter are included in the attachment. To identify your local Senator, please go to www.senate.state.ny.us/senatehomepage.nsf.

The Legislature may well finalize their budget plans this week, so don't delay!

Please FAX the below letter with your signature to: Senator Joe Bruno: 518-455-2448; and your senator.

If you need your Senator's fax number, call the Senate operator at 518-455-2800

If you don't know who your Senator is, look them up online at: http://capwiz.com/etp/state/main/?state=NY

Date
Address
Dear Senator________:

I'm writing to urge your support for the Expanded Syringe Access Program (ESAP).

As you may know, the Legislature enacted this program as Chapter 56 of the Laws of 2000 to prevent the transmission of HIV infection through the sharing of contaminated syringes. Based on a very favorable study conducted by the Department of Health under Governor Pataki in 2003, the Legislature extended the law for four years (Chapter 15, the Laws of 2003).

Under that law, ESAP will sunset in September of this year unless it is again extended by the Legislature. Given the overwhelming success of this program, and that fact that no negative outcomes have been found, I urge the Senate to concur with the Governor's proposal to make it permanent. As the Assembly has already concurred, your support is essential to making this happen.
Thank you in advance for your support.
Sincerely,
YOUR NAME
cc: Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno

Posted by lois at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2007

Condom debate targets prisons

" One striking finding of the Georgia study was that a third of HIV-infected prisoners said they had sex with male prison staffers, and one-fifth had sex with female staffers."

Condom debate targets prisons

Strategy to fight HIV faces uphill challenge
By Jeremy Manier
Chicago Tribune staff reporter

March 18, 2007

Prisons have a rate of HIV infection nearly five times greater than the rate nationwide, yet they are among the few places in America where condoms are almost impossible to get.

Those unsettling facts have spurred a growing campaign by lawmakers and public health advocates who are concerned that prisons may be a prime breeding ground for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The most recent effort to put condoms in Illinois prisons suffered a setback Thursday when a state House committee voted 6-5 against a bill that would authorize distribution of condoms to state inmates.

But officials with the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, which argued for the measure, said they hope to find a compromise with the Illinois Department of Corrections, one of the bill's main opponents. A U.S. House bill that wouldallow condoms in federal prisons was introduced in January, though so far Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) is one of only two co-sponsors.

Such efforts face daunting hurdles. Sexual contact is banned in most prison systems, and officials believe allowing condoms could undermine the rules and even lead to rape of inmates.

Yet supporters of condom laws say the reality is that homosexual behavior in prison is common, and inmates with no means of protection could contract diseases and infect others both in prison and afterward. Most public health experts consider condoms an essential part of HIV prevention efforts. The objections to condom distribution seem detached from real life to Keith DeBlasio, who said he contracted HIV after being raped by another inmate at a federal penitentiary in Michigan, where DeBlasio was serving time for embezzlement and fraud. DeBlasio said his attacker probably wouldn't have agreed to use a condom, but making condoms available could prevent other prisoners from getting the disease.

"I was sentenced to 5 years, and I got a death sentence," he said. Illinois state prisons have 511 inmates known to have HIV or AIDS among a population of 45,000, and studies in other states suggest many such prisoners are sexually active. A federal study last year in Georgia found that at least 88 inmates had contracted HIV while in state custody. Two-thirds of the infected men reported having homosexual contact with other inmates or prison staffers.

Only Vermont and several big cities allow condoms for at-risk inmates. A bill to permit condoms in California prisons passed that state's legislature but was vetoed in October by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Though specific policies vary, most prisons that permit condoms either sell them in the commissary or let an outside group distribute them. The focus is on male prisoners because sexual transmission of HIV among women is not considered a major risk.

Some criticisms of the proposals to let prisoners use condoms recall the debate from the 1980s over promotion of condoms as a "safe sex" tool. Many religious groups argued then that condoms would encourage immoral or dangerous sexual behavior, though public health forces effectively won that debate.

Rev. Harold Bailey, former chairman of the Cook County Board of Corrections, said he believes the moral implications of condom use among homosexuals remain paramount.

"Anytime anyone puts two men together, which is against the law of God, then gives them permission to do it with a condom, that's despicable," said Bailey, who served as the county's jail chief until 2004.

"Having that sexual involvement, even with a condom, is not righteous," Bailey said. "If they're going to [have sex], they're going to do it on their own, and not with my permission. ... I'm not going to hell for nobody."

For the pro-condom side, the moral choice is to prevent disease. The issue has become a crusade for Rev. Doris Green, director of community affairs for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.

Green, who argued for the condom bill in Springfield, said she's especially concerned about the risk to the African-American community, which accounts for about half of new HIV/AIDS cases nationally. She said she often worries about the 15 couples for whom she has performed weddings while the husband was behind bars. Any man infected in prison could bring the disease to his family.

"Those women need to be protected," Green said. "It's about more than just the prisoners."

Lobbyists for the union that represents the state's correctional officers said they oppose any condom proposal. Henry Bayer, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, said allowing condoms would hurt prison discipline.

"We don't want anybody to get STDs, but our members' job is to enforce the rules, and the rules say inmates should not have sex," Bayer said.

Michael Blucker, a former Illinois prisoner who said he contracted HIV after being raped at Menard Correctional Center, opposes condoms for inmates in part because "being gay isn't what God intended for us."

"Handing out condoms is like saying, `Go ahead, rape somebody," said Blucker, who in 1995 unsuccessfully sued the state over the assault. Yet studies of prisons and jails where condoms are allowed suggest that most guards and inmates support those programs.

In the Washington, D.C., city jail, where officials distribute about 200 condoms each month, a 2002 survey found that 64 percent of correctional officers and 55 percent of inmates thought the effort was a good idea. The study, published in the journal AIDS Education and Prevention, found that only 13 percent of guards said condom distribution had caused problems in the jail.

"No major security infractions involving condoms have been reported in the jail since the inception of the program," the study's authors wrote. "There isno evidence that sexual activity has increased." In Los Angeles, where the county jail started condom distribution in 2001, sheriff's department spokesman Steve Whitmore said the policy has caused "no significant problems."

Whitmore said L.A.'s program has gone forward even though sexual contact by inmates remains illegal. "It's against the law, but we're also cognizant ofthe realities. AIDS kills people," he said.

An outside group distributes the condoms, and jail officials do not know which prisoners get them, Whitmore said.

Some condom programs may have succeeded because they are narrow in scope. In L.A., condoms are distributed only to self-identified gay inmates, who live in separate housing from the broader jail population.

In reality, much of the high-risk homosexual contact in prison involves men who don't consider themselves gay outside prison, former prisoners and researchers said. About 1 percent of prisoners report having been raped. According to an in-depth study the CDC published last year on HIV transmission in Georgia prisons, most sex among prisoners was either consensual or what the authors called "exchange sex." Those inmates said they use sex as a bartering tool to get cigarettes, drugs, food or protection from other inmates.

One striking finding of the Georgia study was that a third of HIV-infected prisoners said they had sex with male prison staffers, and one-fifth had sex with female staffers.

The CDC report called condoms an integral part of HIV prevention efforts outside prisons and suggested that states weigh the risks and benefits of allowing condoms.

Part of the urgency that Green feels stems from figures showing that African-Americans account for a growing proportion of HIV cases in the general population. Two-thirds of the inmates who contracted HIV in Georgia prisons are black, the CDC study said. "It is a public health crisis," Green said. "And it is infecting the community we claim we want to save."
----------
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/health/chi-0703180058mar18,1,3185865.
story

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

Posted by lois at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

A Room for the Night (Not 40 to Life)

March 18, 2007, NY Times
Square Feet | Checking In
A Room for the Night (Not 40 to Life)
By ALISON GREGOR

THE hulking granite building overlooking the Charles River housed some of this city’s most notorious criminals for more than a century, but it will soon provide luxury accommodations for some of the most well-heeled visitors.

The transformation of the Charles Street Jail, as the building was known, into the Liberty Hotel is among the largest of a growing number of hotel conversions of abandoned jails and prisons. The Liberty Hotel, in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, is to open for business this summer. Room rates have not yet been set.

The $110 million reconstruction project includes a new 16-story tower adjacent to the former jail, which began operating in 1851, and the demolition of a daunting wall that separated the institution from the community since around 1940. The hotel will have 298 rooms, of which 20 will be in the old jail building.

“People are saying this will be Boston’s most captivating hotel,” said Richard L. Friedman, president and chief executive of Carpenter & Company, the developer.

The company had doggedly pursued the site because of its architectural significance. “A century and a half ago somebody sited a jail at the most prominent possible place in Boston and built a fabulous building,” Mr. Friedman said.

The old jail is near the Charles River and has views of downtown Boston. A cruciform with four wings, the structure has thick granite walls that enclose a soaring 90-foot atrium at its center — once used as an exercise yard — which is topped by a cupola. Soon, four huge chandeliers, 10 feet in diameter, will hang from winches over entrances leading to two upscale restaurants — one to be called Bread and Water — along with a 3,000-square-foot ballroom off the atrium.

“If you were building this new, you could never afford to build a space like this atrium space,” said Peter Diana, the vice president and general counsel of Carpenter & Company. “It would be prohibitively expensive and elaborate. This building just has good bones, as they say.”

Gary C. Johnson, a principal at Cambridge Seven Associates, the project’s architect along with Ann Beha Architects, agreed, but he said that making the necessary modifications to the building hadn’t been easy.

“When we first walked in here, there were pigeons flying around, holes in the roof, and it was full of debris,” Mr. Johnson said. “It had been abandoned about 12 years, and I think we were all overwhelmed by the possibilities of the space — as well as the condition of the building.”

Carpenter & Company won the right to develop the property in 2000 through a land-lease deal with Massachusetts General Hospital, which owns the land on which the jail sits. The company also developed the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, along with other prominent hotels in the area.

But the Liberty Hotel’s biggest challenge so far, Mr. Friedman said, has been the constraints on redevelopment of the building, which has been declared a national historic landmark. Carpenter & Company will receive an estimated $17 million in federal and state tax credits, contingent upon maintaining the historic nature of the jail, which was built to the latest humane standards of the mid-1800s for jailhouse construction, but had sunk into deplorable conditions by the time inmates sued in 1971. The jail closed in 1990, under a 1973 federal court order.

The jail’s storied history will be the feature of an interpretive exhibit in a corridor off the lobby. Among the more notable inmates was James Michael Curley, who served time in the early 1900s after taking the civil service exam in the name of a friend, but went on to become governor of Massachusetts. A group of suffragists was imprisoned in 1919 for protesting when President Woodrow Wilson visited Boston. “At the end of the day, we want to maintain the historic image of the jail,” Mr. Friedman said. “Guests will know it’s a jail. There will be bars on some windows. There will be old cellblocks exposed.”

Hotels built out of jails or prisons have become increasingly popular. At least three bed-and-breakfast inns are operating in former jails in small towns in the United States, including one converted from an elegant Italianate county jail built around 1869 in Preston, Minn. And numerous budget accommodations and youth hostels have been built in converted jails and prisons worldwide, including countries like Canada, Switzerland, Slovenia, South Africa and Australia.

In November 2004, the Comfort Inn Alamo Riverwalk opened in the former Bexar County Jail, built in 1878 in San Antonio.. Room rates range from $109 to $199 a night.

The building had been used to store files since it stopped functioning as a jail in the early 1960s, according to Robin Joseph, the hotel’s general manager. The jail was made into 82 rooms under strict oversight by preservationists. Some modifications, though, were necessary, like covering up a three-story chute in one corner of the hotel, which was known as the “hanging room.”

Thick concrete walls made life difficult for developers who converted the former Sultanahmet Prison in Turkey, built around 1918, into the 65-room Four Seasons Istanbul, which opened in 1996. The hotel still works hard to try to accommodate customers with uninterrupted cellphone signals, said Marcos Bekhit, a regional vice president for the Four Seasons and the general manager of the hotel.

Depicted in the 1978 film “Midnight Express,” which was not actually filmed at the prison, Sultanahmet was one of the first penal institutions to be converted into a luxury hotel. Developers found a telling bit of doggerel scratched into its walls: “All the world’s an inn — or that’s the tale, but Sultanahmet is a stinking jail.” The Four Seasons Istanbul, whose room rates range from $390 to $3,500 a night, initially tried to play down its history when it opened, according to Mr. Bekhit.

“We used to hide the fact that it’s a prison,” he said, until the owners learned that its history was a large part of what draws people to the hotel. “Now, we talk very much about the most beautiful prison in the world,” he said.

The prison, which had been used for political prisoners from the late 1970s until its closure in 1982, was a logical candidate for conversion to a hotel because it is in the old quarter of Istanbul, with the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace at its doorstep, Mr. Bekhit said. Still, he said, it has been hard to deal with the restrictions put on redevelopment by Turkey’s heritage board, which oversees redevelopment of historic buildings.

“We were not allowed to change anything, from the size and shape of the windows to the mustard paint,” he said. “We had to paint 12 tones of mustard color — the original color of the prison — and we have a lot of paint in our storage area.”

Mr. Bekhit said that although he was initially surprised that Four Seasons was willing to open a hotel in an old prison, he recognizes that the architecture has been an important factor in the hotel’s success.

The template of a jail, which developers say is easily adaptable to a hotel, attracted the British hotel chain Malmaison to Her Majesty’s Prison Oxford in Oxfordshire, England. The prison closed around 1996 and opened as a 97-room hotel, the Malmaison Oxford, in December 2005.

“I’m pleased to say we’re running at similar occupancies to when it was a prison,” said Robert B. Cook, president and chief executive of Malmaison, meaning that the hotel is often fully booked for six weeks in advance. The cost of the hotel conversion was about $42.5 million. But the hotel — which uses as its slogan, “This time, we take no prisoners” — was worth it, Mr. Cook said.

“If a prison came my way again, I’d do it,” said Mr. Cook, whose hotel company has also been involved in conversions of churches and breweries.

Back in Boston, the developers of the Liberty Hotel in Boston said they doubted that they would take on another conversion of a jail to a hotel.

“I wouldn’t do it again,” said Mr. Friedman, who struggled to finance the project after 9/11, and eventually found funding from private sources like Deutsche Bank and San Diego National Bank.

“This was fun,” he said, “but it’s a heck of a lot easier to build a hotel at a highway cloverleaf somewhere.”

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/realestate/commercial/18sqft.html?pagew

Posted by lois at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

John Brentlinger- writer, activist, philosopy professor

John Brentlinger; UMass philosophy professor
3/20/2007

NORTHAMPTON - John Allen Brentlinger, University of Massachusetts philosophy professor, writer, photographer, jazz trumpet musician, poet, and activist, died Tuesday morning, March 6, 2007 surrounded by his loving wife, Sandy Mandel, sons Bruce, Chris, and Peter Brentlinger, daughter Katherine Brentlinger Mahmood, their spouses and partners, and a few close friends. While participating in a clinical trial with significant future medical potential, he died of complications from cancer. He was 72 years old.

The son of the late Ralph Fusen Brentlinger and Pattye Wallace Brentlinger, John was born in Sapulpa, Okla. during the Depression. He enlisted in the Navy during the Korean War, and was stationed in Guam. While on Guam he was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he earned his baccalaureate degree. He went on to complete his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Yale University, was hired to teach Greek philosophy in the University of Massachusetts Philosophy Department, and taught undergraduate and graduate philosophy until his retirement in 1996. His first book, The Symposium of Plato (1970), illustrated by Leonard Baskin, continues to be regarded as an important contribution to the field of philosophy.

John was profoundly influenced by and came to political maturity during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of intensive and exciting political and cultural transformation. During those years John turned Left and never looked back, becoming a Socialist, a Marxist philosopher, and an activist. In 1973, he and Ann Ferguson were among the co-founders of the Socialist/Feminist Philosophers Association (SOFPHIA), which continues to support the innovative work and thinking of a national network of progressive philosophers. In the early 1980s John was inspired by land rescuers in Puerto Rico, documenting their struggle in his book Villa Sin Miedo: Presente!. It was during that era that John was also first introduced to the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. What began as a burgeoning political interest blossomed into a committed life-long love affair, particularly with the community of artists and artisans of Solentiname. In Nicaragua, John found "sacred places and events created by people in an unself-conscious, communal process of self-definition" and in those places and with those people, John felt a deep and loving solidarity. His book, The Best of What We Are: Reflections on the Nicaraguan Revolution (1995), noted to be of "immense philosophical significance," is based on John's experiences in Nicaragua over a period of more than 20 years. In 1999 he founded an NGO, the Solentiname Friendship Group of Western Massachusetts, which works with its Nicaraguan counterpart, the Union de Pintores y Artesano de Solentiname, to promote education, healthcare, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, and eco-tourism. While the material aid and support to the Nicaraguan community is significant, the reciprocal relationships established through this solidarity work improves the quality of life for all the participants. In this spirit, John organized and curated Solentiname art exhibits throughout the United States, with all proceeds benefiting this project.

John was a long-time resident of Leverett and moved to the Bay State community of Florence in 2003. As a member of this community, John became active in and gave sermons at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence as well as other congregations in New England. At the time of his death, he was completing a new book, The Unbroken Circle: U.S. and Nicaraguan Communities in Solidarity.

Besides his wife and children, he will be mourned by his adored grandchildren, Zara, Zamyaa, Preston, Evan, and Rayyan; his brother, William Wallace Brentlinger, and his wife, Ruth; sister Frances Joiner; a loving extended family, including Henrietta Mandel, Ann Ferguson and her partner Carol Shea; Elena Pineda and her family, many close friends; the members of the Solentiname Friendship Group; and the people of Isla San Fernando/Elvis Chavarria, Solentiname, Nicaragua.

A memorial celebration of John's life will be held on May 6 at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence at 4 p.m. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Solentiname Friendship Group/Education Fund, c/o Ann Browning, P.O. Box 2006, Ashfield, MA, 01330 and the Cancer Connection of Florence, MA, 01060.

Posted by lois at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2007

Bob Herbert, NY Times: "Jeffrey Lucey-Death of a Marine"

March 19, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Death of a Marine
By BOB HERBERT

Jeffrey Lucey was 18 when he signed up for the Marine Reserves in December 1999. His parents, Kevin and Joyce Lucey of Belchertown, Mass., were not happy. They had hoped their son would go to college.

Jeffrey himself was ambivalent.

“The recruiter was a very smooth talker and very, very persistent,” Ms. Lucey told me in a call from Orlando, Fla., where she was on vacation with her husband and their two grown daughters last week. The conversation was difficult. Ms. Lucey would talk for a while, and then her husband would get on the phone.

“We see him everywhere,” Ms. Lucey said. “Every little dark-haired boy you see, it looks like Jeff. If we see a parent reprimanding a child, it’s like you want to go up and say, ‘Oh, don’t do that, because you don’t know how long you’re going to have him.’ ”

The war in Iraq began four years ago today. Fans at sporting events around the U.S. greeted the war and its early “shock and awe” bombing campaign with chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Jeffrey Lucey, who turned 22 the day before the war began, had a different perspective. He had no illusions about the glory or glamour of warfare. His unit had been activated and he was part of the first wave of troops to head into the combat zone.

A diary entry noted the explosion of a Scud missile near his unit: “The noise was just short of blowing out your eardrums. Everyone’s heart truly skipped a beat. ... Nerves are on edge.”

By the time he came home, Jeffrey Lucey was a mess. He had gruesome stories to tell. They could not all be verified, but there was no doubt that this once-healthy young man had been shattered by his experiences.

He had nightmares. He drank furiously. He withdrew from his friends. He wrecked his parents’ car. He began to hallucinate.

In a moment of deep despair on the Christmas Eve after his return from Iraq, Jeffrey hurled his dogtags at his sister Debra and cried out, “Don’t you know your brother’s a murderer?”

Jeffrey exhibited all the signs of deep depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Wars do that to people. They rip apart the mind and the soul in the same way that bullets and bombs mutilate the body. The war in Iraq is inflicting a much greater emotional toll on U.S. troops than most Americans realize.

The Luceys tried desperately to get help for Jeffrey, but neither the military nor the Veterans Administration is equipped to cope with the war’s mounting emotional and psychological casualties.

On the evening of June 22, 2004, Kevin Lucey came home and called out to Jeffrey. There was no answer. He noticed that the door leading to the basement was open and that the light in the basement was on. He did not see the two notes that Jeffrey had left on the first floor for his parents:

“It’s 4:35 p.m. and I am near completing my death.”

“Dad, please don’t look. Mom, just call the police — Love, Jeff.”

The first thing Mr. Lucey saw as he walked down to the basement was that Jeff had set up an arrangement of photos. There was a picture of his platoon, and photos of his sisters, Debra and Kelly, his parents, the family dog and himself.

“Then I could see, through the corner of my eye, Jeff,” said Mr. Lucey. “And he was, I thought, standing there. Then I noticed the hose around his neck.”

The Luceys hope that in talking about their family’s tragedy they will bring more attention to the awful struggle faced by so many troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other emotional illnesses. “We hear of so many suicides,” said Mr. Lucey.

Ms. Lucey added, “We thought that if we told other people about Jeffrey they might see their loved ones mirrored in him, and maybe they would be more aggressive, or do something different than we did. We didn’t feel we had the knowledge we needed and we lost our child.”

The Luceys are more than just concerned and grief-stricken. They’re angry. They’ve joined an antiwar organization, Military Families Speak Out, and they want the war in Iraq brought to an end. “That’s the only way to prevent further Jeffreys from happening,” Ms. Lucey said.

Mr. Lucey made no effort to hide his bitterness over the government’s failure to address many of the critical needs of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. His voice quivered as he said, “When we hear anybody in the administration get up and say that they support the troops, it sickens us.”

Posted by lois at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2007

4th Anniversary of the Iraq War- "The Ides of March 2003"

March 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist, NY Times
The Ides of March 2003
By FRANK RICH

TOMORROW night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now ...” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

By the time the ides of March arrived in March 2003, these warning signs were visible on a nearly daily basis. So were the signs that Americans were completely ill prepared for the costs ahead. Iraq was largely anticipated as a distant, mildly disruptive geopolitical video game that would be over in a flash.
Now many of the same leaders who sold the war argue that escalation should be given a chance. This time they’re peddling the new doomsdayscenario that any withdrawal timetable will lead to the next 9/11. The question we must ask is: Has history taught us anything in four years?Here is a chronology of some of the high and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week [with occasional “where are they now” updates].

March 5, 2003
“I took the Grey Poupon out of my cupboard.”
— Representative Duke Cunningham, Republican of California, on the floor of the House denouncing French opposition to the Iraq war.

[In November 2005, he resigned from Congress and pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from defense contractors. In January 2007, the United States attorney who prosecuted him — Carol Lam, a Bush appointee — was forced to step down for “performance-related” issues by Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department.]

March 6, 2003
President Bush holds his last prewar news conference. The New York Observer writes that he interchanged Iraq with the attacks of 9/11 eight times, “and eight times he was unchallenged.” The ABC News White House correspondent, Terry Moran, says the Washington press corps was left “looking like zombies.”

March 7, 2003
Appearing before the United Nations Security Council on the same day that the United States and three allies (Britain, Spain and Bulgaria) put forth their resolution demanding that Iraq disarm by March 17, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, reports there is “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”. He adds that documents “which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” None of the three broadcast networks’ evening newscasts mention his findings.

[In 2005 ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.]

March 10, 2003
Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks tells an audience in England, “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Boycotts, death threats and anti-Dixie Chicks demonstrations follow.

[In 2007, the Dixie Chicks won five Grammy Awards, including best song for “Not Ready to Make Nice.”]

March 12, 2003

A senior military planner tells The Daily News “an attack on Iraq could last as few as seven days.”

“Isn’t it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness?”
— John McCain, writing for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

“The Pentagon still has not given a name to the Iraqi war. Somehow ‘Operation Re-elect Bush’ doesn’t seem to be popular.”
— Jay Leno, “The Tonight Show.”

March 14, 2003
Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, asks the F.B.I. to investigate the forged documents cited a week earlier by ElBaradei and alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction: “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”

March 16, 2003
On “Meet the Press,” Dick Cheney says that American troops will be “greeted as liberators,” that Saddam “has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups, including the Al Qaeda organization,” and that it is an “overstatement” to suggest that several hundred thousand troops will be needed in Iraq after it is liberated. Asked by Tim Russert about ElBaradei’s statement that Iraq does not have a nuclear program, the vice president says, “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong.”

“There will be new recruits, new recruits probably because of the war that’s about to happen. So we haven’t seen the last of Al Qaeda.”
— Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism czar, on ABC’s “This Week.”

[From the recently declassified “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006: “The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”]

“Despite the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of Congress. Senior intelligence analysts say they feel caught between the demands from White House, Pentagon and other government policy makers for intelligence that would make the administration’s case ‘and what they say is a lack of hard facts,’ one official said.”
— “U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms,” by Walter Pincus (with additional reporting by Bob Woodward), The Washington Post, Page A17.

March 17, 2003
Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, who voted for the Iraq war resolution, writes the president to ask why the administration has repeatedly used W.M.D. evidence that has turned out to be “a hoax” — “correspondence that indicates that Iraq sought to obtain nuclear weapons from an African country, Niger.”

[Still waiting for “an adequate explanation” of the bogus Niger claim four years later, Waxman, now chairman of the chief oversight committee in the House, wrote Condoleezza Rice on March 12, 2007, seeking a response “to multiple letters I sent you about this matter.”]

In a prime-time address, President Bush tells Saddam to leave Iraq within 48 hours: “Every measure has been made to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it.” After the speech, NBC rushes through its analysis to join a hit show in progress, “Fear Factor,” where men and women walk with bare feet over broken glass to win $50,000.

March 18, 2003
Barbara Bush tells Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that she will not watch televised coverage of the war: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it’s going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s, it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
[Visiting the homeless victims of another cataclysm, Hurricane Katrina, at the Houston Astrodome in 2005, Mrs. Bush said, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them.”]

In one of its editorials strongly endorsing the war, The Wall Street Journal writes, “There is plenty of evidence that Iraq has harbored Al Qaeda members.”

[In a Feb. 12, 2007, editorial defending the White House’s use of prewar intelligence, The Journal wrote, “Any links between Al Qaeda and Iraq is a separate issue that was barely mentioned in the run-up to war.”]

In an article headlined “Post-war ‘Occupation’ of Iraq Could Result in Chaos,” Mark McDonald of Knight Ridder Newspapers quotes a “senior leader of one of Iraq’s closest Arab neighbors,” who says, “We’re worried that the outcome will be civil war.”

A questioner at a White House news briefing asserts that “every other war has been accompanied by fiscal austerity of some sort, often including tax increases” and asks, “What’s different about this war?” Ari Fleischer responds, “The most important thing, war or no war, is for the economy to grow,” adding that in the president’s judgment, “the best way to help the economy to grow is to stimulate the economy by providing tax relief.”

After consulting with the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, the N.C.A.A. announces that the men’s basketball tournament will tip off this week as scheduled. The N.C.A.A. president, Myles Brand, says, “We were not going to let a tyrant determine how we were going to lead our lives.”

March 19, 2003
“I’d guess that if it goes beyond three weeks, Bush will be in real trouble.”
— Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel teaching at Boston University, quoted in The Washington Post.

[The March 2007 installment of the Congressionally mandated Pentagon assessment “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” reported that from Jan. 1 to Feb. 9, 2007, there were more than 1,000 weekly attacks, up from about 400 in spring 2004.]

Robert McIlvaine, whose 26-year-old son was killed at the World Trade Center 18 months earlier, is arrested at a peace demonstration at the Capitol in Washington. He tells The Washington Post: “It’s very insulting to hear President Bush say this is for Sept. 11.”

“I don’t think it is reasonable to close the door on inspections after three and a half months,” when Iraq’s government is providing more cooperation than it has in more than a decade.
— Hans Blix, chief weapons inspector for the United Nations.

The Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans support going to war in Iraq, up from 59 percent before the president’s March 17 speech.

“When the president talks about sacrifice, I think the American people clearly understand what the president is talking about.”
— Ari Fleischer

[Asked in January 2007 how Americans have sacrificed, President Bush answered: “I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”]

Pentagon units will “locate and survey at least 130 and as many as 1,400 possible weapons sites.”
— “Disarming Saddam Hussein; Teams of Experts to Hunt Iraq Arms” by Judith Miller, The Times, Page A1.

President Bush declares war from the Oval Office in a national address: “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure.”

Price of a share of Halliburton stock: $20.50
[Value of that Halliburton share on March 16, 2007, adjusted for a split in 2006: $64.12.]

March 20, 2003
“The pictures you’re seeing are absolutely phenomenal. These are live pictures of the Seventh Cavalry racing across the deserts in southern Iraq. They will — it will be days before they get to Baghdad, but you’ve never seen battlefield pictures like these before.”
— Walter Rodgers, an embedded CNN correspondent.

“It seems quite odd to me that while we are commenced upon a war, we have no funding for that war in this budget.”
—Hillary Clinton.

“Coalition forces suffered their first casualties in a helicopter crash that left 12 Britons and 4 Americans dead.”
— The Associated Press.

Though the March 23 Oscar ceremony will dispense with the red carpet in deference to the war, an E! channel executive announces there will be no cutback on pre-Oscar programming, but “the tone will be much more somber.”

March 21, 2003
“I don’t mean to be glib about this, or make it sound trite, but it really is a symphony that has to be orchestrated by a conductor.”
— Retired Maj. Gen. Donald Shepperd, CNN military analyst, speaking to Wolf Blitzer of the bombardment of Baghdad during Shock and Awe.

[“Many parts of Iraq are stable. But of course what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everyone.”
— Laura Bush, “Larry King Live,” Feb. 26, 2007.]

“The president may occasionally turn on the TV, but that’s not how he gets his news or his information. ... He is the president, he’s made his decisions and the American people are watching him.”
— Ari Fleischer.

[The former press secretary received immunity from prosecution in the Valerie Wilson leak case and testified in the perjury trial of Scooter Libby in 2007.]

“Peter, I may be going out on a limb, but I’m not sure that the first stage of this Shock and Awe campaign is really going to frighten the Iraqi people. In fact, it may have just the opposite effect. If they feel that they’ve survived the most that the United States can throw at them and they’re still standing, and they’re still able to go about their lives, well, then they might be rather emboldened. They might feel that, well, look, we can stand a lot more than this.”

— Richard Engel, a Baghdad correspondent speaking to Peter Jennings on ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

-------------------------------

AND, go to this url to see the chart (you can enlarge the chart) from Feb 2004 to Feb 2007 on statistics of causalities, deaths and economic indicators in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/opinion/18ohanlon.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2007

Barbara Gittings, 74, Prominent Gay Rights Activist Since ’50s, Dies

March 15, 2007, NY Times
Barbara Gittings, 74, Prominent Gay Rights Activist Since ’50s, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX

Barbara Gittings, a prominent gay rights activist who a decade before the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 was agitating for the rights of lesbians and gay men, died on Feb. 18 at her home in Kennett Square, Pa. She was 74.

The cause was breast cancer, said her partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen.

At a time when few gay men and women dared come out in private, much less in public, Ms. Gittings was a vocal — and highly visible — figure in the fledgling gay rights movement. In the late 1950s, she founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national organization for lesbians. In the 1960s, she took part in early gay rights demonstrations at the White House and elsewhere. In the early 1970s, she helped lobby the American Psychiatric Association to change its stance on homosexuality; in 1973, the association rescinded its definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

M
“She was one of the rare people in the homophile movement — before Stonewall — who took a militant stance,” David Carter, the author of “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution” (St. Martin’s, 2004), said in a telephone interview. “And she not only took a militant stance, but she was in the forefront.”

Ms. Gittings also worked to make information about gay men and lesbians more widely available in libraries. Though not a librarian by training, she was for many years the head of the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force. (It is known today as the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Round Table.) In that capacity, she oversaw and edited the association’s comprehensive bibliography of literature by and about gay men and lesbians.

As Ms. Gittings often said in interviews, she became keenly aware of the need for such a bibliography as a young woman, when she scoured local libraries, seeking, but seldom finding, something that would help her understand her own life.

Barbara Gittings was born on July 31, 1932, in Vienna, where her father was a member of the United States diplomatic corps. Returning to the United States when Barbara was young, the family eventually settled in Wilmington, Del. When she was a teenager, her father caught her reading “The Well of Loneliness,” the 1928 novel of lesbian love by the English writer Radclyffe Hall. He told her to burn the book. He did so by letter, for he could not bring himself to speak to her.

Ms. Gittings entered Northwestern University, intending to study drama. But she was increasingly distracted by the need to learn as much as she could about homosexuality. She haunted the libraries of Chicago, unearthing little that was relevant and less that was encouraging.

“I had to find bits and pieces under headings like ‘sexual perversion’ and ‘sexual aberration’ in books on abnormal psychology,” Ms. Gittings told the publication American Libraries in 1999. “I kept thinking, ‘It’s me they’re writing about, but it doesn’t feel like me at all.’ ”

She left Northwestern after her freshman year, and throughout her decades of activism supported herself with clerical jobs. In 1958, commuting from her home in Philadelphia, Ms. Gittings started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, which was founded in San Francisco in 1955; she later edited the organization’s national newsletter, The Ladder. In 1965, she took part in one of the first gay rights pickets of the White House, an effort to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in federal employment.

Ms. Gittings received many awards, among them honorary membership in the American Library Association. The Free Library of Philadelphia named its gay and lesbian collection for her. This week, the New York Public Library acquired the papers of Ms. Gittings and Ms. Lahusen, which chronicle more than half a century in the gay rights movement.

Besides Ms. Lahusen, her companion of 46 years, Ms. Gittings is survived by a sister, Eleanor Gittings Taylor of San Diego. With Ms. Lahusen, Ms. Gittings lived for many years in Philadelphia and Wilmington before moving to Kennett Square in January.

“Before Barbara died, we went jointly into an assisted-living facility here,” Ms. Lahusen said by telephone. “Our last bit of activism was to come out in the newsletter of our assisted-living facility.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/obituaries/15gittings.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

ALABAMA VOICES: Fight for voting rights continues

ALABAMA VOICES: Fight for voting rights continues

March 5, 2007

By Kenneth Glasgow

Politicians, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, religious leaders and civil rights activists, including Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, gathered to honor the struggle for voting rights in Alabama at events marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

I am comforted by the important gains made by African Americans over the past 40 years, but reminded that the dream of equality Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. imagined is yet to be realized.

On March 7, 1965, marchers seeking voting rights for disenfranchised blacks in the South were beaten by police officers who wanted to stop the Selma to Montgomery protest. The tragic event mobilized broad support for the elimination of racist policies that created obstacles to African-American voting, and helped trigger the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The law was a vital step towards achieving the fundamental democratic principal of universal suffrage.

Despite the historic change, millions of Americans are still excluded from the polls because of restrictive felony voting laws that reflect the dramatic growth of the prison system in recent decades. At the time the Voting Rights Act was implemented, 1.5 million Americans could not vote because of a felony record. Today, more than 5.3 million people are disenfranchised nationally. This rise in the number of disenfranchised adults is an unfortunate reminder that the fight for voting rights goes on.

Alabama has the third highest disenfranchisement rate in the nation because its constitution imposes a lifetime ban on voting for people with certain felony convictions, and as a result nearly a quarter-million of our citizens cannot vote. Alabama is one of only 12 states to permanently bar some citizens from voting even after the completion of their full sentence. Of those disenfranchised in Alabama, nearly 90 percent have been released from prison, and live and work in the community.

Among African-Americans in Alabama, the rate of disenfranchisement is particularly stark. One of every seven African-American adults in Alabama is disenfranchised, a rate nearly twice the national average. Because Alabama imprisons African-Americans at a rate nearly four times that of whites, the racial influences that impact Alabama's criminal justice system contribute to African-Americans' high rates of disenfranchisement.

The result is that black communities have a diminished political voice. Even people without convictions lose political clout because the concerns of the community are not equally represented at the polls.

Since 1997, 16 states have taken steps to reform disenfranchisement laws, resulting in more than 600,000 people regaining the right to vote. Four years ago, the Alabama Legislature sought to improve its voter restoration process as well, by restoring voting rights to eligible people within 50 days of submitting an application.

It was a move in the right direction, but the bureaucratic confusion and inefficiency that arose has illegally denied voting rights to thousands of Alabama citizens. A voter restoration system that applies automatically after release from prison would ease the administrative burdens that delay restoration.

This is in sharp contrast to Attorney General Troy King's recent proposal to make Alabama's voter system even more backward by requiring all citizens with felony convictions to apply through the bureaucratic restoration process.

The men and women who have redeemed themselves by serving their time in prison should be embraced and welcomed home. Restoring their right to vote is a crucial part of giving them a second chance. As a person who has been previously incarcerated, I know that voting connects you to your community by building responsibility for your neighbors and advancing common goals of democracy. Research has also shown that former offenders who vote are less likely to be rearrested than non-voters.

As we commemorate our advancements, I hope our country's leaders do not forget that the struggle for democracy continues for more than 5 million Americans who cannot vote because of past mistakes. The effort to expand voting rights to people with felony convictions is the new frontier of the civil rights movement. I hope those who marked this anniversary will join it.

Rev. Kenneth Glasgow is state coordinator of Alabama Restore the Vote and executive director of The Ordinary People Society.

Posted by lois at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2007

Marie LaPinta's Brother Closer to Freedom After 23 Years

Newsday
Mar 14, 2007
Long Island
Man convicted in '83 closer to freedom
BY ALFONSO A. CASTILLO

Two years after overturning the murder conviction of Marie La Pinta for the killing of her abusive husband, a Suffolk judge has done the same for her brother, who was convicted of pulling the trigger.

State Supreme Court Justice Robert W. Doyle Tuesday vacated the 1984 murder conviction of Leonardo Crociata, 73, who has served 23 years for the 1983 shooting of his sister's husband, Michael La Pinta. Crociata's sentence was 25 years to life.

Following Doyle's ruling, Crociata pleaded guilty to murder Tuesday and is expected to receive a sentence on March 22 that will allow for a prompt parole. Anthony La Pinta said he and his brother, Lenny, "who are really the victims in this," will plead for their uncle's immediate release.

As he did with Marie La Pinta, 71, Doyle ruled that Crociata was denied a fair trial because he was represented by the same law firm as his sister and was not notified by the trial judge of the conflict of interest.

"It's a joyous event for us," said Crociata's nephew, Hauppauge defense attorney Anthony La Pinta, who led the legal campaign that culminated in his mother's 2005 release. "I think the premise here is that finally he's had a second day in court and it's a much fairer day than the first day."

In his ruling, Doyle said that the conflict "affected the nature of the defense" offered on Crociata's behalf.

"He's gratified with the decision, no question," said Crociata's attorney, Kevin Keating of Garden City, who filed the motion seeking the reversal of his client's conviction several months ago. "He's just hopeful that one day soon he'll be able to reunite with his family."

That family includes a wife of 42 years, a son who is a New York City firefighter, one daughter who is a special education teacher and another who is a physical therapist. Keating said his client's family, who live in Brooklyn, requested privacy.

Suffolk prosecutors did not comment on the case. As they did with his sister's case, prosecutors supported overturning Crociata's murder conviction, stating in court documents that "a clear and unequivocal conflict of interest existed" in his representation.

Marie La Pinta's son, Lenny, said he was "elated" over the news about his uncle.

"Now there's a sense of closure. Now we feel we've come full circle as a family," he said. "My mom has always wanted her brother to feel the same freedom as she does."

Crociata's possible release from prison would wrap up a quarter-century-long journey for the La Pinta family that began one early spring day when Crociata was at his sister's home and got involved in an argument with his brother-in-law.

Relatives say Michael La Pinta was abusive to his wife and they were about to separate. During the scuffle, Marie La Pinta hit her husband with a baseball bat and Crociata shot him to death. Marie La Pinta helped her brother wrap her husband's body in a mattress pad and dump it at the Babylon landfill.

After their mother and uncle's convictions, the La Pinta brothers mounted a massive effort focused on bringing their mother's abuse at the hands of her husband to light and winning her freedom.

Although Marie La Pinta's exoneration on murder charges and subsequent release were celebrated, Anthony La Pinta said the victory always felt "incomplete."

"She felt bittersweet about her case," said Anthony La Pinta. "She always said, from the beginning, that if she could change places with her brother, she would."

Keating said Crociata "always loved his sister and he remains happy that she has her freedom back."

Anthony La Pinta said his mother's first priority following her release was to visit her brother in prison. She has gone to see him at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate Stormville about twice a month, La Pinta said.

The siblings, who immigrated from Italy together, also talk on the phone nearly every night, La Pinta said.

"The bond between the two has not wavered, not one bit," he said.

Staff writer Zachary R. Dowdy contributed to this story.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lilapi0314,0,6437647.story?c
oll=ny-top-headlines

Posted by lois at 08:24 PM | Comments (0)

Clemency is rare but needed in Pa. prisons

From The Morning Call
March 13, 2007
Clemency is rare but needed in Pa. prisons
WILLIAM M. DiMASCIO

With the political pressure of a re-election campaign behind him and four more years in office assured, Gov. Ed Rendell took the somewhat dicey step of commuting the prison sentence of a man who had spent two-thirds of his life behind bars. It was a bold move in a state that arguably has the least compassionate sentencing structure in the nation. But timing is everything, as they say, and if the political stars finally aligned themselves for the governor, they were long overdue for about 4,000 life-sentenced prisoners.

Clemency for lifers has been virtually non-existent in Pennsylvania ever since the statewide referendum of 1997, when the law was changed to require a unanimous, rather than a majority, vote of the five-member Pardons Board before a commutation request could even be considered by the governor. This change put the power to deny clemency in the hands of any one board member, and with two politically sensitive, elected officials ? the attorney general and the lieutenant governor ? as members, the odds are stacked against any lifer's appeal making it to the governor. The current lieutenant governor, Catherine Baker Knoll, has been an exception in her willingness to support meritorious appeals.

Michael H. Anderson was one of only three prisoners to beat those odds. Ricki Pinkins was the first and his sentence was commuted to life on parole by outgoing interim Gov. Mark Schweiker in 2003. The third is George G. Orlowski who is still awaiting action.

The paucity of clemency is especially draconian because hundreds of men and women were sentenced to life without parole as juveniles; unwitting accomplices present during a homicide; and persons suffering from Battered Women Syndrome, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or a variety of mental and emotional impairments. In short, people who might deserve some form of sanctioning but who in most other states would be eligible for parole at some point.

Anderson, 54, has been in prison since he was 18 in 1971. He was convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of a SEPTA bus rider who Anderson and a group of his friends were attempting to rob. In the midst of a scuffle, Anderson was knocked to the ground and one of his friends, Raynard Gregory, took a knife from Anderson's pocket and stabbed the rider twice.

Gregory was tried after Anderson and received a sentence of seven to 20 years. He was paroled after serving seven years but convicted again later for a series of new violent crimes. Gregory currently is serving a 60-120 year sentence.

This kind of ironic twist ? in which the killer gets a lighter sentence than an accomplice ? is not uncommon. When taken together with the increasing number of wrongful convictions being brought to light by virtue of DNA evidence, it should be clear that our criminal justice system is seriously flawed. Some safety valve, such as the commutation process, needs to be functional.

Anderson operates a sewing machine, making underwear for Correctional Industries at SCI Graterford. He also serves as treasurer for the prison branch chapter of the NAACP. ''He's quiet and well-liked,'' Superintendent Dave DiGuglielmo said. ''And, he has a good work ethic or he wouldn't have been able to keep his job at Correctional Industries.''

Anderson, who applied unsuccessfully for commutation four other times, was married in the prison visiting room in 2002. He will have to spend a year in a community corrections center before being let out on parole. Ultimately, Anderson said, he would like to move to Virginia to live with his wife.

News of the commutation spread rapidly through the dank corridors of the maximum-security prison. Lifers, emotionally starved for any hope of ever being released, greeted Anderson's good fortune as a sign that the clemency drought might be ending.

The concept of clemency was not developed to reward prisoners or make their lives easier. Nor was it designed to advance the careers of politicians. It is an act of mercy, and it should be used to enhance our humanity.

William M. DiMascio is executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, with offices in Philadelphia.
Copyright © 2007, The Morning Call
http://www.mcall.com/news/opinion/anotherview/all-left_col-cmar13,0,7677315.story?coll=all-newsopinionanotherview-hed

Posted by lois at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)

Great Britain: The Big Question: Should women's prisons be closed?

The Big Question: Should women's prisons be closed? And, if so, what should replace them? By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 14 March 2007, The Independent (Great Britain)

Why are we asking this question now?

A radical report, commissioned by the Home Office, has called for all women's prisons to be shut down over the next 10 years and replaced by a network of small, secure units nearer to women's families.

Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, asked a Labour peer, Baroness Corston, to assess the pressures faced by female offenders after the suicide of six inmates at Styal jail, Cheshire, in just 13 months. Clearly shocked by the suffering and inefficiency she discovered during her nine-month inquiry, she painted a picture of life in women's prisons far removed from the cheerful camaraderie of Australian soap opera Prisoner Cell Block H.

She said: "I was dismayed to see so many women frequently sentenced for short periods of time for very minor offences, causing chaos and disruption to their lives and families, without any realistic chance of addressing the causes of their criminality." And she reached the conclusion that wide-ranging reform was essential to help break a grim cycle of abuse, addiction, family breakdown and offending affecting vulnerable women.

How many women are locked up?

Last weekend, 4,329 women were behind bars in 16 prisons in England and Wales. Although the total stabilised over the last year, suggesting magistrates are now heeding pleas to opt for community sentences for petty offenders, the trend has been upwards since the 1990s, with the female prison population virtually doubling in the past decade.

The largest and most well-known women's prison is Holloway, in north London, which holds almost 500 prisoners. A damning inspection report two years ago said it was infested with mice, pigeons and insects, although the prison service insists conditions have improved since then. The other 15 are spread between Kent and Durham, but wide areas of the country have no women's prison.

There has been none in the West Midlands since Brockhill prison in Redditch, Worcestershire, was converted into a male jail. Strangely, the nearest prison for a Cornish woman is nearly 200 miles away in Gloucestershire.

Are female offenders treated like men?

Women, representing only 5.4 per cent of the prison population, break the law much less often than men. Those who do are more likely to be guilty of theft and fraud and less likely to be involved in violence, criminal damage and organised crime.

The evidence suggests that when women fall foul of the criminal justice system they will be harshly treated by a system designed for men. More than one-third of those behind bars have no previous convictions, double the proportion of men.

More women than men kill themselves in prison - the reverse of the situation in the outside world - and five times more harm themselves. Women are more likely to be looking after children, and 18,000 youngsters suffer the often "catastrophic" loss of a jailed mother each year, Lady Corston warns. But because of the small number of women's prisons, they are often locked up far from their families.

What particular problems do women prisoners suffer?

The female prison population represents a grim snapshot of almost every social form of deprivation and disadvantage. More than half say they have suffered domestic violence, one in three has experienced sexual abuse, 80 per cent have no school qualifications and 40 per cent have spent time in local authority care.

Three-quarters display symptoms of severe neurotic disorders, such as depression or extreme anxiety. Three-quarters have to undergo detoxification programmes upon arriving in jail - sometimes for a cocktail of as many as nine drugs - with high levels of abuse of crack cocaine, heroin, cannabis and benziodiazepines.

In just six months in one prison, one woman killed herself and staff resuscitated another five. There were 13 attempted hangings and 28 self-strangulations, as well as 112 incidents of cutting. In five episodes, large amounts of medication were swallowed and, in a further two, glass and razor blades. One woman threatened to jump to her death and one attempted to suffocate herself. Staff found, and destroyed, 23 ligatures.

Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "Every time I visit a women's prison I am struck by how distressed and ill so many of the women prisoners look. On arrival, addicts huddle together pale and stick thin, some women are queuing for the telephone, desperately trying to sort out care for their children, other women are in shock, just staring into space."

What is the Home Office doing?

Mr Clarke and the Home Secretary, John Reid, have acknowledged that too many women are in custody. A "women's offending reduction programme" launched in 2004 set out plans to persuade courts to keep women out of jail, to improve programmes for women with mental health and drug problems and to help them find homes after being freed.

Ministers are studying projects in Halifax and Worcestershire, where women who have criminal records or are in danger of offending are given advice on turning around their lives. But the Government's good intentions are matched by only modest results. Some reformers argue the situation could be made worse by the constant air of crisis in the prison system in general.

What is the alternative?

Lady Corston wants fewer women sent to prison, with courts opting instead for community sentences. Those who have to be deprived of their liberty should no longer be locked up, but held in secure specialist units holding up to 30 women, where their behaviour and problems with drugs can be tackled.

She calls on the Government to phase out women's prisons over the next 10 years, and suggests that responsibility for women offenders should be transferred from the Home Office to the Department for Communities and Local Government. She argues that ministers should appoint a "champion" in government to oversee policy on women offenders, end the routine strip-searching of women in prison and improve jail sanitation.

How has the Home Office responded?

Although the department commissioned and published Lady Corston's report, and describes it as high-calibre, it stopped short of backing proposals that would amount to a revolution in the treatment of female prisoners. The Home Office Minister, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, gave "an undertaking that the Government will look at the issues it raises and the recommendations it makes". Ever sensitive to newspaper headlines, would they want to be vilified for allowing Rosemary West to serve the rest of her sentence in "a secure unit" in the centre of Gloucester?

Should women be sent to prison?

Yes...

* The public would not support notorious inmates such as Rosemary West being transferred to 'secure units'

* Putting them behind bars could provide a salutary shock that would deter them from reoffending

* Locking up offenders, whether male or female, sends a powerful deterrent message to society

No...

* Many are not habitual criminals, but vulnerable women who turn to petty crime to feed a drug habit

* Imprisoning mothers often leads to them losing contact with their children and being evicted from their homes

* Prison is not the best place to treat the chronic mental health and drug problems that many female inmates suffer Also in this section

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2355925.ece

Posted by lois at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2007

MI: A Way to Fill-Up Prisons Just As Some Prisoners Are Being Released

Free Press
Detroit, MI

Taking the long way to square one
March 7, 2007
BY BRIAN DICKERSON
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Taxpayers who argue that Michigan could get by just fine with a part-time Legislature clearly don't appreciate how complex the task of making laws has become in our fiscally challenged state.

For instance, the current legislative session is scarcely three months old, but our elected representatives in Lansing are already hard at work figuring out how to 1) reduce the number of nonviolent offenders incarcerated in our state prisons and 2) increase the number of nonviolent offenders incarcerated in our state prisons -- not necessarily in that order.

To understand the contradictory imperatives at play here, let's examine each prong of the problem the way seasoned legislators do, in complete isolation from the other prong.

The search for savings

Lansing's desire to reduce Michigan's burgeoning prison population arises from the state's need to cut spending by about $900 million before April 30 or start dunning taxpayers for the difference.

Earlier this year, a bipartisan advisory panel appointed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm suggested that the state, which currently imprisons a much larger percentage of its population than most of its Midwestern neighbors, could save truckloads of tax dollars if it stopped feeding and housing its least-dangerous inmates.

Granholm quickly followed up by proposing a $92-million cut in the Department of Corrections budget -- a savings she said could be achieved in part by freeing low-risk and sick inmates a little earlier than their scheduled release dates.

But fear not, Department of Corrections employees! What the budget-cutters taketh away, lawmakers may soon restoreth with a new law that could plunk thousands of drunk drivers into our already bulging prisons.

A new source of inmates

A law Granholm signed this year (after it won lopsided passage in both
houses) authorizes prosecutors to charge drivers facing their third drunken-driving convictions with a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison -- even if their previous arrests occurred decades ago.

The Senate Fiscal Agency says it has no idea how much the new law will cost taxpayers, because it has no way of predicting whether more drivers will be
1) dissuaded from committing a third DUI offense or 2) incarcerated for committing one.

But insurance data indicate that about 80% of two-time DUI offenders become multiple offenders. Birmingham lawyer Pat Barone, who specializes in the defense of DUI defendants, predicts the new law will generate between 6,000 and 10,000 new felony cases a year.

If 75% of those new felons are sentenced to the minimum prison term authorized by the new law, Michigan taxpayers would pay another $139 million to $232 million a year -- or about twice what Granholm proposes to save by releasing currently incarcerated low-risk offenders early.

If all goes well, Michigan's overcrowded prisons will be right back where they started by the time the new fiscal year begins.

Ha! I'd like to see a bunch of part-time legislators do that.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070307/COL04/703070326/108
1

Posted by lois at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: NY-Wrong Turn on Sex Offenders

March 13, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Wrong Turn on Sex Offenders

With little public discussion and no opposition to speak of, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has made New York the latest state to travel down a murky legal road, to a place where laws are made not in response to facts, but to wishfulness and fear. It is a place where prisoners who finish their sentences remain locked up for crimes they might commit, submitting to psychological treatment that nearly always fails and whose only sure outcome is the open-ended spending of tens of millions of dollars a year.

This is the result of the Legislature’s passing a bill last week calling for the civil commitment of sex offenders. Nineteen other states have such laws, which are motivated by the public’s intense revulsion at sexual crimes and fear of predatory offenders. Gov. George Pataki pushed for one for years, but never was able to get a bill past the Assembly. Then Mr. Spitzer tried and quickly got a different result, using the method he supposedly went to Albany to abolish: hashing legislation out behind closed doors and presenting it to the public as a done deal.

Mr. Spitzer says New York’s system will be a model for the country. It had better be, given that other states’ experiences are so troubling. These were laid out in a recent three-part series in The Times, which found that civil commitment laws have led to post-prison warehouses, where offenders check in, but don’t check out.

About 2,700 men are being held involuntarily in civil commitment programs around the country. The legal basis for their confinement, affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997, is treatment for a mental abnormality. But no one knows for sure if therapy works, and there are no studies of civil commitment’s effectiveness in preventing new crimes because so few offenders have been released from it.

There is, however, evidence that civil commitment can become a judicial fraud, with men being sent away on the psychological testimony of uncertified nonexperts into programs compromised by their conflicting mandates of offering therapy and being lockups. They cost, on average, four times more per inmate than prison, but almost never make an offender fit to rejoin society.

Sometimes the results are disastrous, like the Florida program, where offenders got drunk and reportedly had sex with staff members and one another. Offenders often shirk treatment; most never complete it. A few do, then get out to rape and murder again. Others are warehoused long past the time anyone would consider them a reasonable threat. Leroy Hendricks, the offender who challenged his confinement in the Supreme Court and lost, is now a 72-year-old stroke survivor who uses a wheelchair and costs Kansas taxpayers $185,000 a year.

There are other ways to handle the agonizingly difficult problem of sexually violent predators, and the bill, to its credit, contains several. It creates an elaborate regime of quasi-judicial proceedings, panels of experts and juries and judges that should satisfy many due-process concerns, though at a far higher cost than prison — hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient per year. It sharply increases criminal penalties for sex crimes, eliminates parole for sex-related felonies and provides long-term supervision for offenders who go free. It mandates treatment in prison.

It is clear that Mr. Spitzer and many lawmakers — though not the braying Republicans who sought a pandering lock-’em-all-up measure — have grappled seriously with the issue and fashioned a bill that is more decent that it could have been. But it is easy to doubt that the layer of protections they have created will work in the real, messy world.

And when you consider the recent explosion of local laws designed to keep sex offenders at bay — restricting where they can live and work, forcing them to the literal fringes of society, like some human form of toxic waste — what you see is not a rational system for managing risks and rehabilitating people, but a system for managing public fear. The state must be sure to monitor civil commitment to measure its effectiveness and be prepared to quickly revamp the program as flaws become apparent.

If the goal is to prevent as many sex crimes as possible with the resources at hand, then the state should be prepared to conclude that it might be smarter to spread its effort around. This might mean treating and supervising the large cohort of criminals who would never qualify for civil commitment, rather than lavishing resources on the impossible task of identifying one tiny subset, the worst of the worst, locking them indefinitely in dubious therapy as a much larger universe of offenders continues to abuse at will.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/opinion/13tue1.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

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

March 12, 2007

Bard & Cornell Conference for Youth Especially- Resisting Criminalization Conference- April 13-15, 2007

Resisting Criminalization Conference
April 13-15, 2007

The Prison Activist Coalitions at Bard College and Cornell University aregroups of students committed to combating the incessant growth,
inequality, racism, and oppression of the United States prison system.Join us in an effort to build a stronger movement against the rapid cagingand degredation of our communities.
At Bard, we grew from a few students who volunteered for the Bard PrisonInitiative by tutoring in New York State prisons. We believed that ourtutoring efforts were not sufficient to address the system’s failures.

This is now the group’s third year in existence. Our efforts began
educating our campus and the surrounding communities about many prisonissues. From there, the Prison Activist Coalition engaged in supportingprisoners through fundraisers, book-drives, art shows, letter-writingcampaigns, and other projects; fighting the Rockefeller Drug Laws andother draconian legislation; and speaking out against the injustices ofthe Prison Industrial Complex.

At Cornell, our work has grown from a group of students who wanted to
develop organizational capacity after attending events with Fred Hampton Jr. of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee and Ashanti Alston, formerBlack Panther and current chair of the Jericho Movement. We have alsodeveloped a strong relationship with the Southern Tier Advocacy andMitigation Project (S.T.A.M.P.) to develop peer-to-peer relationships withjuvenile prisoners at the MacCormick Secure Center and the LansingResidential Center. Further, we’ve developed a strong relationship withJalil Muntaqim, who is a political prisoner of the New York 3 residing at Auburn Correctional Facility.

However, our geography and our numbers limit the scope of our work. We atBard and Cornell realize that in order to adequately fight for radical changes, we need to immerse ourselves within a larger movement. But whereis this movement now? Many prison activist groups are working separately.In this time of apathy, heightened political repression, and a rapidlyintensifying crisis in our prison system, it is our responsibility tounite. With Eliot Spitzer as the new governor of New York and the recen victory of the Telephone Campaign for Justice to reduce the egregious
phone call costs of prisoners and their families, we feel this is an
opportune moment to develop a more unified and strategic set of goals forthis movement. Many students and community organizers in and around NewYork State are active in doing prison work; thus, in response to what weconsider a state of emergency, we are extending an invitation to allprison activists and community organizers - especially but not at alllimited to youth - to join us for a two-day conference at Bard CollegeApril 13-15th. We recognize that coming from these two schools we hold agreat deal of privilege and resources. However, we do not presume to speak
for all prisoners or the communities most affected by criminalization.Instead, we want to connect youth who will inherit this system with eachother, organizers with more experience with these issues, and members of all our communities.

The goals of this conference are:
1. To form a unified prison activist movement with a strong network ofcommunication among its individual organizations/members.
2. To produce a collective statement in response to urgent prison issuesand our proposal on what needs to be done.
3. To map out ways we can continue to work together and support oneanother’s efforts (i.e. planning a campaign).

This is not a conference to teach people about the prison system. On thecontrary, we are building a working conference as a forum where prison activists can come together to talk about current issues, what eachorganization does, the obstacles they face, what they desire to do, andhow we can all work collaboratively to effect real and lasting change. Itwill be an opportunity for us to link up, learn from each other, and forma broader base of action. Though this will take place at Bard College, wewant to join forces with other groups in developing the conference. Our
workshops and strategy sessions will focus on:
• Education in prison
• Juvenile incarceration
• Parole and re-entry
• Rockefeller Drug Laws
• Political Prisoners
• Jail/Prison expansion

What issues do you want to explore and what do you wish to accomplish fromsuch an event? Any feedback, outreach, and support you can offer willgreatly strengthen this endeavor. Join us to support prisoners and to counter the criminalization of our communities!

To obtain more information on the conference and to RSVP, please contact:
Jennifer Quick, jlq4@cornell.edu
or
Max Forman-Mullin, mm893@bard.edu

Posted by lois at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

MA: State fails immigrants

State fails immigrants
EILEEN MCNAMARA, Boston Globe
March 11, 2007

It is no small irony that the Spanish-speaking grandmothers and nursing mothers rounded up as national security threats in an immigration raid on a New Bedford leather factory were stitching safety vests and backpacks for the US military.

The government's multimillion-dollar contract with the owners of the factory where hundreds of low-wage earners were led away in shackles after an immigration sweep last week underscores the absurd contradictions inherent in our immigration policy. One federal bureaucracy is trying to deport the same undocumented workers whose cheap labor another federal bureaucracy is content to exploit.

The agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who carried out the raid work for an administration in Washington that has acknowledged that these sweeps are meaningless without comprehensive reform of national immigration policy. "The system we have in place has caused people to rely upon smugglers and forgers in order to do the work Americans aren't doing," President Bush said last December after a series of high-profile immigration sweeps across the nation. "It is a system that frankly leads to inhumane treatment of people."

Why, then, does the White House not call for an immediate cessation of these raids in favor of a long-promised and long-overdue overhaul of a broken system?

The bungled raid on the Michael Bianco factory served to provoke what Governor Deval Patrick rightly called "a humanitarian crisis" by shipping hundreds of workers, most of them women, to federal detention facilities in Texas, thousands of miles away from their families.

Now, at considerable taxpayer expense, federal officials are trying to remedy their precipitous separation of mothers from their children. But, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Patrick and Department of Social Services Commissioner Harry Spence were alerted in advance to plans to storm the factory. What responsibility then does the state bear for the mess that ensued? How did five of the eight minors picked up in the sweep wind up in a Miami detention facility without DSS knowledge?

Did state officials ask what was to happen to those detained? Did they insist that immigration officials provide legal counsel to detainees before they bundled them onto planes bound for Texas? Did they ask what imminent threat required that these women be removed from Massachusetts for deportation hearings that could be held here just as easily?

Decrying the consequences of inept federal action is a poor substitute for taking the precautions necessary to protect the basic human rights of Massachusetts residents, legal or undocumented.

Carolyn Newberger is a child psychologist in Brookline who has earned a national reputation for her work with neglected and abused children. The abrupt separation of mothers and children precipitated by this raid "is child neglect by any definition I know," she said in an e-mail. "If, as the US Department of Homeland Security claims, the Massachusetts Department of Social Services 'worked closely' with them prior to the raid on the Bianco clothing factory in New Bedford, then our state agency charged with the protection of children has itself actively collaborated in children's abandonment, starvation, and traumatic psychological injury. The damage to the children left behind is inevitable and incalculable, and the leadership of DSS must be held to account for their roles in this travesty."

Soon after taking office, Patrick wisely rescinded Mitt Romney's plan to deputize State Police as immigration agents. Romney's proposal was political pandering of the most craven kind, designed to fuel the anti-immigrant hysteria that is the red meat of the far right. Real leadership requires more, however. By stepping aside for the storm trooper tactics of the ICE agents, the Patrick administration is complicit in the results.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/03/11/state_fails_immigrants/
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.

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

March 11, 2007

Robert King Wilkerson cooks up a new life as a candy maker . Sweet freedom for man found innocent after 30 years.

Sweet freedom for man found innocent after 30 years
Robert King Wilkerson cooks up a new life as a candy maker
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF, Austin, TX
Sunday, February 11, 2007

Robert King Wilkerson eases out of bed. He pulls on a black shirt, a watch cap and sandals, and shuffles into the tiny kitchen of his East Austin duplex.

The shirt covers his tattoos, most self-inscribed decades ago using pencil lead. A long dagger extends down his left forearm; a spider rests on his left hand. The tops of his fingers say "L-O-V-E" and, below that, "H-A-T-E." The initials of a long-ago girlfriend grace his right forearm.

He assembles his ingredients: butter, milk, sugar, baking soda, vanilla and salt. He pulls a pot off a high shelf.

"I was arrested in 1961 for armed robbery," he begins. "Did I do it? Nah, not that one. But I wasn't ready to pay no poetic justice. Gee whiz, I was just a young man. I'd only been out of the reformatory for a year.

"I got sentenced to 10 years," he says. "That was the first time."

He moved to Austin last year after being chased out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and some friends here offered to help out.

The duplex is more studio than apartment. Wilkerson makes the bed next to the dining room table every morning. Paper clutter is placed into tidy piles set at right angles.

The room is filled with panther statues. There is a large wooden one on the floor, the old base of a hip 1970s coffee table. Jungle cats stalk across the TV and a shelf.

Photographs, lined neatly on shelves or tables and stuck to the refrigerator, depict Black Panthers of the human variety.

Here is Wilkerson next to Geronimo Pratt, a Panther organizer who spent 27 years in prison.

Here is Wilkerson standing between two new members of the party last year. Their faces are fierce, masked by dark Malcolm X glasses. Their fists are raised.

Wilkerson is the one in the middle, smiling.

Pralines surpass their ingredients. Combine sugar, butter and milk the wrong way, and you get a sticky mess. But in skilled hands, they produce a magical confection: buttery but not sickly rich, and sweet with a whiff of burned sugar.

Without measuring, Wilkerson pours the assembled ingredients into a soupy khaki-colored mixture. He places the pot on the stove and begins to stir.

"I was 22 when I got out of prison," he says. "I got married, had a son."

He boxed. "My first fight, I came out looking good. But after two rounds, he went to work on me. My arms got tired; my legs got tired. He was beatin' on somebody who wasn't fighting back."

He retired after a few more fights and took odd jobs. In 1970, he was busted for armed robbery again.

"I didn't do it," he insists. "But I know who did." The jury sentenced him to 35 years.

From his fifth-floor cell in the New Orleans parish prison, Wilkerson could hear the guards' television set.

"One day I heard the announcer creep into a program on the air," he says. "He said there was a shootout downtown with what they called 'militants.' "

Among those involved was Donald Guyton, who'd grown up with Wilkerson in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans and had become involved with the Panthers. Taken to the same parish prison as Wilkerson, Guyton says, he started introducing other prisoners to the organization. They protested living conditions and agitated against prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

"Our message was, just because you're incarcerated doesn't mean you have to give up your humanity," he says.

For Wilkerson, the Panthers were as much a translation service as anything: "I couldn't articulate what I was feeling" — a pressurized mixture of anger and hopelessness. "It wasn't until the Black Panthers stated it that I understood it."

After a short escape, he was sent to Angola Prison, where he was placedin solitary confinement. He still managed to carry the Black Panthers' message, and while he was there, he was active in helping file lawsuits and leading political discussions for the Panthers' only prison chapter.

A year later, a prisoner was killed, and Wilkerson and another man were blamed. During the trial, both were shackled, and, after courtroom outbursts by the other inmate, their mouths were duct-taped shut.

The Louisiana Supreme Court reversed that conviction, based in part on the duct tape. In the 1975 retrial, Wilkerson's co-defendant said he alone stabbed the man, but it didn't matter. Wilkerson was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

90 percent innovation

The mixture on the stove begins to froth, like a giant cappuccino. Wilkerson stirs with a long-handled wooden paddle, pulling it through the pot in lazy circles. The praline thickens. The trick is to let the liquid burn enough for flavor but not too much, ruining the batch altogether.

"This candy's funny," he says. "It depends on the weather. If it's sunshiny, it's nice. If it's too humid, it's not."

Wilkerson was raised in New Orleans by his grandmother. Although he'd always had a sweet tooth, he learned to make candy in prison. His first time behind bars, he watched an inmate conjure sweets out of milk from the prison's cows and sugar from the cane cut by inmates working on the farm.

In solitary a decade later, Wilkerson began experimenting in his cell. He collected butter and sugar packets at breakfast; sometimes, other inmates or even guards saved ingredients for him in exchange for a future taste. At first he tried using a "stinger," a homemade heating element created from a piece of metal and wires.

Later, he learned that if he rolled toilet paper into a coil and then tucked the edges back on themselves into a tissue doughnut, he had a sort of homemade Sterno that burned hot enough to caramelize the sugar. He twisted a towel around the can into a handle so he didn't burn his hand. He stirred the mixture with a ruler he stripped of paint.

A single batch — a couple of pounds — burned about 30 rolls of toilet paper. He cooked it on the toilet seat because it was easy to clean and because the entire operation could be swept into the toilet if an unfriendly guard wandered by.

He figured out he could peel the top off a Coke can to create a tiny pot. When that boiled over, he stacked more cans on top, creating a tall cooking tube.

When the candy was ready, he poured the caramel into a tray made from a manila folder covered in onionskin paper. As that cooled, he poured another layer on top and mixed them together with pecans, sometimes sneaked in by the guards.

"You got to have cooperation from the people who's working," he says. "It's the unity of opposites. The officer, you know, he has rules he has to go by. But he's got to work for 16 hours, too, so he wants to make things easy. And the brass walks the same road. So the officer allows you to do your little thing, as long as it doesn't infringe on his job.

"I'd usually start on a Friday night and finish on a Sunday," he says. "You got to have patience."

Slow and steady

The praline mixture has thickened. Wilkerson scrapes the caramel residue off the bottom of the pot. The smell of cooking sugar and heated milk pours from the stove.

He spreads pecans over a baking tray. Moving fast, he pours the mixture on top of the pecans. It spreads slowly, like cake batter.

How does a man pass 29 years in a 6-foot-by-9-foot concrete box?

"I was in prison," Wilkerson says, "but prison wasn't in me."

He did push-ups, jumping jacks, kick-outs, side kicks and stomach crunches in the narrow spaces of his cell. He paced. He read. He wrote. He studied the law. Eventually, what he learned helped him gain a new trial.

"It was a little crack in the door I was trying to creep through," he says.

The witness who'd implicated Wilkerson in the prison slaying recanted, saying he didn't see Wilkerson stab anyone. The crack widened.

Courts batted his case back and forth, granting him new trials and taking them away, declaring him innocent and re-proclaiming his guilt. Big-name lawyers took up his cause without pay, eager to fight what appeared more and more to be a political imprisonment.

He and two other Panther inmates, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, who spent the 1970s, '80s and '90s in a single room for 23 hours a day, came to be known as the Angola Three.

"Even if he was guilty," says George Kendall, a New York attorney who has sued Louisiana alleging cruel and unusual punishment on Wilkerson's behalf, "it doesn't justify" half a lifetime in solitary.

After much technical legal wrangling, prosecutors offered a deal: If Wilkerson would not sue them for a wrongful conviction, he could go free. He walked out of Angola on Feb. 8, 2001.

"Why did it take so long?" he says. "Why did it even happen? When they say the wheels of justice turn slow, that's crap. I believe justice delayed is justice denied. But I also believe justice delayed is terrorism. If you're not dying imminently, you're dying incrementally."

He pauses, takes a breath. "So, you ask me, 'Why did it take so long?' "

A slow smile. "I'd have to say, I guess the wheels of justice turn slow."

Just right, for now

"Some people, when they cook the candy, it'll come out a little sugary," Wilkerson says. "But to keep it creamy and less sugary, I do something different."

After pouring the now taffy-thick mixture over the pecans, he begins pushing the edges toward the middle, folding it back on itself, whipping air into the praline before it hardens completely.

When it is the consistency of a soft wax, he pulls a sharp paring knife across the surface, cutting it into roughly square chunks. Not quite caramel, not yet crunchy, it melts gently in the mouth, like maple sugar.

"When I was in prison making candy, guys would say, 'You could make a lot of money out there — if you ever get out.' " In the past couple of years, Wilkerson has sold his candies over the Internet, calling them Freelines. At $3 a bag, he's not challenging Hershey's. But most months, the sales cover his living costs: $350 rent, a few bucks more for food and utilities.

When he's not melting sugar, he speaks at rallies. He addressed a Black Panther reunion. He's traveled to more than a dozen countries to speak against injustice. He tries to keep the story of the Angola Three's two imprisoned members from fading away.

Sixty-four years old and free for the past five, Wilkerson's only real asset is his story. "All I do is talk," he says. "Just talk."

Ann Harkness, a local activist who has sponsored Wilkerson at several events, says she sometimes has to keep the question-and-answer sessions from turning into a freak show, like midway crowds staring at a man on a bed of nails: "You know, 'Come see the man who spent 30 years in solitary.' "

But Guyton, who is now known as Malik Rahim, suspects that people are drawn to Wilkerson not for what he endured but for how he emerged.

"For a person to go through 29 years in one of the most brutal prisons in America and still maintain his sanity and humanity, that's what makes people want to listen to Robert."

Being known as an American political prisoner has its perks. He is feted and toasted by the network of radicals permanently outraged by the Establishment. Here's a picture of him with socialist historian and author Howard Zinn; here's another with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California.

"It's a circle I got introduced to I never thought I would," he says. "Not that I wanted to."

In November, heiress and arts patron Ann Getty invited him to her San Francisco mansion. A living political art installation, he arrived each morning at 8:30, made pralines in her restaurant-size kitchen all day and left at 4. At the end of the two weeks, she presented him with a new industrial-size stove. It would take up almost his entire living room/bedroom, though, so it has stayed in California.

"A lot of these white activists don't understand," Harkness says. "He lives hand-to-mouth."

Walking out of Angola, Wilkerson says, "was like getting out of a graveyard. It's white on the outside and filled with rotting bones on the inside."

As a brush with death sharpens life, a lifetime of confinement can broaden the vision, and Wilkerson is reluctant to commit to anything.

"I started seeing the whole world as my stage," he says. "Not just New Orleans or Austin." Those places, he adds, "are just points of embarkation."

The pralines, too: "If I had something else to do, I'd probably do it." Someday, maybe, he'd like to open a restaurant.

But at the moment, he feels comfortable here. The small rooms and the predictable pace are familiar. The pralines, sweet and undemanding, are cooling on the counter.

"Maybe I did have a plan for when I got out," he says. "And maybe this is it."

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/02/11/11candyman.html

Posted by lois at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)

Mr. 76759 Designs His Dream House

The Angola 3 website is at www.angola3.org

March 11, 2007
Architecture, NY Times
Mr. 76759 Designs His Dream House
By CHRIS COLIN

MINOR improvements still occur to him, but Herman Wallace has more or less finished his dream house. It’s got a yellow kitchen, a hobby shop and custom-made pecan cabinets. It should be noted that no actual house exists, but this is understandable. Mr. Wallace has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola for the last 34 years.

Mr. Wallace’s virtual home is the subject of a new book, “The House That Herman Built,” and an art installation with three-dimensional models of the house is on tour in Europe. The project — which walks a thin line between art and activism — is a result of a question posed to Mr. Wallace five years ago: What kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6-by-9-foot cell for three decades dream of?

The woman who asked the question, and later produced the book and the installation, is Jackie Sumell, a 32-year-old white artist who at the time lived in San Francisco. Her work, often political, has been shown in galleries in San Francisco, Cincinnati and Portland, Ore. Mr. Wallace, a 65-year-old Black Panther originally imprisoned for robbery, was convicted in 1972 of murdering a prison guard. In November a state court commissioner recommended that his conviction be overturned, and a decision is pending on whether to adopt that recommendation.

In the four years it took to design the house, Ms. Sumell and Mr. Wallace developed a close rapport. Their intimacy can be glimpsed in the more than 300 letters they exchanged, many of which are included in the book. Their correspondence was initiated by Ms. Sumell after she attended a talk by an exonerated prisoner, a fellow Black Panther who had been put in solitary around the same time as Mr. Wallace. (They and a third inmate, also in solitary for decades, became known as the Angola Three.)

Nearly a year after her postal friendship with Prisoner No. 76759 began, Ms. Sumell entered the M.F.A. program at Stanford University and, in a class devoted to investigating spatial relationships and architecture, she was assigned to interview a faculty member about his home.

But she had a more interesting candidate.

Her next letter to Mr. Wallace described the assignment and asked him: What kind of house do you dream about after all these years in a cell?

Mr. Wallace’s cell is part of the 18,000-acre maximum-security prison in Angola, La. It was once a complex of plantations, named for the African country from which most of the slaves there were transported. The inmates still pick cotton and other crops in the fields.

“The house is going to need a swimming pool, with a light-green bottom and a large panther painted in the center,” Mr. Wallace wrote to Ms. Sumell.

Yet for the most part the house invented by a man in solitary confinement reflects the thoroughly ordinary existence that he lost in prison. Mr. Wallace, who grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, focused on amenities he longed for and old-fashioned building details he can remember.

The imagined house is the antithesis of Mr. Wallace’s current quarters: a suburban home of about 3,500 square feet surrounded by flowers; he specified roses, gloxinia and delphiniums. There is also a guest house, reserved for visiting activists. A second-floor master bedroom looks out over a marble patio, landscaped garden and massive oak tree.

Steel and concrete — prison materials — have no role here. Birch and pecan are everywhere, their special qualities carefully explained in Mr. Wallace’s letters.

Ms. Sumell said that Mr. Wallace, his view so abbreviated for so long, focused well on minute details — the potatoes and Tabasco sauce in the pantry, the notebooks laid out on the conference table — but had a harder time imagining open spaces.

Traces of a prison mindset crop up. When the placement of his computer meant his back would face the office door, Ms. Sumell said that he asked that a mirror be installed above, so he could see anyone entering the room. A sense of security is important to him, she explained. The master bedroom sits safely above the very center of the house. A wraparound porch adds a layer of perimeter, as does the surrounding garden. There is even a special door leading to an underground bunker, equipped with its own water supply. The goal, Ms. Sumell said, was never to feel trapped.

The time capsule of prison can be glimpsed in his preference for a 1970s aesthetic: shag carpeting flows through the three bedrooms, one decorated entirely in white. The master bedroom’s furniture is mahogany. The purple barstools were rejected: Ms. Sumell complained that she didn’t know how to draw them. In one concession to changing times, Mr. Wallace asked that the bearskin rug be made of fake fur.

As the details accumulated, Ms. Sumell added, the house became something Mr. Wallace could fully visualize and, consequently, served as a kind of escape. (Such powers of visualization are not uncommon for him after years of solitude: Ms. Sumell described a chess tournament he helped organize in which games were played by inmates calling out their moves, cell to cell.)

Though Ms. Sumell estimates that she made at least 20 trips to visit him at the prison over the four years they worked on designing the house, many of the descriptions and measurements were exchanged by mail and were subject to the prison’s censors. Once officials confiscated an elaborate floor plan Mr. Wallace had drawn; Ms. Sumell was told that it could have enabled another criminal to rob the (virtual) home.

The house would probably win no design awards. Except for the panther peering up from the pool bottom, Mr. Wallace’s ideal is resolutely plain by contemporary architectural standards. (In a telephone conversation from prison Mr. Wallace recalled photographs of some more experimental houses sent to him by Ms. Sumell: “They had houses in trees,” he said disapprovingly.)

What’s arresting about the design is the singular approach to architectural planning that brought it into being — Ms. Sumell calls herself the “tube Herman’s ideas go through” — and the emotional candor that infused the process. The letters in the book reveal excitement but also pain. In them Mr. Wallace refers to Ms. Sumell as a daughter, and at other times as a sister.

“We’re family,” she said matter of factly. “He’s my best friend.”

He gave advice on relationships and even fashion critiques. (After seeing her new mohawk, Ms. Sumell recalled, he said, “It’s not that bad.”) She discovered someone animated and thoughtful, a man who creates elaborate paper flowers in his cell.

There were surprises too. As the project neared completion, Ms. Sumell learned that her mother was dying. With the first exhibition of the house models coming up — a chance to attract attention to Mr. Wallace’s legal case — he insisted she cancel it.

“You just focus on your mom,” she said he instructed.

Is a project like this art? Or is it activism? And how significant are those questions in the context of a man spending three decades in a concrete box? Ms. Sumell says that she believes her only option is to push ahead, merging art with activism wherever possible. Her next goal is to build the actual house, right outside the prison if possible.

Mr. Wallace now has a copy of the book. (Merz and Solitude of Stuttgart, Germany, printed 800 copies, which are being sold for $20 each at the Angola3.org Web site.) Though he found it a little strange to have “people peeping inside my head,” he said, his voice sounded proud, if tentatively so.

“It expresses something different from the public perception of us prisoners,” he said. “We have dreams too.”

Mr. Wallace’s most pressing dream is another courtroom, and a chance at freedom. In the months to come the state will rule on the court commissioner’s recommendation that Wallace be released. Meanwhile, he said, he continues to think about his house.

Images of the house Herman Wallace designed are at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/arts/design/11colin.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1173624546-h+2wEwZtG5MKsh0oBR54XQ

Posted by lois at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2007

F.B.I. Head Admits Mistakes in Use of Security Act

"The inspector general traced the increase in the use of the letters after Sept. 11, 2001. There were 8,500 in 2000, the year before the Patriot Act broadened surveillance powers. There were 39,000 in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005, the years covered in Mr. Fine’s review."

March 10, 2007
F.B.I. Head Admits Mistakes in Use of Security Act
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, March 9 — Bipartisan outrage erupted on Friday on Capitol Hill as Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, conceded that the bureau had improperly used the USA Patriot Act to obtain information about people and businesses.

Mr. Mueller embraced responsibility for the lapses, detailed in a report by the inspector general of the Justice Department, and promised to do everything he could to avoid repeating them. But his apologies failed to defuse the anger of lawmakers in both parties.

M
“How could this happen?” Mr. Mueller asked rhetorically in a briefing at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Who is to be held accountable? And the answer to that is I am to be held accountable.”

The report found many instances when national security letters, which allow the bureau to obtain records from telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit companies and other businesses without a judge’s approval, were improperly, and sometimes illegally, used.

Moreover, record keeping was so slipshod, the report found, that the actual number of national security letters exercised was often understated when the bureau reported on them to Congress, as required.

The repercussions were felt far beyond Mr. Mueller’s office. Democratic lawmakers, newly in control of Congress, promised hearings on the problems. Several Republicans expressed anger and dismay, as well.

“It is time to place meaningful checks on the Bush administration’s ability to misuse the Patriot Act by overusing national security letters,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, “National security letters are a powerful tool, and when they are misused, they can do great harm to innocent people.” Mr. Leahy said his panel would hold extensive hearings on the inspector general’s findings.

In the House, Representative Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat who heads the Intelligence Committee, said that the inspector general had painted “a highly troubling picture of mismanagement” and that it was up to Congress to “conduct vigorous oversight of this situation.”

Among the Republicans voicing anger was Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “When it comes to national security, sloppiness should be reserved for the hog lot, not the F.B.I.,” said Mr. Grassley.

Mr. Mueller attributed the inaccuracies to “deficiencies in the database” and the failure to retain signed copies of national security letters in all cases.

“We have already taken steps to correct these deficiencies,” he said.

Mr. Mueller emphasized that the report determined that the lapses were a result of errors rather than criminal or malicious intent, that apparently no person or business was harmed and that the inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, agreed that the national security letters were a vital tool in the post-Sept. 11 world.

But he conceded that the abuses, however unintentional, were contrary to American traditions of law and respect for privacy. And even if the actual number of mistakes is relatively small, “nonetheless it is a serious problem,” he said, promising to do whatever he could to reassure skeptics on Capitol Hill.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales noted that the information discussed throughout Mr. Fine’s document was the kind that the bureau “would have been entitled to if we had followed the rules.”

But Mr. Gonzales, who was by coincidence speaking to reporters after a privacy conference here, said he viewed Mr. Fine’s conclusions as serious.

Mr. Mueller left open the possibility that some F.B.I. employees might be disciplined for their errors involving national security letters. In response to a question, he said there had been “no discussion” on whether he should step down.

The inspector general traced the increase in the use of the letters after Sept. 11, 2001. There were 8,500 in 2000, the year before the Patriot Act broadened surveillance powers. There were 39,000 in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005, the years covered in Mr. Fine’s review.

But his office found that the number of letters in case files was 20 percent higher than those recorded in the central legal office at the bureau. Those discrepancies, plus slowness in gathering and transmitting data, meant that the numbers of national security requests reported to Congress were “significantly understated,” Mr. Fine wrote.

Although the investigation uncovered no examples of lives turned upside down or businesses disrupted, the privacy problems went beyond the theoretical in a few instances. One letter demanding telephone toll-billing records yielded voice messages because a recipient was overly cooperative.

Another letter demanding e-mail transaction records was answered by e-mail contents and images.

In other incidents, though rare, national security letters seeking data on individuals were answered by information on the wrong people “due to either to F.B.I. typographical errors or errors by the recipients” of the letters, Mr. Fine wrote.

Moreover, he added, mistakes of that nature were not always reported promptly to the legal office, as regulations require.

The inspector general also criticized the bureau for using what are called exigent letters in improper circumstances. An exigent letter is meant to be used to obtain information in an extreme emergency like a kidnapping when the bureau has already sought subpoenas for the information. In too many instances, such letters were used in nonemergencies when the bureau had not requested subpoenas, Mr. Fine wrote.

Some of the sternest critics of the bureau were not mollified by Mr. Mueller’s apologies and promises.

“This confirms some of our worst suspicions,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Romero scoffed at the notion that Mr. Gonzales could help turn around the problem.

“This attorney general cannot be part of the solution,” Mr. Romero said. “He is part of the problem.”

Mr. Romero said the Patriot Act, which Congress re-enacted a year ago after extensive debate, should be given another look, so the provisions on national security letters could be improved.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee (and, like Mr. Leahy, a former prosecutor), told reporters that the bureau had apparently “badly misused national security letters.”

“This is, regrettably, part of an ongoing process where the federal authorities are not really sensitive to privacy and go far beyond what we have authorized,” Mr. Specter said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/washington/10fbi.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat on the judiciary panel who voted against the original Patriot Act, said the inspector general’s inquiry “proves that ‘trust us’ doesn’t cut it” when it comes to the F.B.I.

Posted by lois at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2007

CA: SEIU Local 1000 opposes new prison construction

SEIU Local 1000 opposes new prison construction
By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau

March 7, 2007
California's second-largest union representing state prison workers issued its plan to fix the system Wednesday with a backhanded slap at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans to expand it.
The Service Employees International Union Local 1000 said the stateshould focus on expanding rehabilitation and re-entry programs rather than adding new bed space. It also is seeking to change the parole and sentencing systems and fill the better than 1,000 vacancies that permeate the non-custody staffing ranks.

Union Vice President Marc Bautista said the union opposes the thrust of Schwarzenegger's $10.9 billion corrections plan that leans heavily on adding space for 78,000 inmate beds at the state and local levels.

"I'm against any new construction," said Bautista, whose union represents 13,000 correctional workers, second to the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents 31,000 employees.
***********Note:
SEIU's report is available at:
http://seiu1000.org/docUploads/Corrections%20Reform%20Recommendations%20and%20Appendicies.pdf
Executive summary at:
http://seiu1000.org/docUploads/Corrections%20Reform%20Executive%20Summary.pdf

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/134158.html

Posted by lois at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2007

Jason Siedenberg's response to reports of "surge in violence" and the Police Executive Research Forum: "Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge "

Response of Jason Ziedenberg, Executive Director, The Justice Policy Institute to reports of “Violent Crime Upsurge” reported in the NY Times and other newspapers.
NY Times article follows Jason’s letter)
-----------------------------------------
March 10, 2007
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
RE: “Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge,” March 9, 2007.
The Police Executive Research Forum’s (PERF) survey of 2-year crime trends in 56 jurisdictions—something that led them to conclude that there is an “alarming” trend of rising violent crime—needs to be put into context.

According to an analysis by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, and the National Center on Juvenile Justice, it is simply “too soon to tell” if the relatively small increase in crime seen nationally represent a long-term national trend. For example, the violent crime arrest rate for youth under age 18 grew by one percent in the last full-years survey from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To put that change in context, the country would have to see the same increase for 19 more years before we would return the scale of violence seen a decade ago. Surveys by the U.S. Department of Justice show that, an American's chancesof being the victim of a violent crime are still lower than at any point since the 1970s.

There is no way to know if the 56 jurisdictions surveyed by PERF are representative of national trends. Criminologists use national surveys by the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation because the data reported there is subject to some quality control mechanisms. PERF’s survey also shows that, over the last two years, most places reported some mixed pattern of rising and falling violent crime.

Any increase in violence, anywhere, is a reason for concern. While PERF and the U.S. Conference of Mayor have used this small change in crime as justification for increased federal funds for policing, research also shows that lowering unemployment, increasing wages and increasing graduation rates can also lower crime rates.
Jason Ziedenberg
Executive Director
The Justice Policy Institute
1003 K Street, NW, Ste #500
Washington, DC, 20001
website: www.justicepolicy.org
----------------------------------
March 9, 2007, NY Times
Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge
By KATE ZERNIKE
Violent crime rose by double-digit percentages in cities across the country over the last two years, reversing the declines of the mid-to-late 1990s, according to a new report by a prominent national law enforcement association.
While overall crime has been declining nationwide, police officials have been warning of a rise in murder, robbery and gun assaults since late 2005, particularly in midsize cities and the Midwest. Now, they say, two years of data indicates that the spike is more than an aberration.

“There are pockets of crime in this country that are astounding,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which is releasing the report on Friday. “It’s gone under the radar screen, but it’s not if you’re living on the north side of Minneapolis or the south side of Los Angeles or in Dorchester, Mass.”
Local police departments blame several factors: the spread of methamphetamine use in some Midwestern and Western cities, gangs, high poverty and a record number of people being released from prison. But the biggest theme, they say, is easy access to guns and a willingness, even an eagerness, to settle disputes with them, particularly among young people.
“There’s a mentality among some people that they’re living some really violent video game,” said Chris Magnus, the police chief in Richmond, Calif., north of San Francisco, where homicides rose 20 percent and gun assaults 65 percent from 2004 to 2006. “What’s disturbing is that you see that the blood’s real, the death’s real.”
The research forum surveyed 56 cities and sheriffs’ departments — as small as Appleton Wis., about 100 miles northwest of Milwaukee, and as large as Chicago and Houston. Over all, from 2004 to 2006, homicides increased 10 percent and robberies 12 percent.
Aggravated assault, which is usually accompanied by the use of a weapon or by a means likely to produce severe injury or death, according to an F.B.I. Web site, increased at a relatively modest 3 percent, but aggravated assaults with guns rose 10 percent. And some cities saw far higher spikes.
Homicides increased 20 percent or more in cities including Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Hartford, Memphis and Orlando, Fla. Robberies went up more than 30 percent in places including Detroit, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Milwaukee. Aggravated assaults with guns were up more than 30 percent in cities like Boston, Sacramento, St. Louis and Rochester.
Seventy-one percent of the cities surveyed had an increase in homicides, 80 percent had an increase in robberies, and 67 percent reported an increase in aggravated assaults with guns.
This study relies on numbers from cities, rather than yearly F.B.I. totals, which are typically released in the fall. The group collected similar numbers last year, and those numbers were largely borne out by the data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Police chiefs say the trends in aggravated assaults are particularly alarming. They are often considered a better gauge of violence than homicides; the difference between the two is often poor marksmanship or good medical care.
“Had we not had some of the trauma rooms we have here in Rochester, our homicide numbers would be higher,” said Mayor Robert Duffy, who served as a police chief for seven years, before becoming mayor two years ago.
While murder rates hit 11-year highs in places like Boston, police officials note that they are not seeing the highs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crack cocaine fueled spikes in homicides, particularly in large cities. Some cities like Denver and Washington had declines in homicides.
Still, the overall trend is mirrored in other places not covered by the report. New York City, for example, which had enjoyed remarkable declines and seemed immune to the rising murder rate elsewhere in 2005, reported a 10 percent increase in homicides in 2006. In Chicago, which had been cited as another model of declining violence, homicides rose 4 percent from 2004 to 2006.
Police officials say the violence tends to happen among young men in their late teens and early to mid-20s. In some cases, it is random. But in many cases, it is among people who know one another, or between gangs, as a way to settle disputes. Arguments that 20 years ago would have led to fistfights, police chiefs say, now lead to guns.
“There’s really no rhyme or reason with these homicides,” said Edward Davis, the police commissioner in Boston. “An incident will occur involving disrespect, a fight over a girl. Then there’s a retaliation aspect where if someone shoots someone else; their friends will come back and shoot at the people that did it.”
In Richmond, Chief Magnus said he would often go to the scene of a crime and discover that 30 to 75 rounds had been fired. “It speaks to the level of anger, the indiscriminate nature of the violence,” he said.
“I go to meetings, and you start talking to some of the people in the neighborhoods about who’s been a victim of violence, and people can start reciting: ‘One of my sons was killed, one of my nephews,’ ” he said. “It’s hard to find people who haven’t been touched by this kind of violence.”
Many chiefs blame the federal government for cutting back on police programs that they say helped reduce crime in the 1990s. But they also say the problem is economic and social. “We seem to be dealing with an awful lot of people who have zero conflict-resolution skills,” Chief Magnus said.
In Rochester, Mr. Duffy said his city had the state’s highest dropout rate — half of all students drop out— and the highest child poverty rate, with 40 percent of children under 18 living below poverty level.
“There’s a direct correlation between the kids who drop out of our high schools who get involved in selling drugs and who end up in homicides,” Mr. Duffy said.
As a police chief, Mr. Duffy brought in programs that had reduced crime in other cities: a project cease-fire to end gun violence, a Compstat data collection program to identify the areas of most stubborn crime. But it has not helped.
“We’re doing all the right things consistently, but we have not seen relief,” he said. “It takes much more than law enforcement.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/us/09crime.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)

Patrick wants detainees from immigration raid kept in Mass.

Patrick wants detainees from immigration raid kept in Mass.

By David Weber, Associated Press Writer | March 8, 2007
Boston Globe

BOSTON --Gov. Deval Patrick urged federal authorities to not move any more factory workers detained in an immigration raid out of state until their children are located and arrangements are made for their care.

More than 300 people were detained for possible deportation as illegal aliens in a raid at a New Bedford leather maker. About 150 of them have been flown from the former Fort Devens military base to a detention center in Texas, the governor said.

"I urged the federal government to stop all flights out of Fort Devens immediately until we can be assured that all parents have been identified and appropriate arrangements made for their children and dependents," Patrick said at a Statehouse news conference.

Federal authorities postponed a third flight that was scheduled to depart at noon Thursday after Patrick twice called Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff seeking better cooperation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at Fort Devens.

"What we have never understood about this process is why it turned into a race to the airport," Patrick said. "There are families affected, there are children affected."

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Julie Myers said ICE agents asked each of the those arrested if they were sole caregivers to children. Myers noted that 60 people were released as a result of that questioning. She said ICE was being unfairly criticized for allegedly not considering the needs of children affected by the arrests.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," she wrote in a letter to Patrick.

But Massachusetts Department of Social Services spokeswoman Denise Monteiro said one woman was still detained at Fort Devens on Thursday despite her infant requiring hospitalization Wednesday night in New Bedford for dehydration because she could not nurse from her mother. Monteiro said the nursing mother was expected to be released and reunited with her infant Thursday night.

Meanwhile, the Defense Logistics Agency said Thursday it was suspending the company, Michael Bianco Inc., whose owner and three managers face federal charges, from bidding on future contracts. No changes were made to the firm's current $83.6 million contract with the agency.

The company, which has made products including safety vests and lightweight backpacks for the military, has also done work for the Army.

The state has identified about 35 children whose parents were arrested, said JudyAnn Bigby, secretary of Health and Human Services. She said those children were staying with relatives or friends, but she added that it's important for state social workers to interview their parents to make sure the kids are staying with responsible adults. The state said it had found 29 foster homes in case they were needed.

There are other children who are either adolescents or had keys to their homes "and went home with no one there," Bigby said.

"They have not self-identified themselves. We have no idea how many that is," she said.

Patrick asked anyone with information about children in need of help to call 1-800-792-5200. He emphasized that the state has no role in turning illegal immigrants over to federal authorities.

At least 60 of the 361 people detained from Tuesday's raid have been released for humanitarian reasons, most related to child care issues, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Patrick on Wednesday expressed concern that the children of the detainees -- most of whom are from Guatemala and El Salvador -- might not be receiving proper care. But immigration officials insist they coordinated with state social service agencies in advance.

In the raid, company owner Francesco Insolia, 50, and three top managers were arrested. A fifth person was arrested on charges of helping workers obtain fake identification.

"They came in and swept up all these workers, most of them women," Patrick said. "The folks who run that plant? They're back at work today. And I think there's something wrong with that."

Authorities allege Insolia oversaw sweatshop conditions so he could meet the demands of $91 million in U.S. military contracts.

Investigators said the workers toiled in dingy conditions and faced onerous fines, such as a $20 charge for talking while working and spending more than two minutes in the bathroom.

------

Posted by lois at 08:45 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Lawsuit seeks to end segregation of mentally ill prisoners

Thursday, March 8, 2007, Boston Globe
Lawsuit seeks to end segregation of mentally ill prisoners

By Jonathan Saltzman and Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

An advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit today alleging that the state Department of Correction's segregation of mentally ill prisoners in isolated cells for 23 hours a day has led to numerous prisoner suicides and self-mutilations.

The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Boston by attorneys for the Disability Law Center, seeks to end the practice, which advocates say violates the constitutional rights of several hundred mentally ill inmates in the state prison system, which has a population of about 11,000.

The lawsuit was filed after an intensive yearlong review in which advocates visited inmates at Susan-Baranowski Correctional Facility and MCI-Cedar Junction, toured the units, and reviewed records.

"We had worst fears confirmed," said Stanley J. Eichner, executive director of the Disability Law Center. "The system is broken. These men are being subjected to intolerable conditions which cause them to gravely harm themselves, too often fatally."

Leslie Walker, the executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services and an attorney on the case, said the plaintiffs want the Department of Correction to exclude mentally ill inmates from segregation units and provide access to mental health treatment that is currently available. Similar lawsuits in other states have spurred the changes the plaintiffs are seeking, including California, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Connecticut, and New Mexico.

The lawsuit focuses on 18 individual inmates who either harmed or killed themselves. The lawyers today displayed three photos of one inmate whose arms, torso, and neck bore horrific red scars from self-mutilation advocates say was spurred by his segregation.

On Feb. 21, the state Department of Correction announced it would comply completely with 29 recommendations in an independent study that found serious problems with how prisons handle suicidal inmates. The study, however, did not recommend that the state end its practice of segregating mentally ill inmates. Lawyers today alleged that the study was a halfhearted effort by the state spurred in part by questions asked by advocates for the Disability Law Center.

The study, commissioned by the department, found that staff lacked sufficient suicide-prevention training and did not check frequently enough on some inmates at risk of killing themselves. The report also found that some cells used to house despondent inmates had not been stripped of features the men could use to harm themselves and that prisoners under suicide watch become even more isolated because they are denied visitors, showers, phone calls, and time outside their cells.

The National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a nonprofit research center based in Baltimore, was asked to perform the study after state prisons saw a spike in suicides in 2005 and 2006. Ten inmates have killed themselves in state prisons in the past two years, and a suicide attempt left a prisoner brain dead. Of the 11 inmates, five had been on suicide watch, and six had documented mental health issues. The study found that prison policies exacerbated some of the problems
Posted by the Boston Globe City & Region Desk at 12:02 PM

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2007/03/lawsuit_seeks_t.html

Posted by lois at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

Bob Herbert- NY Times "Education, Education, Education" and letter to editor

March 9, 2007
For Black Women, Education Is the Key (1 Letter)
To the Editor:
Re “Education, Education, Education,” by Bob Herbert (column, March 5):

Mr. Herbert’s excellent column about young black men who should be repeating the mantra of “education, education, education” in order to achieve success could have made the same point for black women who face the same challenges.

He discussed the particular challenge that “a black male who drops out of high school is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a bachelor’s degree.” But minority women have the fastest growing prison population in the United States and have not received equal attention.

College and Community Fellowship, the program that I direct at the CUNY Graduate Center, assists formerly incarcerated women and men through the stages of higher education, and I have seen the tremendous difference it makes.

With the assistance that they get from the fellowship, not one has been back to prison in the six years since we started. The recidivism rate for the general release population of prisoners is over 50 percent in the same time period.

Those who recognize that access to education increases the life prospects of young black men should be aware that educating young black women is an equally important goal worthy of greater public attention and support.

Vivian Nixon
New York, March 7, 2007

March 5, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Education, Education, Education
By BOB HERBERT

It’s an article of faith that the key to success in real estate is location, location, location.

For young black boys looking ahead to a difficult walk in life, the mantra should be education, education, education.

We’ve watched for decades — watched in horror, actually — as the lives of so many young blacks, men and boys especially, have been consumed by drugs, crime, poverty, ignorance, racial prejudice, misguided social pressures, and so on.

At the same time, millions of blacks have thrived, building strong families and successful careers at rates previously unseen. By far, the most important difference between these two very large groups has been educational attainment.

If anything, the role that education plays in the life prospects of black Americans is even more dramatic than in the population as a whole. It’s the closest thing to a magic potion for black people that I can think of. For boys and men, it is very often the antidote to prison or an early grave.

A new report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston tells us that young adults in general have been struggling in the labor market. Many have been left behind by the modest economic recovery of the past few years, especially those with limited education credentials.

The report, which focuses on black males, emphasizes the importance of education in overcoming this tough employment environment:

“For males in each of the three race-ethnic groups (blacks, Hispanics and whites), employment rates in 2005 increased steadily and strongly with their educational attainment. This was especially true for black males, for whom employment rates rose from a low of 33 percent among high school dropouts to 57 percent among high school graduates, and to a high of 86 percent among four-year college graduates.

“The fact that only one of every three young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of job during an average month in 2005 should be viewed as particularly distressing, since many of these young men will end up being involved in criminal activities during their late teens and early 20s and then bear the severe economic consequences for convictions and incarcerations over the remainder of their working lives.”

There is no way, in my opinion, for blacks to focus too much or too obsessively on education. It’s the fuel that powers not just the race for success but the quest for a happy life. It represents the flip side of failure.

The differences in rates of employment between white men and black men narrow considerably as black men gain additional schooling. After comparing the percentage of the male population that is employed in each race or ethnic group, the Northeastern study found:

“The gap in [employment to population] ratios between young white and black males narrows from 20 percentage points among high school dropouts, to 16 percentage points among high school graduates, to eight percentage points among those men completing 1-3 years of college, and to only two percentage points for four-year college graduates.”

For anyone deluded enough to question whether education is the ticket to a better life for black boys and men, consider that a black male who drops out of high school is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a bachelor’s degree.

Black males who graduate from a four-year college will make, over the course of a lifetime, more than twice the mean earnings of a black high school graduate, which is a difference of more than a million dollars.

According to the study, “Black males with college degrees and strong literacy/math skills also are far more likely to marry and live with their children and pay substantially more in taxes to state and national government than they receive in cash and in-kind benefits.”

This is not a close-call issue. It is becoming very hard for anyone to succeed in this society without a college education. To leave school without even a high school education, as so many males — and especially black males — are doing, is extremely self-destructive.

The effort to bolster the educational background of black men has to begin very early. It’s extremely difficult to turn a high school dropout into a college graduate. This effort can succeed on a large scale only if there is a cultural change in the black community — a powerful change that acknowledges as the 21st century unfolds that there is no more important life tool for black children than education, education, education.

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/opinion/05herbert.html

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)

Paul Krugman: NY Times- Valor and Squalor

March 5, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Valor and Squalor
By PAUL KRUGMAN

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend that it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, in 2005 Salon reported that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.

More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq the V.H.A., which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who is entitled to enroll in its health care system. As the agency’s Web site helpfully explains, veterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service connected condition or recent combat service,” will be turned away.

So when you hear stories of veterans who spend months or years fighting to get the care they deserve, trying to prove that their injuries are service-related, remember this: all this red tape was created not by the inherent inefficiency of government bureaucracy, but by the Bush administration’s penny-pinching.

But money is only part of the problem.

We know from Hurricane Katrina postmortems that one of the factors degrading FEMA’s effectiveness was the Bush administration’s relentless push to outsource and privatize disaster management, which demoralized government employees and drove away many of the agency’s most experienced professionals. It appears that the same thing has been happening to veterans’ care.

The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.

And Mr. Waxman, who will be holding a hearing on the issue today, appears to have solid evidence, including an internal Walter Reed memo from last year, that the prospect of privatization led to a FEMA-type exodus of skilled personnel.

What comes next? Francis J. Harvey, who as far as I can tell was the first defense contractor appointed secretary of the Army, has been forced out. But the parallels between what happened at Walter Reed and what happened to New Orleans — not to mention parallels with the mother of all scandals, the failed reconstruction of Iraq — tell us that the roots of the scandal run far deeper than the actions of a few bad men.

New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2007

Ault CO: lawmaker wants GEO's contract yanked

Lawmaker wants prison builder's contract yanked

By Tillie Fong, Rocky Mountain News
March 5, 2007
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/government/article/0,2777,DRMN_23906_5396563,00.html

Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, and two reform groups today formally requested the director of the Department of Corrections and the governor rescind Geo Group’s bid to build a private prison in Ault.

The reasons cited included the company’s performance on a 2003 bid to build a private prison in Pueblo.

McFadyen said GEO Group lost its contract to build the Pueblo facility because it delayed the start of construction, then tried to renegotiate its contract to get a guarantee that it would be paid for 90 percent occupancy, even if beds were not filled.

"Basically, the state of Colorado was held hostage for four years. They didn’t even break ground," McFadyen said.

In her letter to Ari Zavaras, executive director of DOC, she said, "It would appear that the state’s best interests were not served by allowing GEO group to bid any contract with the state because of its lack of performance on its 2003 award."

Officials with Geo Group could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon.

Alison Morgan, spokeswoman for the DOC, said Zavaras was aware of the letter being sent by McFadyen, but had not seen it Monday.

"Since he was not with the department during the RFP (request for proposals) process, it is an issue that he is still studying and is being briefed on," said Morgan.

"Once he has all the information, including McFadyen’s letter, he would welcome an opportunity to sit down and talk to her."

Call To Rescind Private Prison Contract

MONDAY, MARCH 05, 2007
http://thinkoutsidethecage2.blogspot.com/2007/03/call-to-rescind-private-prison-contract.html

Today, Colorado Citizens for Ethics in Government, CCJRC and Rep. Buffie McFadyen (D-Pueblo West) called a press conference to ask Governor Ritter and of DOC Director Ari Zavaras to terminate the contract that was signed by the State of Colorado and the GEO group to build a 1500 bed private prison in Ault.



CCJRC states that we have no confidence in the integrity of the bidding and procurement process given the clear conflict of interest and misconduct when Nolin Renfrow, who is currently under investigation by the CBI for his role in the negotiations, provided private consultation services to the GEO Group in the development of their bid in response to the 2005 RFP while still employed by the Department of Corrections. Mr. Renfrow's private company stands to make $1 million dollars off the contract.



Given the GEO group's failure to perform on a prior contract t build a private prison in Pueblo, CCJRC doesn't believe that the GEO group could have met the statutory requirements for receiving another contract to build and operate a private prison.



The evidence also suggests that the GEO Group did not submit their bid in response to the 2005 RFP in good faith and failed to disclose their intention to ultimately request public financing and a bed guarantee, if awarded the contract. Since being awarded the contract, the GEO Group's demand for a bed guarantee and/or public financing is an attempt to change the material terms of the contract, which is, in and of itself, grounds to terminate the contract. Neither a bed guarantee nor public financing are in the best interests of Colorado taxpayers and must be rejected.



Colorado Citizens for Ethics in Government issued an open records request today to determine 
whether the GEO Group was legitimately awarded the Ault prison contract and to what extent Mr. Renfrow unlawfully influenced the bidding process.



Tomorrow morning, CCJRC is making a presentation on additional concerns about private prisons before the House Judiciary Committee. If you would like to join us, we will be there at 9:30 in Room 0112 in the basement of the Capitol.

Posted by lois at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

U.S. Officials Want to Make 2000 mile frontier inhospitable to crossers

Costly border fence may fail
U.S. officials want to make the 2,000-mile southern frontier inhospitable to crossers. But terrain, weather and human ingenuity have been tough on the technology.

Story by Michael Riley, Denver Post

03/05/2007 -San Diego

A 10-foot-high wall snakes along the U.S.-Mexico border south of here, and behind it another fence, steel mesh and even higher. Cameras sit atop 50-foot poles, and stadium lights can turn night here to day. It's a daunting sight that looks utterly secure.

Until you notice the dozens of divots.

"Everywhere you see a divot, that's where someone has gone over with a ladder," said Damon Foreman, a young Border Patrol agent, pointing to the nicks across the top of the secondary fence.

Sold for $5 on the Mexican side, the ladders are made of rebar and can be carried with one hand at a quick run.

"Ten guys are over that fence in a minute," Foreman said.

For Department of Homeland Security officials trying to secure the country's land borders, it's a hard lesson: A $5 ladder trumps a $30 million fence.

In the multibillion-dollar effort to build a Fortress America, nothing has gained as much attention as the effort to wall off America's borders through a combination of one of the oldest technologies in the world - the fence - and some of the newest - advanced radar, infrared cameras, minidrones.

"We're launching the most technologically advanced border-security initiative in American history," President Bush said in a national address last May.

In September, Americans got the first glimpse of what he meant. Boeing Co. was awarded the initial stage of a multibillion-dollar contract to plan and build SBInet, a 2,000-mile combination of physical barriers and advanced technology that officials predict will turn around a decade of failure and give the country "effective control" of its southern border within five years.

A network of 1,800 long-range, infrared and daylight cameras will scan the Mexican and Canadian borders for drug runners and illegal immigrants, while ground radar tracks vehicles. Seismic, heat and motion sensors will scrutinize difficult-to-monitor areas such as canyons and mountain ranges.

Hundreds of miles of new fences and vehicle barriers will augment the line. And Boeing has suggested the use of small, camera-equipped drones launched from trucks that could send video images back to agents on the ground.

It will be a watershed effort, with a price tag to match. Scheduled to be completed on the U.S.-Mexico border by 2011, the project is estimated by Department of Homeland Security officials to cost $7.6 billion.

"GONE AWRY"

But the southern border is a vast place of daunting geography. Almost 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, it includes snowcapped mountains, a sea of arroyo- scarred desert and 1,200 miles of the Rio Grande.

Despite some notable successes in deploying technology, experts warn that there have also been spectacular failures: Private contractors have shoved off shoddy materials; an unforgiving environment has wreaked havoc on sophisticated systems; and the Border Patrol has misjudged technology's value.

In a cramped control room in the Border Patrol's Del Rio sector in Texas, a crisply uniformed agent shows off the program's most technologically advanced system, part of a network originally known as ISIS, for Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System.

From this spot, two dispatchers have a remarkable view of a 24-mile stretch of the Texas border. Using joysticks, they manipulate more than 40 day-and-night cameras, scanning the border's weed-choked riverbanks for illegal immigrants and dispatching agents via encrypted radios.

On a central console, hits from an array of buried ground sensors roll across a computer screen, alerting the controllers to possible smugglers hidden amid the mesquite and river grass.

"With manpower and technology, you can bring the border under control," said Randy Clark, a Border Patrol supervisory agent, as he stood in front of the impressive array.

"Over the next year or two, there are going to be big changes on the border."

But there is another side to the ISIS story, one that skeptics say underscores the major challenges that lie ahead for a program as ambitious as SBInet.

The cameras like those at Del Rio were erected at dozens of places on both borders by a company called International Microwave Corp., part of a $257 million contract awarded in 1999 and completed over several years.

In two audits, government monitors found many of the cameras weren't installed or were replaced with cheaper, less functional versions than what the contract specified.

The failures spawned a criminal investigation and constituted what one auditor for the General Services Administration called "a major program gone awry." Even when they were in place, the cameras froze in winter and overheated in summer, the GSA audit found.

International Microwave Corp. was later purchased by L-3 Communications, now one of Boeing's major subcontractors for SBInet.

BATTLE-TESTED

The ground sensors were less effective still.

A second audit, this one by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general, found that the sensors were often shorted out by insects or moisture. When they worked, 90 percent of alerts were caused by something other than illegal immigrants, and the deployment of agents to check on hits wasted more time than it saved.

The audit found the agency's 11,000 sensors accounted for less than 1 percent of all apprehensions at the border.

Together, government investigators concluded that the $429 million investment in sensors and cameras was close to useless.

"The border is an astonishingly inhospitable geography. It is mostly remote. It is subject to bizarre and extreme weather conditions," said Doris Meissner, who under President Clinton was head of the Border Patrol's former parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Even so, some of these things have failed more than they should have.

"The promise of technology has been oversold," Meissner warned. "And Congress is vulnerable to that overselling."

Homeland Security officials vow the latest push will be different.

In announcing the Boeing contract, they said they'll begin with a 28-mile stretch in the Arizona desert, fine-tune the system, then build more. They emphasize that with the military contractor they'll get a sophisticated systems manager and technology that has been proved on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Either way, the political momentum may be running ahead of both the agency and its critics.

The White House now appears to see a virtual border curtain as a necessary trade-off to gain Bush's proposed guest-worker program. And for many voters, the need for a wall - preferably a physical one - has taken on a life of its own, the bottom line of any serious border policy.

"The bumper stickers are all 'Build walls and hire guards,"' said James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

"The wall is about politics, not about effectiveness," he said.

700 MILES OF FENCE?

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appeared acutely aware of those pressures at a news conference in February when he rolled out the details of the 2008 Homeland Security budget.

He confirmed what many border experts had already suspected: Despite the approval by Congress last year of a 700-mile border fence, only about half of that will ever be built.

But Chertoff spent as much time talking about the 370 miles of fencing that will be part of SBInet as he did about the initiative's 2,000-mile network of cameras and sensors - acknowledging the potency of a border fence as a political symbol.

"The fence is a powerful reminder of the reality that there's a spot at which our country ends and another country begins," said Steve Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington.

"That's an important delineation. We're not all one big happy country. They have their interests and their country, and we have ours."

For supporters of the border fence, there's no better confirmation of their views than the area south of San Diego, the example that shows exactly how effective some of the world's most basic technology can be.

Before the area was partly fenced off as part of Operation Gatekeeper in 1996, 600,000 people were caught trying to sneak across the San Diego sector's 66 miles of border, half of those within the first 5 miles from the Pacific coast.

A decade and a half later, the number crossing the coastal area that now includes a 14-mile stretch of double fencing, stadium lights and sensors was just 18,000. The fence reshaped the border and forced hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants east into the Arizona desert.

But extending it hundreds of miles is another question.

It was not just the fence that brought the area under control, officials say. Operation Gatekeeper saturated the small stretch of border with hundreds of new agents, all close to detention centers and other resources.

And even with all that, holding the ground has been a major effort.

Smugglers have dug tunnels underneath the fence and cut through it with electric saws. Much of the wire secondary fence looks like a metal quilt, patched and repatched by a small army of maintenance workers.

And then there's simple geography.

As the double fence snakes over hills and gullies, there are substantial gaps. Two sections, totaling 4 1/2 miles, are still incomplete because of construction difficulties and environmental concerns.

One of those holes is at a place called Smuggler's Gulch, a ravine about 200 feet deep. Large sections of gulch are not fenced at all. Much of the 10-foot-high primary wall - made of Vietnam-era landing mat - has been washed away by erosion and rain.

There is a plan to fix it: Fill Smuggler's Gulch with 2 million cubic feet of dirt, and erase it as a geographic feature. Homeland Security officials recently used new legal powers to waive environmental restrictions to the plan, and construction is set to begin sometime this year.

When it is complete, fencing the full 14-mile stretch - less than 1 percent of the border - will have cost $127 million, or about $9 million a mile.

From start to finish, the project will have taken more than 10 years.

BY LAND OR BY SEA

None of that means the hundreds of miles of new fencing can't be done.

Israel is close to completing a 400-mile high-security fence designed to keep out West Bank suicide bombers. India is building a 500-mile, 12-foot-high fence across Kashmir, which officials say may be electrified.

Instead, homeland security experts say, the question is how effective such a massive infrastructure project will be and what the trade-offs are.

The $5 ladder used near San Diego shows that even the most expensive fence isn't much of a barrier unless there are border guards waiting near the other side.

And the 18,000 Border Patrol agents set to be in place by 2008 are well short of the 100,000 guards many experts say would be required to effectively seal the border.

Even if SBInet worked perfectly, they warn, big security risks like terrorists will still have plenty of other options: tunnels, boats and ports of entry using forged documents.

"If you throw all your eggs in the border security basket, it's going to cost you a phenomenal amount of money and it's going to fail in the end," said the Heritage Foundation's Carafano.

"It's like I want to play football and I'm willing to pay whatever it takes to get Peyton Manning as my quarterback. That's great, but now I won't be able to afford a line or a backfield," he said.

"Now it doesn't seem like such a good deal anymore."

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_5356695

Posted by lois at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

Congressman weighs in on Hutto Detention Center

By Daniel K. Lai
3/1/07- Taylor TX Daily Press

After touring the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor Friday, U.S. Congressman John Carter said there is no evidence to support claims of poor food, inadequate education and treatment for immigrants held at the facility.

The center is one of only two detention centers in the United States which house illegal immigrants and their families.

“This hasn't been my first trip to the unit. I was out there twice when they were renovating it to see what plans would be in place to house families,” Carter said. “I was actually quite surprised when the issue came up and I wanted to see for myself what was going on over there.”

Carter, R-Dist. 31, a former county district judge, said based on his experience overseeing the construction of the William S. Lott Detention Center in Williamson County in the 1980s and the Williamson County Juvenile Detention Center while serving as chairman of the juvenile board, the T. Don Hutto facility meets adequate requirements for detaining children.

“I have a pretty good idea of the standards a facility such as this should follow for detaining children,” he said.

Carter said the congressional tour of the facility was neither planned by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials nor Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) officials.

“We scheduled it because I wanted to come. This has become an ongoing issue in my district and I felt it warranted my attention,” he said.

Carter said when he arrived at the facility classrooms were decorated and programs were geared toward the education of the children.

“We talked about some of the issues raised including education and food quality,” he said. “I personally met with four mothers - two from Nicaragua, one from Honduras and one from Columbia, and asked them to honestly tell me about their complaints.”

Carter said the majority spoke on the length of time they were detained as well as several issues with the food provided to detainees.

“They were all claiming asylum. You have to understand, the process to file for asylum is a lot longer than processing them to get them back to their countries,” he said. “With the food, they didn't say it was bad, it's just not what they like or what they are used to.”

Although he did not sample the food, Carter said CCA officials allowed him to inspect it.

“It's very similar to the food you would find in a high school cafeteria in Taylor or Round Rock,” he said. “Green beans straight out of the can, fish or meat, pudding, fruit and cake - basic stuff that is healthy and edible.

“These people are from all over so the food is just something they aren't used to. They weren't telling us they were being starved.”

Carter acknowledged that in the past, the quality of meals for detainees was “not as good as it could've been.”

“Overall I don't think they are getting bad food,” he said.

As to the number of hours children spend learning, while acknowledging students did receive only one hour of education during the months of October through December, Carter said it was due to the lack of classroom space.

“Before, they had mothers attending school with their children because they thought it would be good for both of them,” he said. “When the population grew, it reached a point where they couldn't do that and folks at Homeland Security told them it was okay to reduce that time for awhile.”

According to Gary Mead, assistant director of detention and removal for ICE, when the facility first opened, children were given four and a half hours of education, one hour of recreation and one hour for lunch. Beginning in January, officials added an extra hour for enrichment education (music, computer skills or art) for a total of seven hours of education per day.

Carter said allegations from protesters comparing the facility to a concentration camp are ridiculous.

“I think they have a political agenda,” he said. “There are no reality to those statements whatsoever.”

Carter said it is important the United States have facilities that house illegal immigrants and their children until they can be adequately processed.

“We can't go back to the catch and release program. That is just a free ticket into the United States,” he said. “... We are going to have to secure our borders and this is the way we are going to have to do it.”

However, Texas State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D- Dist. 51, disagrees.

“These are not criminals. These are people who haven't committed any crimes. They're deserving of better than that,” he said.

Rodriguez filed House Resolution 64 in February which urges the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to consider alternatives to detaining families and children.

Rodriguez said he thinks there are better alternatives to the residential center, including programs such as an Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which would help children avoid detention and reduce the expense to taxpayers of detaining families.

“How do you not detain children that come across our borders with parents?” Carter said. “What do you do? Put them in foster care?”

As for future legislation, Carter said he plans to continue working toward immigration reform.

“This issue is a hot button one and it is important to my district and to the state,” he said. “We need to address it and the pitfalls intelligently. The American public trusts we are going to do it right this time. What we did in 1986 under the Reagan Administration granting blanket amnesty is not right. If people come to our country legally, I am for that and I support that and I think they should be rewarded, but it must be done right.”

When asked about the price tag to house immigrants at the facility, Carter said he was stunned.

Under the county's lease agreement with CCA, the company receives payment of about $2.8 million per month from ICE to house up to 512 inmates. The company pays the county an administrative fee of $1 per day per inmate held at the facility.

“That took my breath away,” Carter said. “Unfortunately when you are trying to do it right, that is the cost immigration is putting on the American people. It is a tremendous amount and it makes this crisis not only a human one but a monetary one.”
http://taylordailypress.net/articles/2007/03/01/news/news01.txt

Posted by lois at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Free to Vote in Florida

March 6, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Free to Vote in Florida
Florida is notorious for running elections badly, but its new governor is trying to fix one of the state’s most unjust and undemocratic practices. He has called for tearing down the barriers that prevent as many as 950,000 ex-offenders from voting.

The United States stands alone in the free world when it comes to laws that strip convicted felons of the right to vote — sometimes for life — even after they complete their sentences and go on to crime-free lives. Of the more than five million citizens who were barred from the polls in the last presidential election, virtually all would have been free to vote in nations like Canada, France or Britain.

Northern and Midwestern states are gradually backing away from voting bans for ex-offenders. But these antidemocratic laws remain entrenched in the Deep South, where they were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of a broad effort to restrict the political influence of African-Americans. And Florida has the most restrictive laws and the highest number of disenfranchised ex-offenders of any state in the country.

As it stands now, Floridians who want their voting and civil rights restored must apply to a slow-moving state clemency board that meets only four times a year and has an enormous backlog of cases. The state attorney general recently suggested enlarging the overall staff and having the clemency board meet more frequently, but more substantial action is needed.

Gov. Charlie Crist has a better idea: automatically restoring voting rights to felons who complete their sentences. In a recent speech, Mr. Crist pledged to lead the movement for the restoration of voting and civil rights for ex-offenders in Florida and hinted that he might do so by issuing an executive order.

That’s an excellent proposal. It would take the restoration issue out of the hands of a sluggish bureaucracy that has clearly failed to do its job and vault Florida to the forefront of a national movement that aims to extend democracy to ex-offenders. It would also help put an end to one of the most shameful episodes in American electoral history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06tues2.html

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

NY Times: Part 3 of 3 articles: For Sex Offenders, a Dispute Over Therapy’s Benefits

March 6, 2007, NY Times- Page 1
For Sex Offenders, a Dispute Over Therapy’s Benefits
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and MONICA DAVEY

ATASCADERO, Calif. — During five years of psychotherapy at a treatment center here for sex offenders who have finished their prison terms, Bill Price, a pedophile who admits to 21 victims as young as 3, has constructed a painstaking plan for staying straight.

A requirement of his treatment, the plan catalogs on five single-spaced pages the tactics Mr. Price has learned to stop molesting.

There are 42 so far, including avoiding places where children congregate, abstaining from alcohol, shunning the Internet and sniffing ammonia whenever he has a deviant thought.

“It was just like a hunt for me,” Mr. Price, 59, a former Sunday school teacher, said of his sexual crimes. “I kept choosing children because they were easier prey; they were easier to deal with than women.”

Treatment plans like Mr. Price’s, known as relapse prevention, have been a cornerstone of efforts to reform sex offenders for the past 20 years. Yet there is no convincing evidence that the approach works, or that others do either.

Similar to aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous, relapse prevention has sex offenders own up to wrongdoing and resign themselves to a lifelong day-to-day struggle with temptation. But one of the few authoritative studies of the method, conducted in California from 1985 to 2001, found that those who entered relapse prevention treatment were slightly more likely to offend again than those who got no therapy at all.

Clinicians who work with sex offenders cling to relapse prevention nonetheless, and its durability speaks volumes about the troubled, politically fraught science of treating sex offenders. Not only is relapse prevention of questionable value, but so are the tests to gauge whether sex offenders in treatment still get inappropriately aroused, the drugs used for so-called chemical castration and the methods of predicting risk of reoffending.

Treatment methods have become particularly topical as thousands of sex offenders are confined or restricted beyond their prison terms under civil commitment laws on the books in 19 states. The laws have been found constitutional in part because they aim to provide treatment if possible; New York legislators announced last week that the state would soon allow civil confinement.

On average, the civil commitment programs cost four times more than keeping sex offenders in prison. But too little research has been conducted into how to treat sex offenders, experts say, putting psychotherapists and others working in civil commitment centers at a distinct disadvantage.

“It has never been regarded as a legitimate and recognized topic for research by psychologists,” said Robert A. Prentky, director of research at the Justice Research Institute in Boston. “There is a very strong undercurrent of disrespect for this area of research and perhaps even skepticism, frankly.”

As recently as the 1970s, research on treating sex offenders was practically nonexistent. Barbara Schwartz, a psychologist with New England Forensic Associates in Arlington, Mass., said that when she wrote her first paper on rehabilitating sex offenders in 1971, “I read everything there was to read, and I had a half of one page of references.”

That is partly because sex offenders present major challenges as research subjects. There are far fewer convicted sex offenders than most other kinds of criminals, so sample groups are unreliably small. And sex offenders tend to be so secretive that “it’s really hard to get information from them that you can have confidence in,” said Ted Shaw, a forensic psychologist in Gainesville, Fla., who has treated offenders since 1982.

Even now, in an advanced phase of California’s treatment program for the most persistent sex offenders, Mr. Price says he questions his ability to keep his urges in check. His relapse prevention plan says that if let out, he will seek more treatment at Pure Life Ministries in Kentucky, whose Web site says its goal is “leading Christians to victory over sexual sin.”

“I’m very afraid of just being out there,” Mr. Price said, sitting near the nasturtiums and petunias he had grown in a courtyard of the Atascadero State Hospital here, which includes a wing for civilly committed offenders. “I’m less dangerous than I was, but I’m definitely in touch with my dangerousness.”

Treatment in Phases

During one therapy session, Mr. Price and five other men aggressively tested one another’s ability to stay straight, while two social workers moderated. Sitting in a circle in a locked conference room, briefly sealed off from the loud, grim bustle of the hospital halls, they fell into an argument over whether to protect a young new arrival from predatory older residents.

“If I can save this kid from being hustled or taken advantage of,” said Paul George, a convicted pedophile who has admitted roughly 100 offenses, “I’m going to at least try to make that effort.”

But another man pointed out that Mr. George had habitually groomed child victims by acting as their protector, asking him, “How was that different from this situation?”

At most civil commitment centers around the nation, offenders young and old meet several times a week for group therapy rooted in relapse prevention as well as what are known as cognitive-behavioral techniques. While the former is meant to curb sex offending in particular, the latter are intended to change broader destructive patterns of thinking and reacting, and are commonly used in treating other ailments like anxiety.

Civilly confined men move from one phase of treatment to the next, learning to recognize which situations, thoughts and behaviors have led them to offend, developing skills to avoid them, and applying those skills to their daily lives. They try to learn empathy by writing detailed letters to their victims and even essays in their voices.

“It’s a slow business,” said David Thornton, the treatment director at Wisconsin’s civil commitment center. “You’re talking about years of work, two steps forward, one step back.”

Dr. Thornton said relapse prevention forced sex offenders to focus too heavily on a concrete list of high-risk situations — sometimes as long as 50 pages — that could overwhelm them and lead to failure. Wisconsin’s program rejects relapse prevention and sticks to cognitive-behavioral techniques in an effort to change deep-rooted traits and behaviors.

“It’s much less dependent on the guy having some conscious, deliberate self-control plan in his head,” Dr. Thornton said. “You’re trying to change how he automatically functions.”

Instead of helping a sex offender compile a list of specific situations to avoid, therapists in Wisconsin might seize on the fact that he reacts impulsively when something upsets him, teaching him self-regulation skills. Instead of having the offender recount every last detail of his crimes, they might help him correct long-held misperceptions about children (that they enjoy sex), power (that it is best attained by raping or molesting) and so forth.

Some who represent offenders in Wisconsin, though, say that even the new program there has not answered offenders’ frustrations about their ability to progress in it and to demonstrate that progress.

“The program has gotten larger, more involved and progressively longer,” said Robert W. Peterson, a lawyer in Wisconsin who has worked on such cases since 1998 and says he has seen the state’s program shift repeatedly in design and focus.

“Regardless of the structure of the treatment program, the duration of the treatment program, the nature of the treatment program,” Mr. Peterson said, “what we basically have is living experiments.”

Research Is Sparse

Reliable studies on the treatment of civilly committed offenders do not exist, since so few have been set free. Much of the research into the treatment of sex offenders has come out of Canada, where national criminal history records are easily accessible.

Canadian psychologists have studied not only treatment outcomes but also risk assessment, or determining who is likely to reoffend.

Combining findings from hundreds of smaller studies, R. Karl Hanson, senior research officer for the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in Canada, has found that roughly 15 percent of convicted sex offenders are caught reoffending after five years and that those driven by deviant sexual interests, like pedophiles and exhibitionists, are the likeliest to do so.

Dr. Hanson’s research has also suggested that even lifelong offenders tend to stop, for the most part, by the time they reach their 70s.

He said various studies had shown that “most treatments don’t work very well,” but that, over all, treatment had a modest beneficial effect. One analysis that he published in 2002 found that 12 percent of offenders who got treatment were caught committing new sex crimes, compared with 17 percent of untreated offenders.

Researchers have found that chemical castration, or using hormonal drugs to curb sexual appetite, can be problematic, too.

Doctors have experimented for decades with antiandrogens, which block the effects of sex hormones like testosterone and are most commonly used to treat advanced prostate cancer. But while some consider antiandrogens crucial for the most predatory offenders, the drugs remain controversial, not least because they are expensive and can cause weight gain, osteoporosis and breast development. It is also hard to ensure that released offenders keep taking the drugs.

More than half of states with civil commitment programs say they allow voluntary antiandrogen treatment, but as of last fall, only California, Illinois, Washington and Wisconsin had more than one offender taking the drugs, which can cost several hundred dollars a month. Dr. Fred S. Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore and a longtime critic of civil commitment, said he was troubled by the scant use of antiandrogens.

“I get letters from men around the country, in prison or sometimes civil commitment, asking if I can help them in their efforts to have it made available,” Dr. Berlin said, “because the administrations in their facilities are not even willing to discuss it with them.”

Here in California, where about 40 civilly committed men took antiandrogens several years ago but only four do now, Jesus Padilla, a clinical psychologist at Atascadero State Hospital, said the drugs did not address the underlying emotional problems that lead to offending, nor even necessarily eliminate sex drive.

“I’ve had numerous situations where they say they are working just fine,” Dr. Padilla said of civilly committed men on antiandrogens, “only to catch them having sex with each other or engaging in deviant sexual fantasies even though their testosterone level was down to zero.”

Some doctors see more potential in antidepressant drugs, which can dampen sexual desire while also curbing compulsive behaviors like chronic masturbation, which can preclude offenders from participating in treatment. Some civil commitment programs prescribe antidepressants sparingly or not at all, while others, including South Carolina’s and Wisconsin’s, have dozens of men taking them.

One approach that civil commitment centers have avoided is surgical castration, though at least one state, California, allows it if the offender pays for the procedure himself.

In Virginia, the General Assembly considered a proposal last year to allow voluntary surgical castration as an alternative to civil commitment, but took no action. One pedophile in Virginia castrated himself in a jail shower with a shoelace and a razor blade as his civil commitment trial approached.

Douglas Carlin, a convicted rapist who completed treatment and was released a year ago from the commitment center in Florida, said he thought a lot of offenders there were deceiving their therapists.

“Most of those guys, they are just faking it to make it,” Mr. Carlin said. “They’re just waiting to get released so they can go right back to what they were doing.”

Tools of Assessment

Therapists can gauge the success of various treatments by observing offenders’ behavior, interviewing them and using two instruments. All have serious shortcomings.

One instrument, the polygraph, is routinely used to determine if people continue to offend once conditionally released or have deviant thoughts in the course of treatment. Civil commitment centers also use polygraphs to make sure an offender has admitted all his crimes, a requirement for progressing past the early stage of relapse prevention treatment.

“Usually they will give up lots of information soon after failing a polygraph test,” Dr. Thornton, the Wisconsin treatment director, said.

But polygraphy, which measures blood pressure, breathing rate and perspiration while a series of questions is asked, is generally considered so unreliable that its results are inadmissible as proof in court. Some offenders, especially psychopaths who feel no anxiety when lying, can beat it, experts said.

“Polygraph on its own isn’t the answer to anything,” said Dr. Don Grubin, a forensic psychiatrist at Newcastle University in Britain who has studied the tests. “As part of a bigger package it seemed to have an effect — to help reduce the risk of reoffending.”

The other device routinely used at civil commitment facilities is the penile plethysmograph, which measures changes in the circumference of the penis while the offender is shown sexually suggestive pictures of men, women or children.

Some clinicians and offenders say it is easy, particularly in a laboratory, to stifle arousal and thus cheat on a plethysmograph test.

Mr. Carlin, the Florida rapist, said that during one plethysmograph test, “I just stared at a shelf of cleaning products and read the labels.”

The field of risk assessment, or determining which sex offenders are likely to repeat their crimes once released, has been equally slow to evolve, even as judges and juries are keeping more men locked up after their prison sentences in the belief that they will be dangerous on the outside.

A cottage industry of professionals who diagnose sexually violent predators has developed in the last two decades, and several hundred psychologists, often with little or no background treating sex offenders, make a lucrative business of recommending who should be committed.

During a recent commitment trial in St. Augustine, Fla., one psychologist with hardly any experience treating sex offenders told a jury he had evaluated 350 candidates for civil commitment and testified in dozens of commitment trials since 2000.

Some in the field question why professional organizations like the American Psychological Association have not set ethical and training standards for the many psychologists entering the civil commitment field.

“I don’t think, in my personal experience, that the vast majority of the examiners I’ve come across have sufficient working knowledge of the empirical literature,” said Dr. Prentky of the Justice Research Institute.

But that literature is still of limited use. Most actuarial tools used to predict someone’s risk of recidivism consider only unchanging factors, like their number of past offenses and the sex of their victims. Some scientists say that so-called dynamic factors — how much treatment an offender gets, for example, and how old he has grown — should factor heavily into actuarial risk assessment, too.

“Science hasn’t gotten there yet,” said Eric Janus, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., who opposes civil commitment.

Professor Janus said he hoped for “an explosion of knowledge” about how to prevent sexual violence before it happened, which he said would prevent far more sex crimes than civilly committing offenders.

That sort of research is unlikely to happen in the United States, Dr. Berlin and other experts said, because so many Americans believe that the only investment in sex offenders should be punitive.

“People need to recognize that these are not just criminal justice problems but also public health problems,” Dr. Berlin said, “and the surgeon general as well as the attorney general ought to be supporting research in this area.”

Earlier efforts to rehabilitate sex offenders, like Freudian psychoanalysis and electric shocks to the skin, failed definitively decades ago. A recent case in Orange Park, Fla., offered more evidence that relapse prevention treatment is no solution, either.

There, the authorities say, a convicted rapist who had spent 12 years in prison and 5 at the Florida Civil Commitment Center raped and killed a young woman before dawn on Jan. 23 after following her into the veterinary clinic where she worked.

The suspect, Michael Renard Jackson, 37, won release from the commitment center in 2005 after reaching the highest levels of a relapse prevention treatment program, people familiar with the case said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/us/06civil.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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

NY Times: Manufacturing Misdemeanors

March 6, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Manufacturing Misdemeanors
The New York Police Department has been going fishing. Not content to nab criminals when they break the law on their own, the department has been planting unattended bags in subway stations to see who might take them, at which point waiting officers pounce. As NY1 News reported last week, 220 people were arrested last year in the sting, known as Operation Lucky Bag. In dismissing one of these cases, a Brooklyn judge said the police “do not need to manipulate a situation where temptation may overcome even people who would normally never think of committing a crime.” This program bothers us for that and many other reasons and should be discontinued immediately.
Civil libertarians have argued that the program is entrapment. That is a legal distinction for the courts to decide, but it certainly looks like that to a layperson. It is clearly a poor use of resources. People wandering off with lost property ranks far down the list of law enforcement priorities.
There is also the question of whether the sting does actual harm. In an era of terrorism, where the police have to rely on the help of average people to notice anything suspicious — including apparently abandoned bags — the last thing New York needs are cynical operations that encourage mistrust between the police and subway riders. And of course, there is the effect on neighborliness. It is remarkable how many people in this city are willing to track down the owners of lost cellphones, wallets or bags. Arresting good Samaritans is bad enough, but encouraging them not to help in the future through this kind of overly aggressive policing is a downright shame. The best thing to do with this misbegotten program would be to end it.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06tues4.html

Posted by lois at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2007

Fortress America: Part 1

Fortress America: Part 1

As the U.S. builds walls and trains agents to bar its southern door from the rush of illegal immigrants, some see only a policy of prison shackles and razor wire.

Story by Michael Riley, Denver Post

3/4/07
Laredo, Texas

Gerardo Carbajal sits on a bench on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande, shivering. Caught that morning by the U.S. Border Patrol as he stepped out of the ice-cold river, he's exhausted, hungry, and he's going home.

At just 17 years old, Carbajal has sneaked across the border six times before. "It's never been this hard," he said, confessing that he would return to his home in the Mexican state of Guanajuato rather than try again.

Although he may not know exactly why, Carbajal knows this for sure: The border is changing.

In federal courthouses in Laredo and Del Rio, a small army of illegal immigrants who a few years ago would have been set free or dumped back across the border are instead going to jail. In Artesia, N.M., there is a ballet of cranes twirling over half-finished barracks in frenzied preparation for a flood of trainees headed to the Border Patrol Academy there.

And in the Arizona desert, Boeing engineers are laying down the first segment of a high-tech "virtual wall" that will eventually stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

From California's Imperial Beach to the Rio Grande, a "Fortress America" is emerging. And while the new Democratic-controlled Congress will have a say in exactly how far the effort will go, its shape is already unfolding.

If all goes according to plan, the strategy will cost billions of dollars, lead to the biggest border prison boom in decades, create the federal government's largest enforcement arm, and literally remake the landscape of the country's 2,000-mile southern border.

Yet for its critics - and there is no shortage - the effort is an expensive, even foolhardy risk, pouring more money into failed border- control strategies when there are cheaper and more effective means to reach the same end.

Even members of the then- Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee recognized last year that a decade and a half of attempts to control the border have been a multibillion-dollar boondoggle, with little to show for it.

Border security spending has increased tenfold since 1995, the committee noted sharply in its 2007 funding report, and the number of Border Patrol agents has climbed from 5,000 to more than 12,000.

"Yet during that same period," the report said, "the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has jumped from five million to over eleven million."

But with the growing public fury over the fact that at least half a million people a year sneak across this country's southern border - most simply walking across unimpeded - a broad consensus has developed among lawmakers in both parties that a border buildup must be part of any long-term solution to the country's illegal immigration quandary.

As the policy unfolds, the impacts are far-reaching and sometimes little-noticed. Among them:

Illegal-immigration-related cases recently surpassed narcotics as the single-largest category of federal prosecutions in the country. An 85 percent jump in federal immigration cases nationally beginning two years ago is traceable almost entirely to a new strategy by U.S. attorneys at the border.

The 2004 Intelligence Reform Act authorized 40,000 new immigration-related detention beds by 2010, and thousands are now being built in border regions like southern Texas. The most direct beneficiary is a slew of private prison companies, which have seen their stock prices climb dramatically, partly as a result.

President Bush has ordered the hiring of 6,000 new Border Patrol agents by 2008. Coming on the heels of a similar buildup in the 1990s, the increase will give the agency one- third more agents than the FBI and 11,000 more than the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The buildup will lock taxpayers into long-term capital costs for decades to come. While border fencing could cost about $3 million a mile to build, congressional auditors recently estimated it could cost $70 million a mile to maintain over the fence's 25-year life.

THE RULE OF LAW

Experts say the benefits of such a broad buildup on the border will depend on several unknowns - whether officials can overcome the notorious contracting difficulties of past border infrastructure efforts; whether new technology lives up to its potential; and whether Congress can pass a guest-worker program to rechannel much of the flow.

But however those questions are eventually answered, the border is being transformed in countless places: For supporters, it's a long-overdue effort to establish the rule of law; for foes, it's a slow militarization built on prison shackles and razor wire.

To see the sweep of some of the changes, spend a day in the bustling Laredo courtroom of Federal Magistrate Judge Adriana Arce-Flores.

Over the past three years, as federal prosecutors have attempted to put an end to the border's revolving door, they have sent tens of thousands more illegal immigrants into federal court, and nowhere more aggressively than in the Southern District of Texas.

According to government data obtained by Syracuse University in New York, the number of prosecution referrals for immigration-related crimes in that district jumped in fiscal year 2004 from 4,062 to 18,092 - a 345 percent increase.

Five days a week, Arce-Flores' courtroom witnesses a steady march of men and women in orange jumpsuits, the vast majority of whom are Spanish-speaking immigrants caught near the border.

During a pretrial hearing before another of Laredo's magistrate judges in early December, the judge dispatched 22 cases in four hours. Nearly all the immigrants were charged with a felony - illegal re-entry after a previous deportation or removal. And because all pleaded guilty, exchanges in court were mostly limited to how defendants were detained and a few questions by the judge about their education level and occupation.

The answers were short, as if the less said the better: "Edwin Rodriguez, sixth grade, watch salesman." "Jose Ortiz Reyes, sixth grade, painter."

But it's not so much that the court is spending time jailing gardeners and construction workers, said Arce-Flores, who is one of the busiest federal judges in the country. It's that the enormous immigration caseload is like a large fire that sucks oxygen from a closed room.

Clerks are tired. U.S. marshals are overworked. While the average federal judge has 87 open felony cases at any one time on the docket, that average for each of the two full judgeships in Laredo is 1,400.

"Do you go after the mob or these guys on the border? Do you go after the Ecstasy distribution rings or these guys on the border?" said Charles L. Lindner, a California lawyer and past president of the Los Angeles Criminal Bar Association, explaining how the focus on federal immigration prosecutions is rippling through the system.

"We're short on (assistant U.S. attorneys) in the office here in Los Angeles because they're doing immigration in Laredo," Lindner said.

There is evidence he's right, even if the link is indirect.

The U.S. Justice Department announced in July that it was hiring 20 new assistant U.S. attorneys but said all would be sent to the border to focus solely on immigration- related offenses.

Sitting in her court offices in Laredo, Arce-Flores pulls out a calculator from a large desk and begins tapping buttons - performing a quick estimate of what it costs taxpayers to jail the immigrants passing through her courtroom.

"If I have 30 people a day times five days a week, that's 150 people," she said.

Each costs about $90 a day to keep in jail, the judge said, and the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor offender is six months.

That's nearly $2.5 million, "for just for one week's work," according to Arce-Flores.

"But when they are discussing this in Washington, they keep saying, 'We need to detain every one of them; we need to give every one jail time,"' Arce-Flores said. "I don't think they realize the consequences."

PRISON BOOM

John Ferguson, chief executive of Corrections Corporation of America, certainly does. And for private prison companies like his, these are giddy days.

Over the past year, the stock price of Ferguson's company has climbed 86 percent. The stock of its main competitor, Geo Group Inc., has done even better, rising 155 percent.

The prosecution offensive by U.S. attorneys on the border has meant a boom in demand for rented detention space by the U.S. Marshals Service, most of which will go to companies like his, Ferguson noted in an optimistic conference call to investors in February 2006.

More important, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced in August an ambitious plan to remedy one of the border's long-standing problems: There aren't enough beds to hold everyone the Border Patrol catches.

In the case of non-Mexicans - who usually can't be quickly returned to their home country - the only choice had been to release them, issuing "Notices to Appear" for a later hearing in immigration court. Less than 15 percent came back.

The end of that policy required the federal government to find jail space for as many as 50,000 more immigrant detainees a year - almost all of which will be contracted to private companies. The jump in demand means prisons are sprouting along the border like prairie grass.

In Laredo, a 1,500-bed "superjail" to hold immigrant detainees is set to be built this year. A new prison in Taylor, Texas, was recently built to house immigrant families with children. And around Del Rio, on the Rio Grande, at least four counties have together added more than 2,000 beds to rent-a-jail facilities in the past year and a half, nearly all filled with illegal immigrants caught on the border.

An industry magazine for private prison companies recently estimated that in Texas alone, 7,000 immigration-related detention beds have recently been built or soon will be.

In the tiny Rio Grande Valley town of Raymondville, contractors put up a 2,000-bed facility in just over three months, using a line of credit from Willacy County and an experimental design that looks like a collection of Boy Scout tents on steroids.

"They pay those guards $9 an hour plus. For an area like ours, that's pretty good wages," said Emilio Vera, a silver-haired commissioner for Willacy County who said the prison boom is reviving desiccated rural communities like his.

Immigrant advocates and prison- reform groups are less impressed.

Immigrant detainees held in Raymondville are confined in the windowless super-tents for 23 hours a day, with no partitions closing off toilets or showers, according to immigration attorneys who have visited the facility. Lights are on day and night, and prisoners complain of insufficient clothing and spoiled food.

"I still have clients who complain about rancid milk being served to them and people vomiting," said Jodi Goodwin, a Harlingen immigration attorney who visited the facility several times before officials began limiting access to many areas two and a half months ago.

"There are no windows, so there's very little direct light. The detainees sleep, live and stay in the same space for 23 hours a day," she said.

While officials for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement say all facilities meet federal standards, critics say problems are likely to grow because of the government's reliance on companies with a motive to skim services and increase profits.

"It's almost like a futures market. You have private prison companies gambling on expansion of the immigrant detention system, and basically prison speculators who are convincing communities to do this," said Bob Libal, an organizer with South Texans Opposing Private Prisons (STOPP).

"It's a sick market, but a market nonetheless," he said.

Still, supporters say the vastly increased detention capacity may be the most important step toward a secure border, flaws and all.

"The simplest thing that has happened would have seemed to be obvious, but it's essentially thinking of immigration enforcement as an assembly line and that end part - holding someone and getting them quickly returned to their home country - was always the hardest thing to do," said Stewart Verdery, the former Homeland Security assistant secretary for border security under President George W. Bush.

"By changing the nature of the game on both of those, you've made it much more of a fair fight between the legal process and the pull of our economy," Verdery said.

BIG PLAN, BIG PRICE

In December, the Department of Homeland Security presented Congress with its vision for the border's future. Called the "Secure Border Strategic Plan," the 48-page report described an unprecedented deployment of manpower and technology. In return, it said, America would gain "effective control" over the Mexican border in five years.

The projected cost was $48.8 billion through fiscal year 2011. Even that price is conservative, analysts warn.

But the strategic plan contained a sobering fact.

After billions of dollars already spent and the deployment of thousands of new Border Patrol agents in the past decade and a half, the country had "effective control" over just 284 miles of the Mexican border as of March 2006.

To homeland security experts, all that suggests the architects of the current effort to secure the border must learn the lessons of past ones: Low-tech can trump high-tech; the border is a money sinkhole; and never underestimate the risks immigrants will take to reach the globe's richest economy.

But the most fundamental lesson, said Doris Meissner - who, as Immigration and Naturalization commissioner during the Clinton administration, oversaw the last major push to control the border in the mid- 1990s - is that there will always be unintended consequences.

After the construction a decade ago of 70 miles of double and triple fencing around San Diego and busy crossing points in Texas, millions of border crossers simply shifted to routes across the Arizona desert, thousands of them dying along the way.

The border security strategy of the 1990s reduced the illegal traffic in some border areas while greatly increasing it in others, leading to the biggest jump in illegal immigrants living in the U.S. in more than a generation.

"You have to ask yourself what's the cost-benefit here," Meissner said.

Meissner and others warn that the push to secure the border has taken on a political momentum that may obscure smarter, cheaper alternatives. One would be to create an effective system to check the legal employment status of every worker in the country, require its use by law, then crack down on employers who continue to hire undocumented immigrants.

Without jobs, immigrants would stop coming, she said.

"I think border enforcement is extremely important, but it is absolutely out of proportion to other things that can be done," Meissner said.

But for now, she concedes, all eyes are on the border.

http://test.denverpost.com/lacrosse/ci_5352616

Posted by lois at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Springfield's violent crime declines 16%

Springfield's violent crime declines 16%
Sunday, March 04, 2007

By PATRICK JOHNSON

SPRINGFIELD - Violent crime dropped 16 percent in Springfield last year, but Police Commissioner Edward A. Flynn said it is still an uphill effort before Springfield is no longer seen as a dangerous place.

Preliminary FBI numbers for 2007 indicate crime rose on average by 4 percent nationwide.

The city's 2006 numbers also contrast with a November publication by Morgan Quitno Press, a private publishing company in Lawrence, Kan., that rated Springfield as the most dangerous city in the state.

Flynn, who questioned the ranking at the time, said Springfield saw a 16 percent drop in violent crime between 2005 and 2006, which is better than the seven cities of comparable size in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, which are considered peer communities.

The two Massachusetts peers, Lowell and Worcester, saw declines of 9 percent and 5 percent.

Boston, with a population of 600,000 or roughly four times that of Springfield, is not included among the peers, but Flynn made a point of comparing the two anyway. Boston's total violent crime rate increased by 11 percent, including 28 percent in the homicide rate.

Flynn also highlighted the 12 percent drop in armed robberies and 19 percent decline in aggravated assaults. The city's homicide rate declined by 17 percent, but that figure is misleading, because the actual numbers, from 18 in 2005 to 15 last year, are relatively small.

Rapes, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts increased between 2 percent and 4 percent, and larcenies remained even. Flynn said the number of armed robberies and assaults involving guns also dropped significantly.

There were 70 fewer robberies involving guns last year, a drop of 26 percent, while there were 37 fewer gun assaults, an 11 percent drop.

The total number of 2,265 violent crimes reported is a seven-year low since 2000, he said.

Violent crimes peaked at 3,470 incidents in 2001 and have been declining each year since, he said.

The department's numbers prior to 2000 are not considered reliable, he said.

Flynn said since taking over the department he has emphasized the collection of reliable crime data to get a clearer picture of what types of crimes are happening and where, and where police resources should be deployed.

He said Springfield's crime statistics in the past may have been inflated, because of a methodology of counting some incidents more than once if multiple offenses took place.

For example, a robbery that ended in homicide would be tallied as two separate crimes - armed robbery and murder.

"Instead of counting spiders, we were counting spider legs," he said.

Flynn said he is going to continue beating the drum that the city is safer than being portrayed so that people will not be afraid to leave their houses or venture downtown.

"There's a subset of people in the community who will reject it and say it's right up there with crop circles," he said.

"This will take time," he said. "People kind of believe what they read in the paper, but they really believe what they see and experience."

Panagore said that tackling crime and problems of dilapidated, abandoned buildings and littered, overgrown lots today will only serve to help Springfield's reputation tomorrow.

"What I say repeatedly is that this stuff takes time. It takes a couple of years," he said. "Over the next couple of years, this steady progress is what we're about."

©2007 The Republican

Posted by lois at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

A Record of Failure at Center for Sex Offenders

"As Liberty departed, Florida picked another private company, the GEO Group Inc., to run the center here."

March 5, 2007, NY Times, Page 1
A Record of Failure at Center for Sex Offenders
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and MONICA DAVEY

ARCADIA, Fla. — Inside a privately run treatment center here for pedophiles and rapists who have completed their prison sentences, where they are supposed to reflect on their crimes and learn to control their sexual urges, bikini posters were pinned to walls.

Two men took their shirts off, rubbed each other’s backs and held hands, while others disappeared together into dormitory rooms. Some of the sex offenders appeared to be drunk from homemade “buck” liquor secretly brewed and sold here.

And some of the center’s employees, who openly ignored the breaking of rules (“As long as they are happy, we let them go,” one explained), reported that a high turnover rate among staff members was mostly because of female employees leaving their jobs after having had sex with the offenders.

These and other observations were included in a memorandum composed in 2004 by six employees on loan here from Pennsylvania. They had been dispatched by the Liberty Behavioral Health Corporation, which ran the facility, the Florida Civil Commitment Center, and a facility in Pennsylvania.

Nineteen states have laws that allow them to confine or restrict sex criminals beyond prison in a trend that is expanding around the country, with legislators in New York last week announcing agreement on a new civil commitment law there.

The courts have upheld the constitutionality of such laws in part because they are meant to furnish treatment where possible. Most of the states run their own centers to hold and treat such predators, generally with meager results, but at a time when private solutions are popular for prisons, toll roads and other state functions, a few have teamed with private industry.

Yet as the story of the center here in Arcadia reveals, even a $19 million partnership between the state and a company that describes itself as “a national leader in the field of specialized sex offender treatment and management” failed to meet a central purpose: treating sex offenders so they would be well enough to return to society.

“It was like walking into a war zone,” Jared Lamantia, one of the visiting workers who signed the memorandum, recalled in an interview. “The residents in that place ran the whole facility.”

The memorandum is among thousands of pages of public and private documents about the Florida center reviewed by The New York Times, providing a rare window into the lives of civilly committed sexual predators and the people who guard and treat them. While programs like Florida’s are popular because they keep sex offenders locked away past their prison terms, they cost far more than prison — in the case of Florida, on average twice as much — with no measurable benefit beyond confinement.

For more than seven years, Liberty was in charge of almost every facet of the Florida center, where more than 500 men are held beyond their criminal sentences in a crowded former prison surrounded by cow pastures.

That ended last June in a cloud of claims and counterclaims, investigations and legislative hearings. By the end, after the state did not renew Liberty’s contract, the Florida Department of Children and Families was virtually at war with the company, with each side pinning blame on the other — the state accused of failing to properly finance the center, the company accused of failing to manage it.

“The place is a cesspool of despair and depression and drug abuse — of people being lost,” said Don Sweeney, a mental health counselor in St. Petersburg who treats some former residents of the center, reflecting on Liberty’s tenure there.

Many outside experts, even some of the center’s critics, said the state’s insufficient financing of the center made Florida as much to blame as Liberty for the many failings, many of which are common in other states. Florida spends less than $42,000 a year per resident, one of the lowest rates in the country.

“There was no money to support that facility and to do what had to be done,” Dr. Robert Bellino, a psychiatrist who worked at the center here, said of the company. “It’s a political football. They were always turning the screws on Liberty — ‘Cut this, cut that, don’t spend this, don’t spend that.’ ”

Ambitious Private Contractors

As legislators across the nation have answered public outrage about heinous sex crimes with civil commitment laws, a bevy of companies and well-paid specialists have cropped up like constellations around the expanding demand.

Liberty Behavioral Health and Liberty Healthcare Corporation, affiliates with common ownership, have emerged as the most ambitious private contractors in the commitment center arena. As recently as last year, the affiliates had accumulated contracts worth up to $26 million a year in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Florida, which was the biggest both in terms of compensation and responsibility.

Growing out of a company that provided emergency room employees to hospitals starting in the mid 1970s, Liberty Healthcare Corporation was founded in 1986 as a provider of mental health, developmental disability and primary care services. In its earliest days, it had no experience treating sex offenders and, its officials said, there was never a particular moment when company officials said to one another, “Let’s go into the sex offender business.”

Yet as Shan Jumper, Liberty’s clinical director in Illinois, tells it, after “analyzing market trends and seeing what areas they could jump into,” Liberty executives apparently recognized the potential.

By 1998, the company, which is privately held and based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., won its first contract to provide services inside a civil commitment center, in Illinois. Rick Robinson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Liberty Healthcare, described the move as a natural outgrowth of its work, which included creating an adolescent sex offender unit in an Arkansas hospital in 1995.

The states that have hired private companies reason that outside experts have more background in the complex realm of detaining and treating sex offenders than most public workers, and in several states where Liberty holds contracts, officials say they have been impressed with the company’s expertise.

But at the Florida center, even beyond a string of embarrassing failures — an escape, the death of an offender after a fight with another over a bag of chips, a sit-in that the state ultimately quashed with hundreds of law enforcement officers — the treatment record was poor.

In Liberty’s tenure, only one of the hundreds of men here progressed far enough in therapy to earn a recommendation from company clinicians that he be released. At various points, many residents were not attending the group therapy specifically addressing sex offending; in May 2005, 35 percent of the center’s 484 residents fell into that category.

In written responses to questions from The New York Times, as well as court depositions, legislative testimony, e-mail messages, letters and memorandums, Liberty defended its treatment record, blamed Florida as insufficiently financing its commitment program and, for years, failing to define exactly what it expected of Liberty.

Early Praise and Promise

Liberty’s early tenure in Florida won praise from independent evaluators who said the treatment program showed promise. Over the first four years the state asked for few changes, and on matters such as the treatment of mentally ill residents, had a “just do the best you can” attitude, as Susan Keenan Nayda, vice president of operations for behavioral health programs at Liberty, said in a court deposition.

But problems began to surface publicly in June 2000 in dramatic fashion when a resident escaped in a helicopter that an accomplice had landed inside the center’s perimeter. The helicopter crashed after departing with the escapee, who was caught 26 hours later in a canal with the pilot, 2 handguns and 28 rounds of ammunition. The pilot, a longtime friend, had visited the escapee 10 times in the five months before the escape.

The bizarre incident raised worrisome questions and the first hints of a conflict over the center’s combined goals of security and treatment. Too few Liberty staff members were in the yard when the escape occurred, a report by state officials found, and the center’s director had ordered razor wire removed from a security fence because, he said, the wire was damaging volleyballs from a nearby court the residents used.

The report also complained about the state’s role, questioning why corrections officers, who were in charge of security on the perimeter, were unarmed. Commitment centers across the country have wavered between following the legal mandate to run a therapeutic program, as laid out by the courts, and the politically acceptable alternative of a more prisonlike one.

In Florida, the conflict emerged again and again. The state’s emphasis swung, at various points, toward and away from a “correctional” approach, company officials suggested. At one point, Ms. Nayda told a Florida State Senate committee that even she was not entirely sure what the center was trying to be.

“There’s a little bit of confusion,” Ms. Nayda said. “What is this place? Is it a prison? Is it a mental health center? A residential treatment facility where people are clients? What is it? We ask that question sometimes too. We really don’t have a lot of guidance around what it is the state wants the facility to be, and we would encourage the state to look at that.”

By the end of 2000, the state moved its civil commitment center from Martin County on the state’s East Coast to its current home here in Arcadia, a 14-acre compound with eight dormitories and other buildings.

From there, the population rose swiftly, even as staff levels mostly stayed put. Liberty repeatedly sought more money from the state for the center’s operations, for special treatment of its large severely mentally ill population and for creation of a supervised release program.

Asked to respond to Liberty’s complaints about financing, Rod Hall, director of the mental health program office for the state Department of Children and Families, said, “The funding provided to operate the facility was the amount negotiated and agreed upon by Liberty prior to its signing of the contracts.”

Liberty’s monthly reports began suggesting that the company was feeling the crunch. The reports noted frequent troubling incidents: residents having sex, assaulting staff members and each another, hiding knives in their rooms.

Liberty also said it faced an unusual challenge in Florida, where hundreds of the center’s residents are not formally committed, but awaiting trials for commitment. These “detainees,” the company said, often reject treatment to focus on their legal battles.

Some critics, meanwhile, began questioning the treatment. Ted Shaw, a forensic psychologist who evaluates civilly committed sex offenders, complained that Liberty held men back in treatment as punishment for minor infractions.

Liberty officials deny the allegations, but Michael Canty, a child molester who was detained at the center but was never formally committed, concurred with Dr. Shaw, saying Liberty staff members would “harass, taunt — try to get you in trouble so you would get kicked out of treatment.”

Rising Tensions, and Violence

By the time the six workers from Liberty’s facility in Pennsylvania arrived here in 2004, tensions inside the center and with the state authorities were reaching a peak.

In April of that year, a mentally ill man jumped off the center’s roof and was injured after staff members rushed at him to get him down. In June, a resident stabbed another 12 times and the staff had residents mop up the blood, destroying evidence before outside law enforcement officials arrived, an internal report showed.

“It was basically a free-for-all prison, out of control,” said Josh Stiles, another of the visiting workers from Pennsylvania.

Liberty officials said they investigated and immediately took “appropriate actions” regarding all that their Pennsylvania employees reported. But they also said the atmosphere in the center at the time was “probably very conducive for allegations that were either unfounded or exaggerated,” and noted that a second group from the Pennsylvania facility, including its director, returned to Florida several weeks later and reported no similar problems.

Nonetheless, Lynda Sommers, a consultant hired by the state to monitor the facility over a number of years, also found it in disarray in the period after the second Pennsylvania group.

Ms. Sommers reported suspected sexual relationships between staff members and offenders, staff members who slept on the job, crumbling facilities, and vague policies on punishing troublemakers and treating the mentally ill.

Liberty’s own internal investigator, Kenneth Dudding, was also deeply critical of hiring decisions for low-level staff members, whose salaries started at a base rate of $12.89 an hour.

“You could have worked at Wal-Mart last week, they put you in front of a computer to read policy for a few hours, then they send you to a dorm and let you go,” said Mr. Dudding, who left after clashing with Liberty’s management.

As for female security workers, Mr. Dudding said they were easily manipulated by the sex offenders. “It’s like putting candy in front of a baby,” he said.

Mr. Dudding said he ultimately called a state whistle-blower’s hot line.

The inspector general of the Department of Children and Families investigated and issued stinging reports, saying that the facility’s safety director had tried to cover up wrongdoing by tampering with evidence, that an employee was suspected of selling marijuana, and that alcohol was being made and sold there.

Liberty officials said the safety director was fired for “failure to properly function in her role” before they received the inspector general’s critique, and they said they fired the worker suspected of drug sales — on whom no contraband was found — for an unrelated reason.

Then a group of residents, angry when the fire marshal demanded that they not have so many personal items, moved into a yard. For months, the staff could not persuade them to go back to their rooms, creating a scene one law enforcement officer called “Woodstock gone amok.”

Liberty said it first asked for help from the Department of Corrections and was turned down, only to ultimately get a response the company called “excessive.” In February 2005, several hundred corrections and law enforcement officers in riot gear arrived and restored order.

That spring, Liberty’s requests to the state grew more insistent. The company asked for $31.1 million for the next fiscal year; it received $18.7 million, the same as the year before.

By April, having described an “alarming” set of “chronic and serious” issues at the facility, the state was preparing to end its relationship with Liberty.

New Company Takes Over

In the end, the struggle between security and treatment may help explain Liberty’s doomed tenure at the Florida center.

“I had imagined that we would be trying to do research or publish or be innovative or at least use state-of-the-art equipment,” said Dean Cauley, a former therapist at the center. “When I arrived, the equipment wasn’t being used, tests were outdated and treatment was very much secondary to maintaining security.”

Liberty officials said that treating patients had always been their company’s reason for being. Most of the company leaders, including Dr. Herbert T. Caskey, the founder, were originally clinicians, not business people.

If states wanted simply to lock up, not treat, the worst sexual predators, Kenneth Carabello, Liberty’s director of regional operations for California and the western United States, said, “We’d let somebody else do this.”

Despite the center’s history, Don Ryce, the father of Jimmy Ryce, the 9-year-old boy whose 1995 rape and murder spurred the Florida Legislature to adopt a civil commitment law in his name three years later, said the law’s “overall intention” had been accomplished.

“There are a lot of people who are confined who otherwise I guarantee you would be out there reoffending,” Mr. Ryce said, though he added, “I’m not going to pretend there aren’t serious problems that need to be addressed.”

As Liberty departed, Florida picked another private company, the GEO Group Inc., to run the center here.

The GEO Group, once known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, has more than 23 years of experience running prisons. Of 63 centers GEO operates worldwide, 58 are correctional and detention facilities.

Last fall, under GEO’s watch, a new glimpse of turmoil began emerging. Early one morning, a resident said he was attacked by another in his bunk. His screaming, kicking and banging on his door went unanswered for almost 15 minutes before staff members responded, other residents said.

GEO officials said workers from the company and the Department of Corrections “responded promptly” to what GEO described as a “resident upon resident” fight, an assessment echoed in a DeSoto County sheriff’s report.

But some 100 residents signed a letter calling for an end to the practice of housing two residents in a single room. The center “is supposed to be a mental health facility, not a prison,” the residents wrote. “We are to be treated as patients, not state convicts.”

Next: The difficult science of treating sex offenders. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/us/05civil.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

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

March 04, 2007

CO: Prisoners Will Repalce Wary Migrants in CO Fields

Inmates Will Replace Wary Migrants in Colorado Fields

By DAN FROSCH
March 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/us/04prisoners.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

DENVER, March 3 — As migrant laborers flee Colorado because of tough new immigration restrictions, worried farmers are looking to prisoners to fill their places in the fields.

In a pilot program run by the state Corrections Department, supervised teams of low-risk inmates beginning this month will be available to harvest the swaths of sweet corn, peppers and melons that sweep the southeastern portion of the state.

Under the program, which has drawn criticism from groups concerned about immigrants’ rights and from others seeking changes in the criminal justice system, farmers will pay a fee to the state, and the inmates, who volunteer for the work, will be paid about 60 cents a day, corrections officials said.

Concerned about the possible shortage of field labor, Dorothy B. Butcher, a state representative from Pueblo and a supporter of the program, said, “The workers on these farms do the weeding, the harvesting, the storing, everything that comes with growing crops for the market.”

“If we can’t sustain our work force, we’re going to be in trouble,” said Ms. Butcher, a Democrat.

The program will make its debut in Pueblo County, where farmers have been hit hard by the labor shortage. Frank Sobolik, director of a Colorado State University extension program that works with farmers in Pueblo County, said he expected that about half of the 300 migrant workers employed by area farms might not return this season.

“There’s a feeling, a perception that these laborers won’t be back because it’s safer for them to find work in other states,” Mr. Sobolik said. “The farmers are really concerned. These are high-value crops we’re talking about here with a high labor requirement.”

Last year, the Colorado General Assembly passed tough legislation that included giving local law enforcement broader powers to check immigration status and restricting access to social services for workers without proper documentation.

The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition estimates that there are 150,000 illegal immigrants in Colorado, many of them involved in agriculture. Migrant workers typically travel here from Mexico, Texas and New Mexico for the crop season, where their labor can last from May through the late fall, before returning home to their families. But those numbers could soon be reduced drastically, as workers who are in the country illegally are unwilling to risk exposing their status.

Joe Pisciotta Jr., who owns a 700-acre produce farm in Pueblo County, said he had about 20 workers and expected to lose half of them. Mr. Pisciotta, a third-generation farmer, worried that such a reduction would undercut his ability to supply buyers with the watermelons, onions and pumpkins he grows.

“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “I’m definitely going to lose customers. We’ve never had an issue like this. With all of us trying to get enough workers on our farms, I’m worried this is going to turn into farmer against farmer.”

Although chain gangs and prison farms have long been staples of American correctional culture, the concept of inmates working on private farms is unusual. But there are signs that other states are following suit. The Iowa Department of Corrections is considering a similar program because of a migrant labor shortage in that state.

Several Iowa farmers called recently to request inmates in lieu of migrant workers, said Roger Baysden, the director of the state’s prison industries program. One farmer asked for as many as 200 inmates, Mr. Baysden said.

In Colorado, Ms. Butcher said she hoped that the program, which could send up to 100 inmates to Pueblo County farmers, would remedy a situation that might otherwise turn into an economic disaster.

Immigrant rights group, however, said the Colorado program was myopic.

“Many immigrants are leaving Colorado for other states that will actually embrace their contributions as good citizens and hard workers,” said Julien Ross, state coordinator for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. “This exodus from Colorado has profound negative consequences on our economy and the very fabric of our society.”

Mr. Ross said his group was organizing a weeklong boycott of Colorado businesses beginning March 25 to demonstrate the workers’ impact on the regional economy.

A group calling for changes in sentencing, the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, is
also uneasy about the program. The group views the inmates’ pay as problematic.

“This feels like the re-invention of the plantation,” said Christie Donner, the group’s executive director. “You have a captive labor force essentially working for their room and board in order to benefit the employer. This isn’t a job training program. It’s an exploitative program.”

But Ari Zavaras, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, said the merit of a hard day’s work outdoors was invaluable to an inmate.

“They won’t be paid big bucks, but we’re hoping this will help our inmates pick up significant and valuable job skills,” Mr. Zavaras said. “We’re also assisting farmers who, if they don’t get help, are facing an inability to harvest their crops.”

With the start of the farming season looming, Colorado’s farmers are scrambling to figure out which crops to sow and in what quantity. Some are considering turning to field corn, which is mechanically harvested. And they are considering whether they want to pay for an urban inmate who could not single out a ripe watermelon or discern between a weed and an onion plant.

“This is not a cure-all,” Mr. Pisciotta said. “What our farm laborers do is a skill. They’re born with it, and they’re good at it. It’s not an easy job.”

Posted by lois at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

Doubts Rise as States Detain Sex Offenders After Prison

March 4, 2007
Doubts Rise as States Detain Sex Offenders After Prison
By MONICA DAVEY and ABBY GOODNOUGH, Page 1, NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/us/04civil.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
graphs at this URL

The decision by New York to confine sex offenders beyond their prison terms places the state at the forefront of a growing national movement that is popular with politicians and voters. But such programs have almost never met a stated purpose of treating the worst criminals until they no longer pose a threat.

About 2,700 pedophiles, rapists and other sexual offenders are already being held indefinitely, mostly in special treatment centers, under so-called civil commitment programs in 19 states, which on average cost taxpayers four times more than keeping the offenders in prison.

In announcing a deal with legislative leaders on Thursday, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, suggested that New York’s proposed civil commitment law would “become a national model” and go well beyond confining the most violent predators to also include mental health treatment and intensive supervised release for offenders.

“No one has a bill like this, nobody,” said State Senator Dale M. Volker, a Republican from western New York and a leading proponent in the Legislature of civil confinement.

But in state after state, such expectations have fallen short. The United States Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the laws in part because their aim is to furnish treatment if possible, not punish someone twice for the same crime. Yet only a small fraction of committed offenders have ever completed treatment to the point where they could be released free and clear.

Leroy Hendricks, a convicted child molester in Kansas, finished his prison term 13 years ago, but he remains locked up at a cost to taxpayers in that state of $185,000 a year — more than eight times the cost of keeping someone in prison there.

Mr. Hendricks, who is 72 and unsuccessfully challenged his confinement in the Supreme Court, spends most days in a wheelchair or leaning on a cane, because of diabetes, circulation ailments and the effects of a stroke. He may not live long enough to “graduate” from treatment.

Few ever make such progress: Nationwide, of the 250 offenders released unconditionally since the first law was passed in 1990, about half of them were let go on legal or technical grounds unrelated to treatment.

Still, political leaders, like those in New York, are vastly expanding such programs to keep large numbers of rapists and pedophiles off the streets after their prison terms in a response to public fury over grisly sex crimes.

In Coalinga, Calif., a $388 million facility will allow the state to greatly expand the offenders it holds to 1,500. Florida, Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia and Wisconsin are also adding beds.

At the federal level, President Bush has signed a law offering money to states that commit sex offenders beyond their prison terms, and the Justice Department is creating a civil commitment program for federal prisoners.

Even with the enthusiasm among politicians, an examination by The New York Times of the existing programs found they have failed in a number of areas:

¶Sex offenders selected for commitment are not always the most violent; some exhibitionists are chosen, for example, while rapists are passed over. And some are past the age at which some scientists consider them most dangerous. In Wisconsin, a 102-year-old who wears a sport coat to dinner cannot participate in treatment because of memory lapses and poor hearing.

¶The treatment regimens are expensive and largely unproven, and there is no way to compel patients to participate. Many simply do not show up for sessions on their lawyers’ advice — treatment often requires them to recount crimes, even those not known to law enforcement — and spend their time instead gardening, watching television or playing video games.

¶The cost of the programs is virtually unchecked and growing, with states spending nearly $450 million on them this year. The annual price of housing a committed sex offender averages more than $100,000, compared with about $26,000 a year for keeping someone in prison, because of the higher costs for programs, treatment and supervised freedoms.

¶Unlike prisons and other institutions, civil commitment centers receive little standard, independent oversight or monitoring; sex among offenders is sometimes rampant, and, in at least one facility, sex has been reported between offenders and staff members.

¶Successful treatment is often not a factor in determining the relatively few offenders who are released; in Iowa, of the nine men let go unconditionally, none had completed treatment or earned the center’s recommendation for release.

¶Few states have figured out what to do when they do have graduates ready for supervised release. In California, the state made 269 attempts to find a home for one released pedophile. In Milwaukee, the authorities started searching in 2003 for a neighborhood for a 77-year-old offender, but have yet to find one.

Supporters of the laws offer no apologies for their shortcomings, insisting that the money is well spent. Born out of the anguish that followed a handful of high-profile sex crimes in the 1980s, the laws are proven and potent vote-getters that have withstood constitutional challenges.

“There has to be a process in place that prevents someone from rejoining society if they’re still dangerous,” said Jeffrey Klein, a Democratic member of the New York State Senate who has pushed for civil confinement there.

Martin Andrews, 47, of Woodbridge, Va., who was abducted, buried in a box and repeatedly sexually assaulted for a week when he was 13, also supports the laws.

“If they can’t control themselves,” Mr. Andrews said, “we need to do it for them.”

But the myriad problems have concerned some advocates for victims of sexual abuse, who suggest the money is being wasted and that other options for dealing with dangerous sex offenders — such as giving them longer prison terms, preventing sentencing deals with prosecutors and mandating treatment during incarceration — would be more effective.

“Civil commitment is a huge, huge assignment of resources,“ said Anne Liske, the former executive director of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, a victims’ advocacy group. “This wholesale warehousing — without using the proper assessment tools and with throwing treatment in when they are not people who can be treated — has already proven not to be working, so why would we do it more?”

A Series of Convictions

Leroy Hendricks was a likely candidate for commitment as he prepared to leave a Kansas prison in 1994.

Mr. Hendricks’s most recent crime, for which he had been convicted a decade earlier, had been “indecent liberties” with two 13-year-old boys in an electronics shop where he worked. All told, his convictions left a painful trail reaching back to 1955: exposing himself to young girls; molesting 7- and 8-year-old boys at a carnival where he was the ride foreman; molesting a 7-year-old girl; playing strip poker with a 14-year-old girl; preying on his own family members, including a boy with cerebral palsy.

Like Mr. Hendricks was, thousands of soon-to-be-released prisoners are screened for commitment each year by state corrections departments, prosecutors and panels. The process varies widely from state to state, as do standards for the evaluators, but in most states, those recommended for commitment have trials before judges or juries.

Mr. Hendricks may have sealed his own fate when he testified in 1994 that he could not “control the urge” to molest when he got “stressed out.” He said his mother, Violet, had wanted a girl when he was born and had dressed him as one when he was growing up.

“I sure don’t want to hurt anybody again,” he told the court, but then conceded that he could not ensure the safety of children in his presence. “The only way to guarantee that is to die,” he said.

More often, these cases come down to contentious duels between psychologists over how best to analyze an offender’s history and likelihood of repeating crimes. In most states, commitment is for an indefinite period, but offenders are allowed to have their cases reviewed by a court periodically.

The results of the screening process are inconsistent. Some offenders are passed up for civil confinement, only to commit vicious crimes again; others’ physical ailments alone make them unlikely repeat predators.

Even though Minnesota prison officials had classified Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a convicted rapist, in a category of sex offenders most at risk to commit more crimes, Mr. Rodriguez went home when his term ended in May 2003. That November, he kidnapped and killed Dru Sjodin, a North Dakota college student who was beaten and raped.

Likewise, Jerry Buck Inman was charged with raping and strangling a college student in South Carolina last June, nine months after his release from a Florida prison after serving 17 years for rape and other crimes. The authorities in Florida looked at his records but decided not to seek commitment.

Meanwhile, some prosecutors seek commitment for others convicted of noncontact crimes like public exposure. In Florida, prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to civilly commit a man who was imprisoned for driving drunk even though his last sex arrest was decades earlier.

“The population that is being detained is a very, very mixed group,” said Richard Wollert, a psychologist in Portland, Ore., who evaluates civilly committed offenders. “There are cases that are appalling in terms of being kept in custody at the taxpayers’ expense when there are probably alternative placements for them.”

Predicting who is likely to commit future sex crimes has become more of a science over the last decade, but many still find the methods questionable.

Actuarial formulas — akin to the tables used for life insurance — play a central role in deciding who is dangerous enough to be committed. They calculate someone’s risk of offending again by looking at factors such as the number of prior sex offenses and the sex of the victims. Men with male victims are graded as higher risk, for example, because statistics show they are more often repeat offenders.

“The danger is that these numbers will blind people,” said Eric Janus, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul who has challenged Minnesota’s civil commitment law in court.

Politics and emotion also factor heavily into who gets committed, with decisions made by elected judges or juries who may be more affected by the raw facts of someone’s offense history or the public spectacle over their crimes than the dry science of risk prediction.

“It’s so emotional for them,” said Stephen Watson, an assistant public defender who represented an offender in Florida. “They don’t even want to hear the research.”

New Laws Follow Publicized Cases

Earlier in the 20th century, many states had sexual psychopath laws that allowed them to hospitalize offenders deemed too sick for prison. But by the 1980s most such laws had been repealed or fallen into disuse.

But a handful of horrific and highly publicized cases in the 1980s and ’90s spurred lawmakers to act again. Washington State adopted the first civil commitment law in 1990 after men with predatory histories killed a young woman in Seattle and sexually mutilated a boy in Tacoma.

After state courts upheld Washington’s law, Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin passed versions in 1994, followed by California in 1996.

Then, in a 5-to-4 decision in 1997, the United States Supreme Court found civil commitment to be constitutional in Kansas v. Hendricks, the same Mr. Hendricks still confined in Kansas.

In the ruling, the justices found that a “mental abnormality” like pedophilia was enough to meet a standard to qualify someone for commitment, not the different standard of “mental illness” that had been traditionally used. The court also rejected the notion that civil commitment amounted to double jeopardy (a second criminal punishment for a single crime) or an ex post facto law (a new punishment for a past crime), noting that Kansas’s statute was not meant to punish committed men but, like other acceptable civil commitment statutes, intended “both to incapacitate and to treat” them therapeutically.

“We have never held that the Constitution prevents a state from civilly detaining those for whom no treatment is available, but who nevertheless pose a danger to others,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, later adding, “By furnishing such treatment, the Kansas Legislature has indicated that treatment, if possible, is at least an ancillary goal of the act, which easily satisfies any test for determining that the act is not punitive.”

Since then, state officials, civil liberties advocates and lawyers have wrestled with exactly what that treatment requirement means.

“There’s no question about it,” Professor Janus of William Mitchell College said, “it’s a very murky area of the law.”

Since the Hendricks ruling, the courts have indicated that states have “wide latitude” when it comes to treatment for the civilly confined, meaning that unsuccessful treatment alone or an untreatable patient would not be enough to undo the laws.

In 2001, the Supreme Court, in Seling v. Young, decided the case of Andre Brigham Young, a committed man in Washington State who argued that the conditions he was being held under were so punitive and the treatment so inadequate as to amount to a second criminal sentence. The court ruled against Mr. Young.

A year later, in 2002, the Supreme Court made clear the limits of who may be committed by states, saying the authorities must prove not just that an offender is still dangerous and likely to commit more crimes but also that he or she has a “serious difficulty in controlling behavior.”

Some civil libertarians and prisoner advocates, who still object to the laws, have not given up on finding a challenge that the Supreme Court might view favorably. Despite the court rulings, these groups insist civil commitment amounts to a second sentence for a crime.

Even the look of commitment centers reflects the dichotomy at the core of their stated reason for being — to lock away dangerous men (only three women are civilly committed) but also to treat them.

Most of the centers tend to look and feel like prisons, with clanking double doors, guard stations, fluorescent lighting, cinder-block walls, overcrowded conditions and tall fences with razor wire around the perimeters.

Bedroom doors are often locked at night, and mail is searched by the staff for pornography or retail catalogs with pictures of women or children. Most states put their centers in isolated areas. Washington State’s is on an island three miles offshore in Puget Sound.

Yet soothing artwork hangs at some centers, and cheerful fliers announce movie nights and other activities. The residents can wander the grounds and often spend their time as they please in an effort to encourage their cooperation, including sunbathing in courtyards and sometimes even ordering pizza for delivery. The new center in California will have a 20,000-book library, badminton courts and room for music and art therapy.

Diseases like hepatitis and diabetes are common among the committed, and severe mental illness — beyond the mental “abnormalities“ described by the Supreme Court — a scourge. A survey in 2002 found that 12 percent of committed sex offenders suffered from serious psychiatric problems like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Most severely mentally ill men cannot participate in sex offender treatment and receive few services besides medication. Verwayne Alexander, a self-described paranoid schizophrenic who has been detained at the Florida Civil Commitment Center since 2003, has sliced himself so many times with razor blades that a guard often watches him around the clock, lawyers said. Mr. Alexander has sought unsuccessfully to be moved to a psychiatric hospital.

Those who choose to participate in sex offender treatment spend an average of less than 10 hours a week doing so, but the hours differ vastly from state to state. The structure of therapy, too, varies widely, a reflection, perhaps, of the central question still looming in the field: Can treatment ever really work for these offenders?

Admitting to previous crimes is a crucial piece of a broad band of treatment, known as relapse prevention, that is used in at least 15 states and has been the most widely accepted model for about 20 years.

Some of the institutions, too, devote time to other therapies and activities that seem to have little bearing on sexual offending. In Pennsylvania, young residents take classes to improve their health and social habits called “Athlete’s Foot,” “Lactose Intolerance,” “Male Pattern Baldness,” “Flatulence” and “Proper Table Manners.”

In California, they can join a Brazilian drum ensemble or classes like “Anger Management Through Art Therapy” and “Interpersonal Skills Through Mural Making.”

But many of those committed get no treatment at all for sex offending, mainly by their own choice. In California, three-quarters of civilly committed sex offenders do not attend therapy. Many say their lawyers tell them to avoid it because admission of past misdeeds during therapy could make getting out impossible, or worse, lead to new criminal charges.

For those who decline treatment — sometimes including hundreds of “detainees” awaiting commitment trials — boredom, resentment and hostility to those in treatment lead to trouble. Some sneak in drugs, alcohol and cellphones, sometimes with the help of staff members, or beat up other residents, sometimes coercing them into having sex.

“There’s rampant sexuality going on in there,” said Natalie Novick Brown, a psychologist who has evaluated 250 men at Florida’s center.

The people who run civil commitment centers say that a constant, nagging question hangs over them: How to keep order while not treating argumentative, sometimes violent offenders like prisoners? The low-level staff members are not prison guards and tend to be poorly educated, trained and paid. Their job titles — in Illinois, security therapy aide — reflect the awkward balance they must achieve between security and therapy.

Because civil commitment centers are neither prisons nor traditional mental health programs, no specialized oversight body exists. None has been created, in part because its base of financial support, the 19 civil commitment programs around the country, would be too small, several experts who study the programs said. But the need, they said, is urgent.

“They ought to be reviewed by an independent entity with the highest possible standards,” said Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore.

Few Signs of Progress

Around the country, relatively few committed sex offenders finish treatment and are released.

“Every year I go to his hearing, and every year there’s no progress in his case,” said Armand R. Cingolani III, a lawyer with a client in Pennsylvania who was committed in 2004 after being adjudicated as a juvenile for sexual assault on two different minors. “It doesn’t seem that anyone gets better.”

Nearly 3,000 sex offenders have been committed since the first law passed in 1990. In 18 of the 19 states, about 50 have been released completely from commitment because clinicians or state-appointed evaluators deemed them ready. Some 115 other people have been sent home because of legal technicalities, court rulings, terminal illness or old age.

In discharging offenders, Arizona, the remaining state, has been the exception. That state has fully discharged 81 people; there, the facility’s director said records were not available to indicate the reason for those discharges.

An additional 189 people have been released with supervision or conditions (excluding Texas, where there is no commitment center and those committed are treated only as outpatients). And an additional 68 (including 58 in
Arizona) are in a higher, “transitional” phase of the program, but still technically committed and often living on state land.

The backlogs have led to an aging population. Inside many facilities, wheelchairs, walkers, high blood pressure and senility are increasingly expensive concerns. Florida’s center filled 229 prescriptions for arthritis medication one recent month, and 300 for blood pressure and other heart problems.

More than 400 of the men in civil commitment are 60 or older, and a number of studies indicate a significant drop in the recidivism rate for this group, many of whom have health problems after years in prison. David Thornton, treatment director of Wisconsin’s center and an expert on recidivism rates, said the decline was increasingly well-documented.

The growth of the committed population has become a political quagmire. No legislator wants to insist on the release of sex offenders, but few are able to swallow the mounting costs of civil commitment. The costs of aging and sick offenders, such as Mr. Hendricks in Kansas, are especially high in part because of their special needs and physical ailments.

From 2001 to 2005, the price of civil commitment in Kansas leapt to nearly $6.9 million from $1.2 million, a state audit there found. “Unless Kansas is willing to accept a higher level of risk and release more sexual predators from the program,” the audit said, “few options exist to curb the growth of the program.”

But as more states consider granting some offenders supervised release, the cost is turning out to be nearly as prohibitive.

For $1.7 million, Washington converted a warehouse in Seattle into a home for men on conditional release. It has 26 cameras monitoring residents, a dozen workers, a surveillance booth overseeing the living area and a 1,700-pound magnetic door.

Two men live there so far.

With the logjams and frustrations mounting, many states have lengthened prison sentences for sex offenders. Virginia last year increased the minimum sentence for certain sexual acts against children to 25 years, from 10, though it also sharply expanded the number of crimes that qualify an offender for civil commitment.

Ida Ballasiotes, whose daughter’s rape and murder in 1988 helped spur the first civil commitment law, in Washington State, said that no sexual predator should walk free and that longer prison sentences should “absolutely” be considered.

“I don’t believe they can be treated, period,” Ms. Ballasiotes said.

After Release, Objections

Even for those sex offenders considered safe enough to be released, going home is no simple process. Kansas authorities decided two years ago that Mr. Hendricks, who was the first person that state committed under its law and who after a decade had progressed to one of the highest phases of treatment, should be moved from Larned State Hospital to a group home in a community where he would be watched around the clock.

Mr. Hendricks would not be allowed onto the home’s porch or patio without an escort, according to court documents. Besides, his medical problems, including poor hearing and eyesight, meant he could not walk down the 40-yard gravel driveway outside the house without falling, the documents said.

But as with many men with his history, the community balked. In California, so many towns object to men leaving civil commitment that some of those released have to live in trailers outside prisons.

“You can’t just sneak them in,” said John Rodriguez, a recently retired deputy director in the California Department of Mental Health. “You’ve got hearings, the court announces it, it’s all over the press.”

In Mr. Hendricks’s case, residents of Lawrence, where he was initially to be moved, collected petitions. “You can tell me that he’s old, but as long as he can move his hands and his arms, he can hurt another child,” said Missi Pfeifer, 37, a mother of three who led the petition drive with her two sisters and mother.

Then officials in Leavenworth County, picked as an alternative, said the choice violated county zoning laws. Mr. Hendricks lasted two days there, in a house off a road not far from a pasture of horses, before a judge ordered him removed.

State officials said they had no choice but to move Mr. Hendricks back to a facility on the grounds of a different state hospital, where he still is.

Through a spokeswoman for the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, Mr. Hendricks declined to speak to The New York Times.

Two years ago, he told The Lawrence Journal-World that he would be living in a group home “if somebody hadn’t opened their damn mouth,” adding, “I’m stuck here till something happens, and I don’t know when that will be.”

Next: Inside the troubled center for sex offenders in Florida.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

TX:Investigations Multiplying in Juvenile Abuse Scandal

March 4, 2007
Investigations Multiplying in Juvenile Abuse Scandal
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, March 3 - A sexual abuse scandal in the Texas juvenile justice system has state politics in an uproar, with accusations that damning reports were doctored and shelved and sexual predators in high positions were allowed to resign without facing charges.

Late Friday, Ronnie Earle, the district attorney of Travis County who has jurisdiction over Austin, the state capital, announced a criminal investigation into possible records tampering at the Texas Youth Commission.

And Gov. Rick Perry, pressed by angry legislators to put the commission into conservatorship, appointed a special master, Jay Kimbrough, a former deputy state attorney general and state director of homeland security, to lead an investigation into the agency and "reports of failures and wrongdoings."

According to officials, at least 13 boys and girls were molested by staff members at two state schools run by the commission. Even before Mr. Earle and Mr. Perry took action on Friday, there were already inquiries under a previously appointed special prosecutor and legislative committees.

At a State Senate hearing in the capital Tuesday, parents complained of sexual abuse and other mistreatment of their children in state facilities.

"My son is home, but he is not the same since he was raped in the T.Y.C.," said Mary Jane Martinez of San Antonio, who told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee that her 17-year-old son "is so ashamed of himself he built a wall."

Ms. Martinez said her son refused to detail what happened to him at the Victory Field Correctional Academy in Vernon.

With the state's Republican leadership under strong challenge, a high-level legislative audit committee called on Governor Perry on Friday to appoint a conservator to take over the commission, or, failing that, to send in state auditors to investigate how it was handling nearly 8,000 youthful felons, misdemeanants and parolees in 36 facilities.

One top Democratic lawmaker with bipartisan support said he would seek to introduce a bill on Monday ordering a takeover of the agency.

"The allegations of sick sexual abuse of troubled youths are so severe, the Legislature needs to bypass the bureaucracy and protect the victims and prevent more children from becoming victims," said the lawmaker, Representative Jim Dunnam of Waco, leader of the House Democratic caucus.

In recent days, top officials of the youth commission have resigned or been ousted. Many lawmakers - already furious with the governor for bypassing them last month on an order that sixth-grade girls be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus causing cancer - have criticized the commission as dysfunctional.

Officials who testified at the State Senate hearing said that the commission staff members trained for only 80 hours compared with 300 for adult criminal justice employees, and that last year the commission's staff turnover rate was 52 percent. There is only one staff member for each 18 juveniles ages 10-21.

"What scares me the most is what I don't know," Senator John H. Whitmire, the Houston Democrat heading the Criminal Justice Committee, told Neil Nichols, then the acting executive director, at the hearing this week.

Mr. Nichols, the longtime general counsel who took over last Friday upon the sudden retirement of the previous executive director, Dwight Harris, acknowledged that "T.Y.C. is in hard times," saying that some of the events "would be impossible to explain to a parent or family."

Mr. Nichols was among the officials replaced this week over the scandal.

The State Senate hearing drew anguished mothers like Katrina Cannon of Troy, near Waco, whose 17-year-old son is now at the McLennan County State Juvenile Correction Facility and who, she said, had once suffered an unexplained incident of rectal bleeding.

"I have asked him and he will not admit anything," Ms. Cannon said.

The revelations, disclosed in recent weeks by news organizations that had obtained long-secret reports by the youth commission and the Texas Rangers, have reverberated around the state.

Will Harrell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, which has investigated juvenile mistreatment allegations for years, said the juvenile justice system was overwhelmed and needed alternatives to incarceration, like probation programs.

The furor is centered on the commission's handling of allegations of sexual abuse by two former high-ranking administrators.

One, Ray Brookins, a security director at the San Saba State School in central Texas, was allowed to transfer to the West Texas State School in Pyote on Oct. 1, 2003, although a commission report compiled in 2005 said he had been disciplined for having adult pornography on his work computer and had been admonished for regularly taking students into his office alone at night with the blinds drawn.

The report was not made public until last month.

The superintendent at Pyote, Lemuel Harrison, said he not been told of Mr. Brookins's history. But the report criticized Mr. Harrison as having ignored repeated complaints from staff members that within days of arriving, Mr. Brookins began taking boys out of the dormitory at night for sexual encounters.

A caseworker later reported overhearing a boy telling his mother that Mr. Brookins had molested him in the dormitory.

When Mr. Harrison went on medical leave in October 2004, Mr. Brookins became acting superintendent and, the report said, "used his authority and powers of persuasion to keep his victims and West Texas State School staff from reporting his conduct."

Mr. Brookins, 41, who was said at the Senate hearing to be working now at a bar in Austin, could not be reached for comment. Two Austin phone listings in his name were out of service and the youth commission has no way to reach him, said a spokesman, Tim Savoy.

Two weeks after Mr. Brookins's arrival at Pyote, the West Texas State School hired a new principal, John Paul Hernandez. Mr. Hernandez, too, began taking boys out of the dormitory to private late night encounters, the report said.

The Texas Rangers later found that both men "engaged in sexual contact with several students." Federal prosecutors declined jurisdiction in the matter and the findings were referred to the Ward County district attorney, Randall W. Reynolds, who said this week that the case was still active, if delayed.

"Frankly I wish it had moved quicker," Mr. Reynolds said. Now it has been turned over to a special prosecutor.

Mr. Savoy of the commission said Mr. Hernandez had "staff sexual contact" with two 17-year-olds and a 20-year-old, and that Mr. Brookins had sexual contact with an 18-year-old and committed "unprofessional conduct" involving other sex-related offenses with six youths 15 to 19.

Both men resigned without criminal charges in 2005. The commission's executive director at the time, Mr. Harris, ordered his own report, which remained secret until last month when The Texas Observer and The Dallas Morning News obtained it and other records and revealed the abuse allegations.

Mr. Hernandez was later named principal of a charter school, the Richard Milburn Academy in Midland. The superintendent, Norman Hall, said that he had not been told of Mr. Hernandez's history at his hiring and that he had now suspended him.

Mr. Hernandez, 41, reached by phone on Wednesday, denied the charges but said he was declining to comment further on the advice of his lawyer.

Mr. Harrison was later named the commission's director of juvenile corrections in charge of several state schools but has now also been suspended, Mr. Savoy, the commission spokesman, said.

Pete C. Alfaro, the chairman of the youth commission board from 2004 until he was demoted by Mr. Perry and announced he would resign this week, said the first he knew of Mr. Harris's 2005 report was from the recent news accounts.

Mr. Earle, the district attorney, said he was investigating an account in The Austin American-Statesman that even when the 2005 commission report was released last month, a section showing that high agency officials had been alerted to the abuse, but ignored it, had been deleted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/us/04youth.html

Posted by lois at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2007

NY: State Plans to Incarcerate People Covicted of Sex Offences After Prison Sentences End

March 2, 2007
State Plan to Monitor Sex Offenders Goes Beyond Detention
By DANNY HAKIM, NY Times

ALBANY, March 1 — New guidelines and procedures announced by Gov. Eliot Spitzer and legislative leaders on Thursday for confining sex offenders who have completed prison sentences go well beyond detaining the most violent predators. The law, which would be one of the most far-reaching of its kind in the country, would also provide mental health treatment to inmates while they are jailed or confined and impose supervision and treatment after their release.

Even those under 18 at the time of an offense could be subject to civil confinement under the agreement, though officials said such cases would probably be rare. Those convicted of any of a wide range of sex-related felonies would be reviewed for potential detainment after their prison sentences end, including those convicted of some nonviolent crimes like giving minors indecent material.

The agreement would eliminate parole for a greater number of sex crimes and give judges discretion to impose far longer terms of post-release supervision during an offender’s initial sentencing, to as much as 25 years from a maximum of 5 years now.

The agreement would also create a new “sexually motivated felony” that would apply to those who intended to commit a sex crime but did not.

“My hope and expectation is that our approach will become a national model,” Mr. Spitzer said at a joint news conference with legislative leaders. He noted that the proposed legislation went well beyond what has been discussed before by the Legislature.

Civil libertarians have long voiced concern about similar laws that exist in varying forms in nearly 20 other states.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said a legal challenge “would certainly be a possibility,” though it would require a test case. She said it was difficult to respond because the deal was negotiated behind closed doors.

“Despite all the talk of reform and openness and a new era in Albany, we once again have three men in a room cutting a deal on a very serious issue without the Legislature even being in town and with no plan for a hearing,” she said.

The legislation is virtually certain to pass because it was negotiated by the leaders of both houses and the governor. The issue of whether offenders younger than 18 could be confined after release was a major sticking point for Assembly Democrats, who relented after it was agreed that those classified by judges as youthful offenders would be exempt.

Washington State passed the first civil confinement law for sex offenders in 1990, and similar laws have been challenged in a number of other states. In 1997, in a 5-to-4 decision upholding a Kansas law, the Supreme Court ruled that states could confine violent sex offenders in mental hospitals even if the offenders did not meet the typical criteria for commitment of the mentally ill.

The new deal here would put in place a complex set of procedures. Before release from prison, sex offenders would be screened by mental health professionals to determine whether they might be predisposed to commit further sex offenses.

If an offender is judged a risk, the case will be referred to the attorney general’s office, which will decide if a jury should be convened to determine whether the inmate requires further supervision. A unanimous decision would leave it to a judge to decide whether to confine the person or impose supervision after release.

Most detainees would be housed in an existing mental health facility in St. Lawrence, north of Syracuse. Talks are continuing on building a dedicated facility to house sex offenders, which legislative officials have said could cost $200 million.

The deal was seen as a new victory for Mr. Spitzer, who succeeded in forging a compromise where George E. Pataki had failed, despite the fact that Mr. Spitzer has at times openly berated lawmakers in both parties. Republicans long accused Democrats of holding up a deal, while Democrats said their own proposals were rejected. And Mr. Pataki’s fractious relationship with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver often caused negotiations to break down.

The deal came two days after lawmakers announced a plan to overhaul the state’s workers’ compensation system, another divisive issue. Mr. Spitzer said the civil confinement legislation was “perhaps too long in the making,” adding, “Like workers’ comp, there was an impasse that required a concerted effort to overcome.”

Senate Republicans credited the governor’s aggressive approach to negotiating deals for breaking the deadlock.

“Steamrolling works,” said Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, referring to a machine the new governor has likened himself to.

“Governor, thank you for providing the leadership, getting us together,” Mr. Bruno said. Referring to Mr. Silver, he added, “Shelly, thank you for being such a great partner — sometimes.”

Mr. Silver said, “For the record, I want to state very clearly that in 2005 we had a comprehensive child safety and sexual predator punishment and confinement strategy in the Assembly.”

There appeared to be concessions on both sides. The Senate conceded two key points to the Assembly. The trials would be held in the counties where the inmates were convicted, not where they are imprisoned. And initial screenings would be done by mental health professionals instead of by officials in the Division of Criminal Justice Services. Senators prevailed in creating a sexually motivated felony and apply the system to those under 18; the governor supported both provisions.

“It was a compromise that didn’t make either side happy,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Brooklyn Democrat who was a central player in the discussions.

Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for the governor, said it was “extremely unlikely” that offenders younger than 18 would be affected. But she added that civil confinement should be considered at any age if the convict “has a mental abnormality and is determined likely to commit sex offenses if released.”

What all this would cost remains to be seen, but some said it would be far more than the $19 million in new financing that the governor has proposed in his budget.

Senator Dale M. Volker, a Republican from western New York who has sponsored bills on the issue for more than a decade, said the new law would require more parole officers and mental health workers, not to mention a new facility.

“This is not going to be cheap,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/nyregion/02civil.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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March 01, 2007

Slavery Is Not Dead. It’s Not Even Past.

March 1, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Slavery Is Not Dead. It’s Not Even Past.
By BOB HERBERT

The Rev. Al Sharpton seemed subdued, quiet, reflective — which was unusual.

Just when we thought the news couldn’t get any weirder, we learned this week, via The Daily News, that Mr. Sharpton’s great-grandfather was a slave who was owned by relatives of Senator Strom Thurmond, the longtime archsegregationist who ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948.

“There’s not enough troops in the Army,” Mr. Thurmond told a screaming crowd during that campaign, “to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our schools and into our homes.”

Mr. Sharpton seemed a little shaken by the revelation. “You’re always kind of thinking that your ancestors were slaves,” he said. “But this was my grandfather’s father. I knew my grandfather. It’s eerie when it becomes so personal.”

The days of slavery are closer than we tend to think, and they were crueler than we tend to realize. Mr. Sharpton’s great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was sent with his wife and two children from South Carolina to Florida so a woman named Julia Thurmond Sharpton could send them out as laborers to pay off debts left by her late husband.

Julia Sharpton was a first cousin, twice removed, of Strom Thurmond.

“They were sent there solely for that reason,” Mr. Sharpton said. “To make money to pay her debt. It was just so clear that they were nothing but property. The complete dehumanization — I don’t think I fully understood it until this hit home.”

There’s a great deal that Americans don’t fully understand about slavery. It’s such an uncomfortable subject that the temptation is to relegate it to the distant past and move on. But the long tentacles of that evil institution are still with us. Slavery was the foundation of the thriving consumer society that we have today and the wellspring of the racism that still poisons so many white attitudes and black lives.

The sheer size of the phenomenon of slavery, which was woven into the very being of the early Americas, is not well known today. The historian David Brion Davis, in his book “Inhuman Bondage,” tells us:

“By 1820 nearly 8.7 million slaves had departed from Africa for the New World, as opposed to only 2.6 million whites, many of them convicts or indentured servants, who had left Europe. Thus by 1820 African slaves constituted almost 77 percent of the enormous population that had sailed toward the Americas, and from 1760 to 1820 this emigrating flow included 5.6 African slaves for every European.”

For most of the time between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the United States was governed by presidents who owned slaves.

One of the points Mr. Davis stressed was that the commodities produced in such tremendous volume by slaves — sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, cotton — were crucial to the formation of the world’s first global mass market.

“From the very beginnings,” wrote Mr. Davis, “America was part black, and indebted to the appalling sacrifices of millions of individual blacks who cleared the forests and tilled the soil. Yet even the ardent opponents of slaveholding could seldom if ever acknowledge this basic fact.”

Instead of reaping rewards for this seminal role in the creation of a rich and powerful nation, blacks have been relentlessly vilified by a profoundly racist society and frozen out of most of the nation’s bounty. Consigned to the bottom of the caste heap after emancipation, and denied some of the most basic human rights, blacks became the convenient depository of whatever blame and negative stereotypes whites chose to cast their way.

The abject state ruthlessly imposed upon blacks for so long became, perversely, proof of their inferiority. Blacks gave whites of all classes someone to look down upon.

Slavery, like the past, as Faulkner reminded us, is not dead. It’s not even past. It’s not something that you can wish away.

The other night Reverend Sharpton flew into Miami to attend a conference. At the airport someone asked for his autograph.

“It was the first time in my life that I thought about why my name is Sharpton,” he said. “I mean this whole thing is as personal as why your name is what it is. You’re named after someone who owned your great-grandparents.”

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/opinion/01herbert.html

Posted by lois at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)

NYC: Amid Claims of Police Profiling, Study Will Review ‘Stop and Frisks’

March 1, 2007
Amid Claims of Police Profiling, Study Will Review ‘Stop and Frisks’ By AL BAKER

The New York City Police Department has commissioned a six-month independent review of the way it stops people on the streets, sometimes searching them for illegal weapons, after the release of statistics that showed the department stopped 508,540 people in the five boroughs last year, officials said yesterday.

The study will focus on the role that race plays in everyday street stops: some critics have suggested that minorities, particularly black people, were unfairly singled out, a claim the police deny. It will be done by the RAND Corporation, a private nonprofit organization that has studied the issue in other cities, including Oakland, Calif., and Cincinnati, officials said.

Nearly two months ago, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly commissioned RAND to review several aspects of firearm use in the department after the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in Queens in November. That study is still under way.

The issue of stopping people on the streets — known in department parlance as “stop and frisks” — has been a source of occasional tension between the police and residents. As part of the study, analysts from RAND will not only examine last year’s 508,540 stops, but also ride with police officers on duty. The officers will be interviewed about their decisions to make stops.

Analysts will also see firsthand how officers complete forms known as UF-250s, which they are supposed to fill out after all such stops. The form captures several points of data, including the circumstances that led to the stop, whether physical force was used, whether the stop included a frisk, and the race or ethnicity of the person stopped. A factor cited frequently on the forms is “area has high crime incidence.”

The analysts will also review an electronic database of all the stops made by officers last year and “take steps to audit the data collection process,” said Greg Ridgeway, the associate director of RAND’s Safety and Justice Program, who will lead the research in New York.

Police officials released statistics on Feb. 2 showing that the number of people stopped last year increased to 508,540 from 97,296 in 2002, the last time the department divulged the data from a single calendar year.

The officials have said that the steep increase is partly due to greater adherence to departmental rules for filling out the stop-and-frisk forms and more aggressive crime-fighting activities, particularly in high-crime neighborhoods. They have repeatedly said that officers do not practice racial profiling.

In a statement announcing the RAND study yesterday, Mr. Kelly said that while the department’s own analysis of its data “in general terms showed that stops were consistent with concentrations of crime and of victim descriptions of suspects,” the RAND analysts would work “to determine whether there are any flaws that we may need to address.”

Responding to complaints of profiling, the department noted that while 55.2 percent of those stopped were black, 68.5 percent of reported crimes involved suspects described as black.

Mr. Kelly added, “We thought it was important to have a separate, independent review, and we turned to RAND again because of its reputation for objectivity and quality research.”

The study will cost $120,000 and will be paid for by New York City Police Foundation, a charity that supports the Police Department.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that the department’s raw data — not just its own summary of its data — should be disclosed publicly and to an array of interested parties, not just to its “chosen consultants” at RAND.

“The situation cries out for an independent review,” she said.

Critics have said that the summary the department released in early February raises as many questions as it answers and, in isolation, is hard to understand.

For instance, according to the department’s data, the average number of people arrested per quarter as a result of street stops doubled to 5,317 last year, from 2,819 in 2002. But Ms. Lieberman pointed out that the story behind the numbers was that in 2002, one person was arrested for every 8.5 stops, while last year, one person was arrested for every 25 stops.

Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian, said he was eager to hear what RAND finds.

“I want the constitutional question answered,” Mr. Reppetto said. “Are these stops, frisks and searches reasonable? That is what the U.S. Constitution demands, that searches not be unreasonable.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/nyregion/01rand.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

Citing Abuses, Texas Governor Ousts Leader of Youth Agency

March 1, 2007
Citing Abuses, Texas Governor Ousts Leader of Youth Agency
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

AUSTIN, Tex., Feb. 28 — Gov. Rick Perry removed the chairman of the Texas Youth Commission on Wednesday over charges that the agency covered up the sexual abuse of incarcerated juveniles.

Mr. Perry also called for the ouster of the acting executive director, the appointment of an independent inspector general and a shake-up throughout the commission, which runs 13 schools housing 3,000 felons under age 21.

“Leadership starts at the top,” a spokesman for Mr. Perry, Ted Royer, said. “And the governor believes the very top leadership has failed.”

Late Wednesday, the State Senate voted unanimously to demand that the governor appoint a conservator to take over the commission temporarily.

On Tuesday, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee disclosed details of long-secret investigations by the commission and the Texas Rangers showing that two supervisors at the West Texas State School in remote Pyote routinely roused boys from their beds for sexual encounters that were reported but went unpunished by the school superintendent, who now has a top leadership position at the commission. The supervisors were allowed to resign without facing criminal charges, but are now under investigation.

The dismissed chairman, Pete C. Alfaro, is a former mayor of Baytown who was first named to the commission in 1995 by Gov. George W. Bush and was appointed chairman by Mr. Perry in 2004. Mr. Alfaro did not respond to messages seeking comment. His latest five-year term expires in August.

Hours after the governor’s spokesman said that Mr. Alfaro had been told by phone that he was being replaced by his vice chairman, Donald R. Bethel, a spokesman for the Texas Youth Commission, Tim Savoy, said the agency had received no notice of the action. The board has a meeting scheduled for Tuesday.

Mr. Perry, a Republican, also called on the board to replace the acting executive director, Neil Nichols, who is the general counsel and a 33-year veteran of the agency. Mr. Nichols took over last Friday upon the sudden retirement of the executive director, Dwight Harris, who started as a caseworker in 1981.

The governor said Ed Owens, deputy executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, had agreed to serve as the commission’s acting executive director.

Though the governor makes appointments to the seven-member board, he has the power by himself only to remove the chairman, legal experts said. He can fire members upon a finding of gross fiscal mismanagement by a legislative audit committee made up of the lieutenant governor, who is the president of the Senate; the House speaker; and two other members from each chamber.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst on Wednesday demanded sweeping changes in the commission.

Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, said Wednesday that he had “no confidence in the board” but that Mr. Perry was not yet ready to seek its ouster.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/us/01youth.html
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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