The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

« February 2007 | Main | April 2007 »

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

Posted by lois at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)

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.

_r.php>

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 Flore