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April 30, 2007

MA: Challenges for Prisons Chief

WBUR Newsroom
Challenges for Prisons Chief
By Monica Brady-Myerov
BOSTON, Mass. - May 01, 2007 - On Beacon Hill today, a joint oversight committee will look into the alarming rate of suicides in prison. Over the past year, the suicide rate in Massachusetts prisons has risen to four times the national average.

The mental health of prisoners is just one of many challenges facing a yet-to-be-named new commissioner for the state's Department of Correction.

WBUR's Monica Brady-Myerov reports.

The audio for this story will be available on WBUR's web site after 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

TEXT OF STORY

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: Outgoing Correction Commissioner Kathleen Dennehy says the new commissioner should have a strong stomach to attack the many problems facing the department.

KATHLEEN DENNEHY: Do they have the intestinal fortitude to dig in their heel and stay the course. I've learned over the past three years it's very easy to set a course to chart a course the challenge is in staying the course.

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: The commissioner serves at the will of the governor. The first obstacle will be agreeing on a contract with the correction officers union, which is now under negotiation. This is the same union that Dennehy claimed slashed her tires and followed her with a giant inflatable rat to undermine her. Former Attorney General Scott Harshbarger says the union is an obstacle to any commissioner.

SCOTT HARSHBARGER: I mean the fact is you have a labor management contract that over the years have taken away the managerial rights of the commissioner.

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: Harshbarger chaired a commission that reviewed the correction system after defrocked priest John Geoghan was murdered in prison.

SCOTT HARSHBARGER: You have a system where 73% of budget is allocated for personnel and in which just this one example is not at all to criticize correctional officers they do difficult and dangerous job but they have 65 paid leave days.

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: The union did not return calls for comment. Another hurdle for the new head is the prison classification system says Leslie Walker, executive director of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services. Walker says the DOC is still over classifying prisoners, that is putting mid-level offenders in high security prisons.

LESLIE WALKER: Massachusetts has twice the number recommended in the maximum security prisons and half the number in the minimum security prisons. If we had more people in the mediums and minimums like the rest of the country, we could reduce costs by having less officers.

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: The state spends more on corrections than it does on higher education. It costs about $44,000 a year per prisoner. Scott Harshbarger says another systemic problem is the care of mentally ill prisoners.

SCOTT HARSHBARGER: we're running probably the largest mental health system in the state is being run in the depar4tment of corrections. Until you either have the budget increase for the doc to deal with that, or these agencies led by the executive office of public safety step up and work on that there are going to barriers for the new commissioner as well.

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: The result of poor mental health care is a high rate of suicides in prison, says Senator Jarred Barrios, who co-chairs the hearing today on prisoners' mental health.

JARRED BARRIOS: Looking at it over time over the last ten years we've been at about 2x the suicide rate when compared to the national average. We are at about 4x that rate over the last year.

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: A correction department study of prison conditions released in February found that prison practices and policies were partly to blame for the high rate of suicides.

The non-profit Disability Law Center is suing the DOC in federal court saying isolating mentally ill inmates at high security prisons, violates federal laws. Leslie Walker of the Mass Correctional Legal Services hopes the new commissioner will address this problem.

LESLIE WALKER: the commissioner can do what the current administration has not done which is listen to the people that it contracts for with mental health services. Listen to outside experts on panel it appoints. Since 1989 either commissions appointed by the governor or the department or correction and the mental health staff have recommended residential treatment units at high security, specialized mental health units.

MONICA BRADY-MYEROV: Currently James Bender, a 30-year employee is acting as Correction Commissioner. On paper, the job sounds alluring... a CEO level position with half a billion dollar budget, five thousand staff members and about eleven thousand people in your care. But in reality, Senator Barrios calls it the biggest no win position in government.

For WBUR I'm Monica Brady-Myerov.
http://www.wbur.org/news/2007/66791_20070501.asp

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

April 29, 2007

LA Times Editorial: California's prison cop-out

"It's almost as if Sacramento wants to punt the issue to the courts."
Opinion : Editorials
EDITORIALS, LA Times
California's prison cop-out
The Legislature's 'reform' package looks more like a dodge than a practical solution to the crisis.

April 27, 2007

POLITICIANS CALL THEIR craft the art of the possible, but the deal on state prisons that the Legislature approved Thursday was more like the art of the dodge. With disgruntled federal courts threatening a takeover of the broken corrections system beginning as soon as next month, lawmakers presented a plan that looks designed to fail.

California's dire prison overcrowding has two main causes. The simplest is that an ever-expanding state population means more people behind bars. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative Republicans convinced Democrats to address that problem by adding 53,000 more beds, mostly to existing state prisons and county jails, and by building "reentry" centers ‹ sort of like high-security halfway houses for inmates near the end of their sentences. But there is a more complicated, policy-driven cause. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation neither corrects nor rehabilitates. The state has a recidivism rate of 70%, the nation's highest, signaling a breakdown of the rehabilitation process. Harsh sentencing and strict parole rules mean prisons are clogged with substance abusers, who are best treated elsewhere, and nonviolent parolees who have technically violated the conditions of their release. Schwarzenegger had a worthy plan to create a sentencing commission that would address these root causes of overpopulation, but it was jettisoned by the Legislature on the appalling grounds that it was too sensitive politically.

The ray of light in Thursday's agreement is that Democrats and Republicans alike demonstrated a healthy embrace of rehabilitation, a notion that has been all but forgotten after generations of tough-on-crime legislation and initiatives. But it's nowhere near enough. The proposed reentry centers, slated to house 16,000 inmates, could help prepare prisoners for a safe and successful return to society ‹ or they could just end up being new prisons.

California's prisons and jails contain 172,000 inmates in a system designed for 100,000. Three federal judges have warned that unless these conditions are convincingly reversed, they will issue their own draconian fixes, including dumping felons onto the streets. Yet the legislators' main response is to build more prison space years from now and to try to ship 8,000 prisoners out of state, if legal challenges fail. It's almost as if Sacramento wants to punt the issue to the courts.

If legislators truly seek to avoid a federal takeover, Thursday's deal should be followed by Friday courage to tackle the reforms they once again put off. But if this is the best they've got, Sacramento needs a new generation of leaders who take more seriously the responsibility of governance.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-prison27apr27,0,418899.
story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials

Posted by lois at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

Tuscon Citizen: It's only fair: AZ inmates should be in AZ prisons

Our Opinion: It's only fair: Az inmates should be in Az prisons
Published: 04.28.2007
There's a lesson to be learned from Tuesday's riot by Arizona convicts transferred to a privately run Indiana prison:
Don't house convicts in prisons across the country from their loved ones. It is bad corrections policy.
The inmates were sent to the Indiana prison by the Arizona Department of Corrections - but that agency isn't at fault.
The state DOC is responsible only for incarcerating inmates sent to it in facilities provided by legislative appropriations.
Quite simply, there are too many inmates and not enough cells.
Over the past year, the number of inmates in Arizona prisons has grown by about 162 per month. That exacerbated a bed shortage that already was severe.

At the beginning of the current fiscal year, Arizona had 30,500 beds for almost 35,000 inmates.
It doesn't take a prison expert to see that's going to be a problem.
The Legislature's solution was to stage a bid competition between the Department of Corrections and private companies to see who could build and operate 3,000 more prison beds for less money.
The bids were accepted in March, but all were rejected. So there is no plan for building more space for Arizona inmates. By the end of 2007, there probably will be 37,000 inmates in a system with 31,500 beds.
The DOC did the only thing it could do: It looked for prisons anywhere that were willing to house Arizona inmates for a price.
It found takers in several states - including Indiana.
It's important to know that the more than 600 Arizona inmates who have been sent to the medium-security corrections facility in New Castle, Ind., since March were selected for transfer because they had no record of disciplinary problems or violence.
But in the view of the inmates, their good behavior is being punished rather than rewarded, according to Donna Leone Hamm, a prison rights advocate.
"The higher-custody inmates, the ones that caused trouble inside the prison system, are not the ones that are being moved," she told The Associated Press.
It's unlikely that a family member from Arizona is going to make a weekly visit to Indiana. The move deprives prisoners of their only support system.
Indiana House Speaker Patrick Bauer told The AP: "These prisoners also have friends and families (back in Arizona). I think it was inevitable. I think it was a bad idea from . . . a social point of view."
He's right. It was a terrible idea.
The blame falls squarely on legislators who like to pass tough laws and mandatory sentences, then refuse to pay for space to house the men and women sent to prison as a result.
Arizona has a moral responsibility to house Arizona inmates in Arizona prisons - not to ship them around the nation. The riot in a prison more than 1,500 miles from Arizona was the predictable result.

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/altss/printstory/opinion/49820

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

CA: San Jose Mercury News Editorial: Spending more cash on California prisons not enough

Editorial: Spending more cash on California prisons not enough
LAWMAKERS IGNORING FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS
Mercury News Editorial
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:04/27/2007 01:32:48 AM PDT

Bipartisan majorities in the Legislature have dealt with the state's prison-crowding crisis the only way they seem to know how: building cells and spending billions.

On Thursday, they rushed through a deal without a public hearing or thoughtful debate. They offered no assurance that the atrociously managed prison system can cope with the new drug and rehabilitation programs and thousands more inmates they are piling on. Decades of waste and ineffectiveness leave little cause for optimism.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislators are truly in a bind: Judges in three courts have given them a June deadline to reduce crowding. If they don't, the courts will take over the prisons and put a cap on the prison population.

The state's response is the largest prison expansion in state history: $7.4 billion in construction, not counting billions more in interest on the bonds, and 53,000 more beds.

This does nothing to end the policies of failure, and it may not mollify the courts. It will take years to add cells. The judges want immediate results. The state's answer - shipping 8,000 inmates out of state right away - will be challenged in court and may be unconstitutional.

The deal ignores the primary cause of prison crowding: California has the nation's highest recidivism rate. Nearly 70 percent of convicts return to prison within three years because of new crimes or parole violations, often minor.

The Little Hoover Commission and corrections experts for years have been calling for fundamental change, including a review of parole policies and community-based sentences for non-violent offenders. They suggest naming a commission to make sense of the morass of contradictory and counterproductive sentencing laws. Making sure prisons hold only people who belong there would alleviate crowding.

But Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass the deal, opposed a sentencing commission. They raised the specter that, failing a deal, a judge would set thousands of dangerous felons loose in the community. Democrats caved, although their leaders are promising to consider more reforms later.

There's no question that more prison beds are needed, starting with 8,000 for inmates needing medical and mental health care. And the approach to adding beds is more sensible than in the past. Rather than just expanding in existing prisons, more than half of the 53,000 new beds would be added to local jails or built as transitional units for inmates at the end of their sentences. This could mark an important shift toward treatment and rehabilitation - but the deal includes little money to set up what will be expensive programs, and no money to operate them.

In a sharply worded letter to Schwarzenegger, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez demanded assurances that staff could be hired and trained, programs could be delivered, and managers would stay long enough to oversee reforms.

"A quick fix without fundamental changes and effective reform is simply `running in place,'" they wrote. "Yet the Department (of Corrections and Rehabilitation) repeatedly demonstrates it is flatly unable to deliver on its promises. ... At this time, the department is not prepared to manage the proposals now before the Legislature."

Even as they were urging legislators to fork over $7.4 billion, top Democrats were wondering whether the money would be wasted.

That's hardly a vote of confidence.
http://origin.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_5762810?nclick_check=1

Posted by lois at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2007

For $82 a Day, Booking a Cell in a 5-Star Jail

For $82 a Day, Booking a Cell in a 5-Star Jail
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER, NY Times

SANTA ANA, Calif., April 25 — Anyone convicted of a crime knows a debt to society often must be paid in jail. But a slice of Californians willing to supplement that debt with cash (no personal checks, please) are finding that the time can be almost bearable.

For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few.

Many of the self-pay jails operate like the secret velvet-roped nightclubs of the corrections world. You have to be in the know to even apply for entry, and even if the court approves your sentence there, jail administrators can operate like bouncers, rejecting anyone they wish.

“I am aware that this is considered to be a five-star Hilton,” said Nicole Brockett, 22, who was recently booked into one of the jails, here in Orange County about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles, and paid $82 a day to complete a 21-day sentence for a drunken driving conviction.

Ms. Brockett, who in her oversized orange T-shirt and flip-flops looked more like a contestant on “The Real World” than inmate, shopped around for the best accommodations, travel-ocity.com-style.

“It’s clean here,” she said, perched in a jail day room on the sort of couch found in a hospital emergency room. “It’s safe and everyone here is really nice. I haven’t had a problem with any of the other girls. They give me shampoo.”

For roughly $75 to $127 a day, these convicts — who are known in the self-pay parlance as “clients” — get a small cell behind a regular door, distance of some amplitude from violent offenders and, in some cases, the right to bring an iPod or computer on which to compose a novel, or perhaps a song.

Many of the overnighters are granted work furlough, enabling them to do most of their time on the job, returning to the jail simply to go to bed (often following a strip search, which granted is not so five-star).

The clients usually share a cell, but otherwise mix little with the ordinary nonpaying inmates, who tend to be people arrested and awaiting arraignment, or federal prisoners on trial or awaiting deportation and simply passing through.

The pay-to-stay programs have existed for years, but recently attracted some attention when prosecutors balked at a jail in Fullerton that they said would offer computer and cellphone use to George Jaramillo, a former Orange County assistant sheriff who pleaded no contest to perjury and misuse of public funds, including the unauthorized use of a county helicopter. Mr. Jaramillo was booked into the self-pay program in Montebello, near Los Angeles, instead.

“We certainly didn’t envision a jail with cellphone and laptop capabilities where his family could bring him three hot meals,” said Susan Kang Schroeder, the public affairs counsel for the Orange County district attorney. “We felt that the use of the computer was part of the instrumentality of his crime, and that is another reason we objected to that.”

A spokesman for the Fullerton jail said cellphones but not laptops were allowed.

While jails in other states may offer pay-to-stay programs, numerous jail experts said they did not know of any.

“I have never run into this,” said Ken Kerle, managing editor of the publication American Jail Association and author of two books on jails. “But the rest of the country doesn’t have Hollywood either. Most of the people who go to jail are economically disadvantaged, often mentally ill, with alcohol and drug problems and are functionally illiterate. They don’t have $80 a day for jail.”

The California prison system, severely overcrowded, teeming with violence and infectious diseases and so dysfunctional that much of it is under court supervision, is one that anyone with the slightest means would most likely pay to avoid.

“The benefits are that you are isolated and you don’t have to expose yourself to the traditional county system,” said Christine Parker, a spokeswoman for CSI, a national provider of jails that runs three in Orange County with pay-to-stay programs. “You can avoid gang issues. You are restricted in terms of the number of people you are encountering and they are a similar persuasion such as you.”

Most of the programs — which offer 10 to 30 beds — stay full enough that marketing is not necessary, though that was not always the case. The Pasadena jail, for instance, tried to create a little buzz for its program when it was started in the early 1990s.

“Our sales pitch at the time was, ‘Bad things happen to good people,’ ” said Janet Givens, a spokeswoman for the Pasadena Police Department. Jail representatives used Rotary Clubs and other such venues as their potential marketplace for “fee-paying inmate workers” who are charged $127 a day (payment upfront required).

“People might have brothers, sisters, cousins, etc., who might have had a lapse in judgment and do not want to go to county jail,” Ms. Givens said.

The typical pay-to-stay client, jail representatives agreed, is a man in his late 30s who has been convicted of driving while intoxicated and sentenced to a month or two in jail.

But there are single-night guests, and those who linger well over a year.

“One individual wanted to do four years here,” said Christina Holland, a correctional manager of the Santa Ana jail.

Inmates in Santa Ana who have been approved for pay to stay by the courts and have coughed up a hefty deposit for their stay, enter the jail through a lobby and not the driveway reserved for the arrival of other prisoners. They are strip searched when they return from work each day because the biggest problem they pose is the smuggling of contraband, generally cigarettes, for nonpaying inmates.

Most of the jailers require the inmates to do chores around the jails, even if they work elsewhere during the day.

“I try real hard to keep them in custody for 12 hours,” Ms. Holland said. “Because I think that’s fair.”

Critics argue that the systems create inherent injustices, offering cleaner, safer alternatives to those who can pay.

“It seems to be to be a little unfair,” said Mike Jackson, the training manager of the National Sheriff’s Association. “Two people come in, have the same offense, and the guy who has money gets to pay to stay and the other doesn’t. The system is supposed to be equitable.”

But cities argue that the paying inmates generate cash, often hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — enabling them to better afford their other taxpayer-financed operations — and are generally easy to deal with.

“We never had a problem with self pay,” said Steve Lechuga, the operations manager for CSI. “I haven’t seen any fights in years. We had a really good success rate with them.”

Stanley Goldman, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, has recommended the program to former clients.

“The prisoners who are charged with nonviolent crimes and typically have no record are not in the best position to handle themselves in the general county facility,” Professor Goldman said.

Still, no doubt about it, the self-pay jails are not to be confused with Canyon Ranch.

The cells at Santa Ana are roughly the size of a custodial closet, and share its smell and ambience. Most have little more than a pink bottle of jail-issue moisturizer and a book borrowed from the day room. Lockdown can occur for hours at a time, and just feet away other prisoners sit with their faces pressed against cell windows, looking menacing.

Ms. Brockett, who normally works as a bartender in Los Angeles, said the experience was one she never cared to repeat.

“It does look decent,” she said, “but you still feel exactly where you are.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/us/29jail.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp
Chart at this URL lists the jails, locations, costs and services.

Posted by lois at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2007

California to Address Prison Overcrowding With Giant Building Program

April 27, 2007
California to Address Prison Overcrowding With Giant Building Program
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER, NY Times

LOS ANGELES, April 26 — In a move to ease chronic overcrowding, California lawmakers on Thursday approved the largest single prison construction program in the nation’s history and agreed to send 8,000 convicts to other states.

The plan, which would cost $8.3 billion and add 53,000 beds, has the strong backing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, who is eager to avert a federal takeover of the state’s prison system, one of the most dysfunctional in the nation.

California prisons are so overcrowded — 16,000 inmates are assigned cots in hallways and gyms — that the governor recently took the highly unusual step of declaring a state of emergency in the system. The state’s prisons house 173,000 inmates — far ahead of Texas, which has the next largest state prison system with 152,500 inmates — and has an $8 billion budget.

The California prisons are the subject of several lawsuits, their medical program is in federal receivership, and various other components of the system are under court monitoring. The courts had given the state until this spring to come up with an overpopulation plan or face possible receivership.

Under the plan that narrowly passed both houses of the Democratic-controlled State Legislature, the state will move prisoners out of 17,000 temporary beds in places like gymnasiums and day rooms, either through transfers to prisons in other states or to older, unused jails in California that need repairs to be brought up to building and safety codes.

The plan, aimed primarily at easing the prison population, would also free space for rehabilitative programs for inmates, lawmakers said.

Further, the state will add the 53,000 beds over the next five years by building additions to existing prisons and through construction of so-called re-entry centers, or smaller buildings where prisoners would spend the last few months of their sentences in the towns and cities where they would eventually be paroled.

The plan calls for two phases of construction, with the financing of the second phase contingent on benchmarks like the start of rehabilitation and mental health programs. The plan would be paid for over two phases with $7.1 billion in state bonds and $1.2 million in local money.

Missing from the plan were a proposed sentencing commission and a program to reduce the number of parolees who re-enter the system, components that had been embraced by Democratic lawmakers and prison reform advocates, and, this year, by the governor. Seven of 10 inmates released from California prisons return, one of the highest recidivism rates in the country.

But Mr. Schwarzenegger, made anxious by the watchful eyes of judges around the state, backed off the contentious proposals to change the parole structure and to examine sentencing practices, handing a victory to Republicans in the Legislature who would abide neither.

“The things we didn’t want to have in this bill are not in it,” said Senator George Runner, chairman of the Republican caucus in the Senate. “We need a program that keeps people incarcerated and tries to rehabilitate them. But if they can’t be rehabilitated, then we need enough beds to bring them back.”

The Democrats who ultimately voted for the plan despite its perceived shortcomings appeared to calculate that they would avoid looking soft on crime while leaving any legal fallout at the governor’s door.

The state had until the middle of May to convince the courts that it had a plan to relieve some of the overcrowding or face a takeover and the potential imposition of caps on the size of the prison population.

It was unclear on Thursday whether the bill would pass muster with the courts. For instance, recent moves by the state to send prisoners to other jurisdictions around the nation was ruled unconstitutional by a state judge; lawmakers said language in the new bill would address the judge’s concerns.

The plan also does little to change the structural problems that have led to overcrowding, like the unusual parole system, which sends former inmates with minor infractions back to prison. Further, the state’s sentencing structure is blind to the problem of prison population, meaning new inmates keep arriving regardless of the ability to accommodate them.

Don Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office, which has filed a class-action lawsuit against the state over prison conditions, said the plan did not address many of the most serious concerns raised in the courts.

“It won’t do anything to provide short-term relief on the overcrowding,” Mr. Specter said.

Like many other states, California has had large prison building programs over the years, but few come close to the size or speed of this program. For example, since 1987 when Texas began to use general obligation bonds to build prisons, the state has used $2.3 billion in such bonds to do that.

Some California lawmakers who voted against the plan expressed outrage on Thursday.

“This is not a plan,” said the Senate majority leader, Gloria Romero, Democrat of Los Angeles. “This is a classic Hollywood prop that the governor wants to have when he walks into court on May 15. All we have done is dig ourselves into a deeper hole. This plan is not workable, and I fully expect a constitutional challenge.”

For his part, Mr. Schwarzenegger seemed ebullient.

“For the first time in a decade, we can add prison beds in California,” he said in a statement. “And that does not just include traditional beds. We will add beds with programs, education, drug and mental health treatment so that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation can truly live up to the rehabilitation part of its name.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/us/27prisons.html

Posted by lois at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Spitzer must lead drug law reform

Times Union
Albany, NY
OP ED, Albany Times Union
Spitzer must lead drug law reform
By GABRIEL SAYEGH
First published: Thursday, April 26, 2007

Last week, the state Assembly passed important legislation to reform the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. The bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry, D-Queens, increases drug treatment alternatives to incarceration, expands judicial discretion to restore fairness in our courts and, critically, allows for people currently serving harsh prison terms for low-level drug offenses to seek much-needed relief.

The Assembly should be commended for passing smart reforms. But where are the governor and the state Senate on drug law reform?

While running for governor, Eliot Spitzer campaigned on a promise: "Day One, Everything Changes." Spitzer made campaign statements in support of real reform of the laws. Lt. Gov. David Paterson was a long-time reform champion while Senate minority leader. Families and advocates working for repeal of the failed Rockefeller Drug Laws were cautiously optimistic about Spitzer's promise. It seemed entirely possible that on Day One, the Rockefeller laws, after nearly 34 long, terrible years, might finally be repealed.

But in the first hundred days of the new administration, drug law reform went missing in action. Spitzer took on a variety of important issues, but the Rockefeller Drug Laws didn't even make his priority list for the end of the legislative session.

Why is it so hard to win real reform, when everyone knows these laws are racist, ineffective, wasteful and unjust? So asks longtime advocate Cheri O'Donoghue, whose son, Ashley, is serving seven to 21 years for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. Ashley is one of more than 14,000 people incarcerated under these harsh laws.

The answer to Cheri's question is downright sinister, but it's no secret. The reason the Rockefeller Drug Laws haven't been done away with is because of a despicable trinity of racism, cash cows and the U.S. census, not to mention the people who rely on this trinity for their political survival. From 1817 to 1981, New York built 33 prisons. But from 1982 to 2000, New York built 38 more prisons -- all of them upstate. The unprecedented prison boom was largely an economic development plan meant to ameliorate the job loss upstate. Rural, white communities were clamoring to build and staff prisons. The Rockefeller Drug Laws delivered the bodies with harsh mandatory-minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses.

The RAND Corp. and other think tanks have shown that drug use and abuse is roughly equal across all racial groups. But the Rockefeller Drug Laws always have been marked by severe racial bias. Today, 91 percent of the people incarcerated under these laws are black and Latino. It's a scenario we'd expect to find in an apartheid state, not a democracy.

Once elected, Spitzer proposed the possibility of closing half-empty prisons in upstate New York, saving millions of dollars. Many groups applauded Spitzer, because New York's prison population has dropped in recent years and its archaic prison industrial complex needs an overhaul. The leading voices against studying closing prisons, though, were politically very powerful. The correction officers union and upstate politicians have parlayed the politics of imprisonment into lucrative businesses and political careers. The prospects for reform have at least dimmed, if they haven't died altogether.

The plot thickens, though. More than 76 percent of the state's prison inmates come from New York City. The U.S. Census Bureau counts them as residents of the upstate prisons in which they're incarcerated, not as residents of the communities from which they came.

Why does this matter? According to the Prison Policy Initiative, if prisoners were not counted as "residents," seven upstate Senate districts would be 5 percent short of their required population size, and thus have to be redrawn. This means that senators in those districts -- all of them Republicans -- would lose their seats, causing Republicans to lose their slim Senate majority. Unsurprisingly, Senate Republicans remain staunch opponents of repealing the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

Two vocal reform opponents -- Sen. Dale Volker of suburban Buffalo and Sen. Michael Nozzolio of the Finger Lakes -- have more than 17 percent of the state's prisoners in their districts. Is it any wonder why they oppose reform?

Spitzer was elected on his record as a crusader against waste and corruption, no matter what powerful interests stood in his way. Advocates for drug law reform hoped the new governor would stand up to the corruption and racism blocking real reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. He now has that chance, with the legislation passed by the Assembly and sent to the Senate. But the Senate, under Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, will block those reforms unless the governor gets more directly involved.

For the sake of justice, and families like the O'Donoghues, let's demand that the governor makes a priority of drug law reform.

Because if nothing changes, nothing changes.

Gabriel Sayegh is a project director at the Drug Policy Alliance in New York City, http://www.drugpolicy.org.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=584144

Posted by lois at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Amherst MA: Reading and Talk: Prisons & Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality

Prisons & Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality
Contributors to new volume on international incarceration trends visit

Food for Thought Books, Amherst, MA

Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 7pm

Editors Seth N. Asumah and Mechthild Nagel, along with contributors Jill Soffiyah Elijah and Diane Antonio will discuss their new book Prisons & Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality at Food for Thought Books, 106 North Pleasant Street, Amherst. The authors will be joined by Lois Ahrens, of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, who will present an essay by Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, a scholar and activist incarcerated in a Pennsylvania prison. A booksigning and reception will follow the talk.

Prisons & Punishment is an important new contribution to the fields of criminal justice, prison studies, philosophy, law, and political science, published by Africa World Press. The book will also prove useful to activists seeking to change or abolish the punishment industry. Prisons & Punishment collects in one volume African, European, and North American scholars, prisoners, activists, and legal practitioners who offer their various perspectives and visions.

About the Authors

Seth N. Asumah is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of African American Studies at State University of New York, College at Cortland. His most recent books are Diversity, Multiculturalism and Social Justice (co-authored with Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo, 2002), The Africana Human Conditions and Global Dimension (co-edited with Johnston-Anumonwo and John Marah, 2002), Educating the Black Child in the Black Independent School (co-authored with Valencia Perkins, 2001) and Issues in Africa and the African Diaspora in the 21st Century (co-edited with Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo, 2001). He is a 1999 winner of the Rozanne Brooks Award for Dedication and Teaching Excellence and a 2002 recipient of "Excellence in Teaching" Award, State University of New York, College at Cortland.

Mechthild Nagel is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Cortland and is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for African Development, Cornell University. She is author of Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play (Lexington, 2002) and co-editor of Race, Class, and Community Identity (Humanities, 2000). Nagel is editor-in-chief of Wagadu: A Transnational Journal of Gender and Women's Studies. She has taught college courses in maximum security prisons for men. Her current research is on African prison intellectuals and African approaches to restorative justice.

Diane Antonio is the Communications Director of the Queensboro Hill Neighborhood Assoc., work with the homeless in my community, and she ran for District Leader in the 22nd A.D. Queens. Her published work includes: "Of Wolves and Women" (Animals and Women, 1995), "The Flesh of All That Is: Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, and Julian's 'Showings'," (SOPHIA, 2001), and "Virgin Queen, Iron Lady, Queen of Hearts: The Embodiment of Feminine Power in a Male Social Imaginary" (Politicos, 2003).

Jill Soffiyah Elijah serves as Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute (CJI) at Harvard Law School (HLS). Ms. Elijah practiced law through various avenues before transitioning into the clinical practice of academia. She was a Supervising Attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), where she defended indigent members of the Harlem, New York community. Prof. Elijah has authored several articles and publications based on her research of the U.S. criminal justice and prison systems.

Tiyo Attallah Salah-El was born and raised in southeastern Pennsylvania. He is an accomplished tenor saxophone player and a composer of jazz music. He has spent over thirty years in a medium security facility in Pennsylvania and during that time has tirelessly educated himself, with the help of dedicated teachers such as Howard Zinn. Tiyo has earned Bachelor's and Masters degrees, studying political science and African American history. His essay, "A Call for the Abolition of Prisons," has appeared in several edited volumes.

Lois Ahrens is the Founder and Project Director of Real Cost of Prisons Project. Lois has been an organizer, fundraiser and creator of progressive organizations and programs for more than thirty-five years. She has developed and directed numerous organizations many of which continue to thrive. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

food for thought books
106 n. pleasant st.
amherst, ma 01002
413.253.5432
www.foodforthoughtbooks.com

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

VT: Overhalm of Prison System Could Include More People Sent Out of State

Editorial: Prisons plan seeks path to lower costs

Published: Thursday, April 26, 2007

Sen. Richard Sears has put forward an approach too rarely broached by lawmakers this session with his proposal to save the state money with a sweeping overhaul of Vermont's prison system.

The boldness of the senator's plan floated before the Senate Appropriations Committee has to do with his willingness to look at ways to reduce the amount of money the state spends to meets its obligations instead of taking the much-traveled route of seeking -- usually through taxes -- additional money to cover rising costs.

Sears, a Democrat from Bennington, proposes closing the state's most expensive prison -- Dale Correctional Facility for women in Waterbury -- converting another women's prison into a low-security jail for men, and consolidating the female inmate population at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington. The state would also send more prisoners out of state, where inmates are held for less than half of what it costs in Vermont prisons.

All these changes could save the state as much as $4 million, according to Sears. Vermont is spending $128 million on corrections, up 16.4 percent from the $110 million in 2006, and more than the state spends on higher education, as the popular comparison goes.

The state's prison population, already straining the corrections system, is expected to grow by 33 percent by 2011, an increase driven by more and longer prison sentences, and the increasing chance of former inmates' being incarcerated again for probation or parole violations. Lawmakers have called the growth in the prison population, and the rising costs that go with it, unsustainable.

The senator's plan is far from perfect. Chittenden County might not be the best site for the women's prison, given that South Burlington handles 40 percent of inmates in the corrections system, according to Darryl Graham, a steward for the state employees union at the prison. Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility also plays host to as many as 1,500 people a year who are brought there drunk and kept until they sober up.

Practical consideration might mean that some other prison would be better suited as the state's sole facility for female inmates, but it's not the details that matter here. The significant thing about Sears' plan is that he proposes shuffling the deck of existing resources and options to come up with a hand that costs less than what the state has now.

Too often, lawmakers seek more money as the first option, an option that usually leaves Vermonters with the bill. Sen. Sears is looking for a solution as if taxpayers matter.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070426/OPINI
ON/704260316/1006

Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2007

CA:: $7.4 Billion Prison & Construction Bill Passes Legislature and Goes to Gov.

April 26, 2007.
Prison Bill Passes Legislature and Goes to Governor
By Frank D. Russo

The California Assembly passed AB 900, the $7.4 billion prison and jail construction measure this morning, with a minimum of debate on a 69-0 vote. Only four Members of the Assembly spoke on the measure, all in favor.

Shortly before the vote, the bill that had been AB 900 dealing with the California Transportation Committee was "gutted and amended," and the amendments that now constitute the bill, were inserted. Even the author of the bill changed from Speaker Nunez to one authored by Jose Solorio, the Chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee.

The California Senate debate was much more spirited and there was substantial opposition to the bill on procedural, financial, and substantive grounds. The first vote fell well short with 11 opposed. As a two-thirds vote bill, 27 of the 40 Senators in the affirmative were needed for it to pass. A "call" was placed on the vote so that Senator Machado, the presenter of the bill in the Senate, could secure the votes necessary for it to pass. A number of other bills and resolutions were taken up by the Senate. Senator Perata asked several times if Machado wanted to "lift the call" and allow the voting to proceed again, but he declined. After almost an hour had passed, the Republican Senators went into a private caucus, leaving Democrats milling about the floor.
The bill passed shortly after Noon with exactly the votes needed, 27-10, when after the roll was called several times, Senator Negrete McLeod changed her vote from "no" to "aye." The bill received 18 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes in the Senate. 4 Republicans and 6 Democrats opposed the bill. Two Republicans and one Democrat did not vote on it.

Senator Tom McClintock, a conservative Republican led off the debate on the bill after Senator Machado delivered his opening statement in presenting it. McClintock was principled and raised questions about the lack of any "cost savers" in the bill, citing the $42,000 per inmate per year involved in incarceration, a cost he said had astronomically increased in recent years, mostly under Governor Schwarzenegger. He also compared the six figure costs of construction of prison cells and bed per inmate with that of other states. His preferred solution--contracting out the custody of prisoners to private companies who can do so at much reduced costs.

McClintock also argued against the use of revenue bonds to finance the construction, which he argued, deprived the voters of their constitutional right to "vote on taxpayer supported debt." He spoke of the unprecedented borrowing in the bill.

Another issue raised by Republican Senators Aanestad and Cogdill involved the process of passing the bill was one of process and the lack of a public hearing and the bill being in print for all to see. Aanestad said of the Assembly's vote right after the amendments were maide "I'll wager you that of the 69 decision makers, that 65 never read the bill." He then said to his fellow Senators, "I'll bet very few of you have read the bill." He brought up the size of the bill, $15 billion by the time interest on the bonds was included and concluded "I'm pushing for a policy hearing."

Senator Perata vacated the Chair of the Senate and minced no words in his floor speech, which was powerful in support of the bill. He acknowledged its faults and predicted that actual implementation by the Governor will be fraught with difficulty. He started out: "There's not a Democrat here who likes this bill. Those who vote for it do so with reservations." As to the process, he said "If anyone believes this is a new issue, yuou have been sleeping through class all year," citing the multiple hearings of Senator Machado's committee on prisons.

Perata told those concerned about costs that if they thought they were writing big checks now, to wait for a Federal Court judge tells you to write even bigger ones.

Perata blistered the management of the state prisons, doubting that they can get the job done, saying "The one thing they tried to build, a death chamber, they couldn't build." This was an explicit reference to the recent fiasco where there was an attempt to hide costs to keep the construction under the $400,000 threshold which triggers a requirement the legislature be notified. He mentioned the fact that the Director of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he didn't even know that construction was going on, and Perata said this did not build confidence in the Department.

He also spoke of the many times that legislators failed to ask when voting to increase sentences about the cost and criticized reaching to the ballot box to ratchet up sentences. He said that elected officials had fallen in love with "a most undocumented myth," that lengthy incarceration makes us safer and said Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger were each as much as fault for the problem of today as each other. In the end he said there was no better choice and the problem would only get worse if there was a failure to act immediately.

In the end, without a vote to spare, that is what has happened. Perata called it "a lousy vote" and that's a good characterization. He spoke from his heart today and gave a speech that should be watched or listened to as it becomes available.

I know that there will be many who will be disappointed about this bill, which was the product of intense negotiations. It will most probably be contested in court. Implementation will be the key and will require vigilance and perseverance so that the promise of rehabilitation will be part of what is reaped from this bill. There is much to do on sentencing, parole, and probation reform that the legislature and Governor need to work on and that are not part of this bill.

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2007/04/prison_bill_pas.html

Posted by lois at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Legislator responds as to why she voted against "gender responsive" prisons

The SF Chronicle blasted those who opposed AB76, which would build a few thousand new gender-responsive prison beds for women. Below is the response from one of the Democrats on Public Safety who voted against the bill...

Fiona Ma responds

Editor -- Your April 24 editorial about prison reform missed the mark on AB76. While well-intentioned, I couldn't support the original measure because it created 4,500 new beds for female inmates run by for-profit prisons. As the saying goes, "when you're in a hole, stop digging.''

I agree with The Chronicle that the state has completely failed in prison reform, and my experience is that county officials are best prepared to handle the state's nonviolent offenders. I supported AB1655, which will keep kids out of the California Youth Authority and bring them closer to home. In their home counties, networks of support can help turn their lives around. AB76 provides none of the same guarantees.

While The Chronicle indicated it knew of no one in Sacramento proposing to backfill beds, this isn't a secret discussion. Corrections Secretary James Tilton proposed increasing the number of women's beds in a July 2006 report, "Inmate Population, Rehabilitation and Housing Management Plan,'' stating that "Activation of 4,500 Female Rehabilitative Community Correctional Center (FRCCC) beds will provide additional female capacity through April 2020."

In a report in the Los Angeles Times, the governor's press secretary indicated his office would attempt to add these beds through negotiations with legislative leaders, regardless of the outcome of AB76.

California's taxpayers deserve better than giving this administration a blank check for costly prison expansion. With Corrections engaged in new prison construction at San Quentin without legislative approval, now is not the time to keep digging.

FIONA MA
Assembly Majority Whip
Sacramento

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

VA: PROTEST CALLED TO DENOUNCE RICHMOND "URBAN WARFARE EXERCISES"

This is almost unbelievable but is in fact true.

ACTION ALERT from The Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality
PO Box 23202, Richmond, VA 23223 l Ph: 804.644.5834 l E-mail:
DefendersFJE@hotmail.com l www.DefendersFJE.org

PROTEST CALLED TO DENOUNCE RICHMOND "URBAN WARFARE EXERCISES"

Four Richmond organizations have joined forces to denounce the "Urban Warfare Exercises" now being conducted in the city by the U.S. Marine Corps and the FBI.

The Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality, Richmond Peace Education Center, Virginia Anti-War Network and VCU Anti-War Network will hold a protest vigil in the 900 block of East Broad Street outside Richmond City Hall from 5:45 to 6:45 p.m. Sunday, April 29.

"In light of the horrific shootings this month at Virginia Tech, it is totally inappropriate for the government to subject the residents of Richmond to the sights and sounds of simulated urban warfare," said Ana Edwards, spokesperson for the Defenders, the Richmond-based community organization that initiated the protest. The Defenders earlier called on Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder to appeal to the Marine Corps and FBI to cancel the exercises. Neither official has responded to that request.

The 11-day urban warfare exercises were scheduled to begin April 19 "two days after the Virginia Tech tragedy "and culminate with a ground exercise on the evening of April 29.

According to a press release issued by the office of Mayor L. Douglas Wilder on April 17, the day after the Virginia Tech shootings, "Citizens may see and hear low-flying helicopters during the time period and may hear simulated sounds of combat, including gunfire with blank ammunition, particularly on April 29."

Edwards noted that the time period mentioned includes April 20, the day designated as a national day of mourning for the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings.

"This exercise is inappropriate on so many levels," Edwards said. "First, the sound of gunfire will be deeply disturbing to many city residents, particularly children, already upset by the tragic events at Virginia Tech. Second, it perpetuates the atmosphere of conflict that can create a context for such senseless acts of violence. And third, it implies official local support for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

According to Capt. Clark Carpenter, spokesperson for the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, the Marines involved in the exercise "will be deployed soon and this training is critical."

The mayor's release also points to one more disturbing aspect of the exercises: the cooperation of the FBI -- a domestic investigative and law enforcement agency -- with the military.

"We are pleased to support the Marine Corps in its efforts to better prepare our soldiers for potential combat in urban areas abroad as well as right here on home soil, if ever needed," Mayor Wilder states in the release.

For more information, please call (804) 644-5834 or e-mail DefendersFJE@hotmail.com.

The following 37 organizations and individuals have called for the cancellation of the "Urban Warfare Exercises"

Forrest Akers, Richmond community activist -- Black Campus Progressives, Hampton University -- Breanne Armbrust, VP, Communications Workers of America Local 2201, Richmond * -- Janet Armstead, Block Captain Coordinator, 7 Eyes of Jackson Ward Neighborhood Watch, Richmond -- Margaret Breslau, Steering Committee, Virginia Anti-War Network, Blacksburg -- Rain Burroughs, A28.org Richmond impeachment event -- Charlottesville Center for Peace & Justice -- Duron Chavis, Happily Natural Day, Get Conscious Think Collective, Richmond -- Elena Day, Charlottesville -- Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality, Richmond -- John Gallini, Pax Christi Richmond -- Hampton Roads Peace & Justice Coalition -- Lois Jones, Richmond Women in Black * -- Lillie Kennedy, R. I. H. D., Inc., nonprofit volunteer group -- Kathleen Kenney, former director, Richmond Catholic Diocese Office of Peace and Justice * -- Malachy Kilbride, member, D.C. Anti-War Network; bd. member, Washington Peace Center; national coordinating committee member, Declaration of Peace * -- Michelle R. Kirby, Co-founder, Richmond Women in Black * -- Allen Layman, President, United Electrical Workers Local 160, Staunton -- Jamilah LeCruise, student, University of Richmond * -- Little Flower Catholic Worker, Louisa County -- Rev. Dr. Paul S. Martin, Change Of Heart Ventures Evangelistic Ministries, Richmond -- Luna Negra, Norfolk peace activist -- Tom Palumbo, member, Veterans For Peace, Norfolk * -- Pax Christi Richmond -- The People United, Shannon Farms -- Robin Edward Poulton, President, V-Peace, Virginia Institute for Peace and Islamic Studies, Richmond -- Prosser-Truth Division #456, UNIA-ACL, Richmond -- The Richmond Defender newspaper -- Richmond Green Party -- Richmond Peace Education Center -- Tanja Softic, Associate Professor, University of Richmond * -- David Swanson, D.C. Director, Democrats.com; co-founder, AfterDowningStreet.org; bd. member, Progressive Democrats of America * -- United Parents Against Lead United, Inc., Richmond -- VCU Anti-War Network -- Virginia Anti-War Network (VAWN) -- Woodbridge Workers Committee -- Cathy Woodson, Board Chair, Richmond Peace Education Center

* Organization listed for identification purposes only

Posted by lois at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2007

Urban Institute Study: Former prisoners struggle with new lives

Former prisoners struggle with new lives, study says
Tuesday, April 24, 2007 3:23 AM
By Alan Johnson
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
A new study confirms some things prison officials have long known: The deck is stacked against former inmates, and the communities where they return suffer along with them.

One Year Out, a study by the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center based on interviews with nearly 300 Ohio prisoners who returned to the Cleveland area, found they faced significant problems that often drove them back to prison. The Urban Institute is a Washington-based, nonpartisan, nonprofit education and research organization.

"One year after release, the men in the study had little stability in their lives and desperately needed community services to help them succeed," said Christy A Visher, principal researcher and the study's co-author. "Most were living in temporary housing, were not working full-time and had health problems that required medical attention."

The Cleveland study was part of a three-year project examining the experiences of inmates returning home to Ohio, Illinois, Maryland and Texas.

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is expected to release up to 30,000 prisoners this year. After three years, 38 percent will be back behind bars, according to the study's figures.

"We can't solve this problem by ourselves," prisons chief Terry Collins said. "Regardless of what anybody does, we all deserve a second chance to do the right thing."

He said several state and community agencies plus faith-based organizations are working cooperatively to help ease re-entry problems.

Collins said he's had "long talks" with Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist. Strickland asked Collins to come up with creative solutions to ease prison overcrowding and reduce recidivism.

In the Urban Institute study, researchers interviewed 294 of 424 initial participants one year after they were released. By then, 56 were back in jail or prison.

They found that just one in three had full-time jobs, about half were living in the same neighborhood as before they went to prison and 40 percent had been arrested at least once in the preceding year.

Many said they lived in areas where drugs are a big problem, and most reported using alcohol and drugs.

The study showed overall that community services are stretched to the breaking point by the demands of 650,000 prisoners released annually in the U.S.

Visher said that the findings "point to important policy opportunities for change -- both in prison and in the community -- that would reduce recidivism, reduce illegal drug use, and increase public safety in Cleveland's neighborhoods. Many of these policy changes are not expensive."

Among the recommendations were providing housing assistance immediately after release, coupled with employment assistance and substance-abuse treatment. The study also suggested involving families more closely in prisoners' re-entry, allowing more liberal partner visitation during incarceration and offering marriage-support services after release.

ajohnson@dispatch.com
Life after prison

Key findings one year after release:

• Housing: 46 percent were living with a parent or sibling, 33 percent with a spouse or intimate partner.

• Employment: Fewer than half had a job; 37 percent were working full-time, 11 percent part-time.

• Relationships: 27 percent said family support was the most important factor keeping them out of prison.

• Health: 59 percent reported a physical illness 12 months after release; 33 percent were receiving treatment.

• Substance use: 35 percent reported drug or alcohol use; 18 percent used more than once a week.

• Parole violations and recidivism: 15 percent returned to prison, most for a new crime, the rest for parole violations; 29 percent reported committing at least one crime since release; 40 percent reported having been arrested.

Source: Urban Institute Justice Policy Center http://www.dispatch.com/dispatch/content/local_news/stories/2007/04/24/REENTRY.ART_ART_04-24-07_D5_KQ6FNMF.html
This and other news about obstacles to returning home after prison can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)

Prison Legal News Settles First Amendment Suit with CA

Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Last modified Friday, April 13, 2007

California settles First Amendment lawsuit with Prison Legal News

By: Associated Press -

SACRAMENTO -- California prison officials have agreed to provide a nonprofit legal newsletter to state inmates to settle a First Amendment lawsuit filed this week in federal court.

The lawsuit by Seattle-based Prison Legal News alleges that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation violated inmates' free speech and due process rights by blocking inmates from receiving their paid subscriptions to the monthly publication. The newsletter covers legal news like court decisions and gives legal self-help advice to inmates.

The department agreed in December to pay the publisher $65,100, most of which will go for five-year subscriptions of the newsletter for each of the 157 prison legal libraries at its 33 adult prisons. The department also agreed to update its mail policy to eliminate several restrictions it had placed on publications.

The publication's attorneys filed the suit Thursday in federal court in Oakland to ensure the settlement is legally binding, said Amy Whelan, an attorney for the newsletter.

Prison Legal News has about 5,000 subscribers, 80 percent of whom are in jail or prison. About 1,000 subscribers are in California prisons. The company also publishes more than 40 books, some of which have been blocked from reaching inmates who ordered them, the suit alleges.

"This is an important vindication of significant constitutional rights," Paul Wright, the newsletter's editor and publisher, said in a statement.

Corrections spokesman Seth Unger said the publications were blocked under policies that required publishers to be on an "approved vendors list," that prohibited hardcover books for security reasons, restricted the weight of mail inmates could receive, and limited the amount of written material an inmate could have at one time.

"It was not an attempt at censorship," Unger said.

However, the department is changing all those policies under the settlement.

Prison Legal News has won similar lawsuits or settlements in Alabama, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/04/14/news/state/21_57_444_13_07.prt

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

Dallas Morning News (!) Editorial- "Death No More" -Tx should abandon death penalty

Death no more
Dallas Morning News
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Ernest Ray Willis set a fire that killed two women in Pecos County. So said Texas prosecutors who obtained a conviction in 1987 and sent Mr. Willis to death row. But it wasn't true.

Seventeen years later, a federal judge overturned the conviction, finding that prosecutors had drugged Mr. Willis with powerful anti-psychotic medication during his trial and then used his glazed appearance to characterize him as "cold-hearted." They also suppressed evidence and introduced neither physical proof nor eyewitnesses in the trial – and his court-appointed lawyers mounted a lousy defense. Besides, another death-row inmate confessed to the killings.

The state dropped all charges. Ernest Ray Willis emerged from prison a pauper. But he was lucky: He had his life. Not so Carlos De Luna, who was executed in 1989 for the stabbing death of a single mother who worked at a gas station. For years, another man with a history of violent crimes bragged that he had committed the crime. The case against Mr. De Luna, in many eyes, does not stand up to closer examination.

There are signs he was innocent. We don't know for sure, but we do know that if the state made a mistake, nothing can rectify it.

And that uncomfortable truth has led this editorial board to re-examine its century-old stance on the death penalty. This board has lost confidence that the state of Texas can guarantee that every inmate it executes is truly guilty of murder. We do not believe that any legal system devised by inherently flawed human beings can determine with moral certainty the guilt of every defendant convicted of murder.
Also Online

That is why we believe the state of Texas should abandon the death penalty – because we cannot reconcile the fact that it is both imperfect and irreversible.

Flaws in the capital criminal justice system have troubled us for some timeyears. We have editorialized in favor of clearer instructions to juries, better counsel for defendants, the overhaul of forensic labs and restrictions on the execution of certain classes of defendant. We have urged lawmakers to at least put in place a moratorium, as other states have, to closely examine the system.

And yet, despite tightening judicial restrictions and growing concern, the exonerations keep coming, and the doubts keep piling up without any reaction from Austin.

From our vantage point in Dallas County, the possibility of tragic, fatal error in the death chamber appears undeniable. We have seen a parade of 13 men walk out of the prison system after years – even decades – of imprisonment for crimes they didn't commit. Though not death penalty cases, these examples – including an exoneration just last week – reveal how shaky investigative techniques and reliance on eyewitnesses can derail the lives of the innocent.

The Tulia and the fake-drug scandals have also eroded public confidence in the justice system. These travesties illustrate how greed and bigotry can poison the process.

It's hard to believe that such pervasive human failings have never resulted in the death of an innocent man.

In 2001, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed."

Some death penalty supporters acknowledge that innocents may have been and may yet be executed, but they argue that serving the greater good is worth risking that unfortunate outcome. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argues that the Byzantine appeals process effectively sifts innocent convicts from the great mass of guilty, and killing the small number who fall through is a risk he's willing to live with. According to polls, most Texans are, too. But this editorial board is not.

Justice Scalia calls these innocents "an insignificant minimum." But that minimum is not insignificant to the unjustly convicted death-row inmate. It is not insignificant to his or her family. This marks a transgression against the Western moral tradition, which establishes both the value of the individual and the wrongness of making an innocent suffer for the supposed good of the whole. Shedding innocent blood has been a scandal since Cain slew Abel – a crime for which, the Bible says, God spared the murderer, who remained under harsh judgment.

This newspaper's death penalty position is based not on sympathy for vile murderers – who, most agree, deserve to die for their crimes – but rather in the conviction that not even the just dispatch of 10, 100, or 1,000 of these wretches can remove the stain of innocent blood from our common moral fabric.

This is especially true given that our society can be adequately guarded from killers using bloodless means. In 2005, the Legislature gave juries the option of sentencing killers to life without parole.

The state holds in its hands the power of life and death. It is an awesome power, one that citizens of a democracy must approach in fear and trembling, and in full knowledge that the state's justice system, like everything humanity touches, is fated to fall short of perfection. If we are doomed to err in matters of life and death, it is far better to err on the side of caution. It is far better to err on the side of life. The state cannot impose death – an irrevocable sentence – with absolute certainty in all cases. Therefore the state should not impose it at all.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DN-toy_01edi.ART.State.Edition1.43b925d.html#

Posted by lois at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

Mississippi: Prison opponents fail to get enough signatures to force vote

Prison opponents fail to get enough signatures to force vote

By Joan Gandy, The Natchez democrat
April 24, 2007

NATCHEZ — A 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline passed without the filing of a petition to request a vote on a new federal prison in Adams County.

Charles Wheat issued a written statement on behalf of the Concerned Citizens of Adams County late Tuesday saying the group failed to get the 1,500 signatures necessary to request the vote.

Two companies are interested in building a federal prison on the outskirts of town, one on county airport property and the other on U.S. 84.

Chancery Clerk Tommy O’Beirne, also secretary to the Adams County Board of Supervisors, said he will report to the board at an 8 a.m. meeting today that no petitions were filed.

“In the absence of the filing, the board will meet and there will be a resolution adopted by the board that no one filed,” O’Beirne said.

“We’ll make notice of that so that the people can go forward with the correctional facility,” he said.

Darryl Grennell, president of the Board of Supervisors, reacted with enthusiasm as he walked up the steps to the chancery clerk’s office shortly after 5 p.m.

“This is good news for Adams County,” Grennell said. “It seems to me the people of Adams County have spoken. It says to me that we have made the right decision.”

One of the prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America, wants to take advantage of Katrina-related GO-Zone legislation that would offer the company financial breaks if they build soon.

Because the company would like to have the facility built before the federal contract is awarded, construction probably would need to begin by July, an economic development official has said.

Wheat and Robert Palmer spearheaded the petition drive, iterating that their purpose was not to prevent the building of a prison but to give voters an opportunity to choose.

“The voting public in Adams County has spoken,” their written statement says. They declined to comment directly on the issue Tuesday.

“Not signing a petition to take the prison issue to an election sent a very clear message.

“Whatever the reasons that many of you felt the need not to exercise your right to vote on such an important issue, the fact remains now that less than five elected individuals will be allowed to make a decisions that affects everyone in the county.”

Tim Trottier, president and CEO of Natchez Community Hospital, and Jack Sours, vice president and general manager of the Isle of Capri Casino and Hotel, accompanied Grennell to the clerk’s office at the end of the day Tuesday.

“Jack and I represent privately owned businesses that are two of the biggest employers in the county,” Trottier said.

“We think it’s so important our elected officials get our support for this important opportunity.”

Sours agreed. “We’re very excited about this. As part of the business community, we know this will be good for the economy of the area.”

http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/articles/2007/04/24/news/news229.txt

Posted by lois at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

MS: Church leaders see opportunity in proposed prison facility

Church leaders see opportunity in proposed prison facility
By Joan Gandy, The Natchez democrat
April 24, 2007

NATCHEZ — Church leaders polled Tuesday agree that a federal prison in Natchez brings benefits to the community.

The Rev. David O’Connor, pastor at St. Mary Basilica and Assumption Catholic Church, said prisons are a part of society and must be accepted as such.

It’s an amazing opportunity for ministry, as well,” O’Connor said. “I’ve been to Woodville many, many times. Those people need ministry in a big way. We can help them find direction with their lives.”

O’Connor referred to the federal prison built in Wilkinson County near Woodville, where several Natchez churches have regular ministries among the inmates.

The Wilkinson County facility is a Corrections Corporation of America prison. CCA is seeking a site to build a prison in Natchez, estimating that it will house 1,500 mostly nonviolent inmates.

The prison is estimated to be a $90 million construction project. When completed, it would employ about 300 people.

O’Connor said the jobs are important. “If a prison brings jobs to the community, I’m in favor of that,” he said.



The Rev. Steve Pearson, pastor at Community Chapel Church of God, agreed.



“I’m for the prison for several reasons — first of all, for all the job opportunities,” he said. “The economic opportunity is tremendous, and it’s long term.”

Pearson also believes a community that has a prison has a chance to offer special ministries within the prison.



“I’d love to have the opportunity for that kind of ministry,” he said.



“Third, I think having the prison here would be a way to give back to our country,” Pearson said.



“Prisons often are looked at as negative, but I think they’re important and make a contribution to our nation.

”Prison ministries already exist at First Assembly of God, the church where the Rev. Doug Wright is pastor.

Wright said a prison in Natchez “would be a wonderful opportunity for the churches to reach out and share Christ’s gospel with the inmates.”

His church has ministries at the Wilkinson County prison as well as at some prisons in Louisiana, Wright said.



“Many of the inmates realize their need to get right with God,” Wright said. “They can be transformed and rehabilitated and, when they are released, they can become productive members of society.”


The Rev. Dennis Flach, pastor of New Covenant Presbyterian Church, said he has seen advertisements on cable TV stations that put the construction of a prison in positive light.



The ad centers on “who goes to prison,” referring to the several hundred employees there, he said. “It’s a very positive and sound message about the real opportunity for Natchez and Adams County,” Flach said.

Prisoners will prompt a need for ministry, Flach said. “We’ll have a need to respond to prisoners to let them know their situations are not hopeless.”

O’Connor said his time spent in the Wilkinson County prison convinced him that such new prisons are totally safe for a community.

“There is just no way for inmates to get out of these new prisons. You’d have to be a miracle worker,” he said.

O’Connor has seen the transformation that can take place through prison ministry.

“There is great ministry to be done there,” he said. “They are very vulnerable. I would like to see prisons with major rehabilitation programs. My heart would be comfortable with that.”

O’Connor believes the Natchez Ministerial Alliance will take an active part in ministering to prisoners if the CCA facility or another one is built in Natchez.

The Rev. Dr. John Larson, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, said the most immediate impact on the community would be the construction of the facility.

He noted the sadness of the need to continue building more prisons.

“I don’t think prisons are a threat, but I do think it’s sad that we don’t have enough prisons and have to keep building them,” Larson said.

CCA is one of two prison companies vying for the federal contract to build a federal prison in the area. Pike County voters have rejected their county as a site. Walthall County is a possible alternate site.

http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/articles/2007/04/24/news/news230.txt

Posted by lois at 09:38 AM | Comments (0)

IN: 6 Articles on Prison Riot in New Castle including background on prison transfers, GEO and New Castle

Critics say prisons-for-pay lead to problems
By KEITH ROYSDON, kroysdon@muncie.gannett.com
April 25, 2007

MUNCIE -- More than $37 billion is spent on incarcerating inmates in the country's jails and prisons each year, and critics of the private prison industry said Tuesday that riots like the one at the New Castle Correctional Facility are often sparked by cost-cutting measures.

"You get what you pay for," said Kent Kopczynski, director of the Private Corrections Institute, a group critical of the private prison industry and the privatization of prisons.

Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative agreed.
"As a general matter, private prisons cut corners," Wagner said. "Private prisons cost as much as public prisons, so the only way they can make a profit is to cut corners."

Inmates at the New Castle facility rioted Tuesday, causing injuries to two guards and damage to the facility. The prison is run by the GEO Group. Under the name Wackenhut, the company considered locating a facility in Delaware County in the late 1990s.

When guards call in sick, services or recreation programs can be cut, Wagner noted, causing unrest among inmates.

Officials on Tuesday cited the role of inmates from Arizona in the riot. More than 600 Arizona inmates -- housed at New Castle after an arrangement among the two states and GEO Group, which operates the privatized state facility -- were housed at the facility this week. As many as 1,260 Arizona inmates were to have been housed in the prison, which has a capacity of 2,400 beds.

The prison also housed 1,050 Indiana inmates as of Tuesday.

Kopczynski said importing inmates from another state -- such as the Arizona inmates at the New Castle prison -- can also increase the possibility of disturbances.

"It's run like a hotel," he said. "They've got to fill the beds. If they can't fill the beds with Indiana natives, they've got to bring them in from elsewhere. You bring in inmates from out of state, and you have a blow-up between inmates."

The prison industry in the United States is a big one. CNNMoney reported in March that $37 billion is spent on corrections each year in an effort to keep more than 2 million inmates incarcerated.

Kopczynski said the problem of "understaffed and underpaid employees" was common in private prisons.

"In a public facility, the staff is reasonably paid, you have health insurance, retirement," he said. "The privateers don't have that. At one GEO facility when the company was still Wackenhut, less than 10 percent of employees participated in the retirement plan because the company paid so much less than they did."
http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070425/NEWS01/704250337/1002

New Castle mayor still supports Arizona prison pact

By JOY LEIKER, jleiker@muncie.gannett.com
April 25, 2007
http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070425/NEWS01/704250335/1002

NEW CASTLE -- The city of New Castle has no written plan on how to respond to an emergency at the New Castle Correctional Facility.

Mayor Tom Nipp, who previously has heralded the addition of jobs and inmates at the prison, didn't back down from that support Tuesday night, hours after Indiana and Arizona inmates had rioted inside the prison located on the city's north side.

The addition of inmates, including those from Arizona in the past six weeks, has resulted in more jobs at the prison. The mayor said that's what is important to the people of New Castle.

"Every emergency has to be dealt with individually," the mayor said, noting that the city's emergency operations plan doesn't have a specific chapter on the prison.

When an emergency occurs, Nipp said responders don't have time to review a thick book of procedures. They must do what they did Tuesday -- act. He said he was proud of how quickly his department heads and emergency officials had responded.

"An emergency plan has to be rather brief," he said as he thumbed through a copy inside his office. It's contained inside a single three-ring binder.

Nipp said off-duty personnel were called into work to be on standby at the city's fire stations and ambulance bays so they could respond to other non-prison-related calls that might come in. The city's police department was also operating with extra officers.

"My number one priority had to be to take care of my citizens," the mayor said. "We felt really comfortable that our citizens were secure."

The business is incarceration, and business is good
New Castle prison's private operator likely can weather riots like one in Indiana, analyst says

By Erika D. Smith, erika.smith@indystar.com
April 25, 2007
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070425/BUSINESS/704250485/-1/ZONES04

GEO Group, the Florida-based company that runs New Castle Correctional Facility, is one of the oldest private prison operators in North America.

Led by industry veteran George C. Zoley, considered by some to be a "grandfather" in the industry, the publicly traded company has operations around the world in industries that include prison management, health care and government services.

"They have a very strong track record of working with a number of states and other countries," said Geoff Segal, a prison-privatization expert and director of government reform for the Libertarian think tank The Reason Foundation.

In the United States alone, GEO Group runs or owns about 50 prisons, mostly in the South. The company said Monday it signed a contract to open a 1,500-bed facility in Laredo, Texas.

GEO Group is growing fast -- just like the industry.

The company, which is second only to Corrections Corp. of America in the number of prisons and prisoners it oversees, had an average two-year net revenue growth of about 22 percent.

Business is so good, in fact, that prison riots don't necessarily hurt a company financially, analysts say. Not in the long run, anyway.

"It's not the case that if you have a riot, you're going to lose a contract," said Anton Hie, an analyst with Jefferies.

GEO Group's stock price did take a hit Tuesday, though. It fell $1.12, or 2.2 percent, to close at $48.78.

Pablo Paez, a spokesman for the Boca Raton, Fla.-based company, said little about the New Castle riot, saying employees hadn't assessed the situation.

"We have policies and procedures in place," he said. "At this point, the focus is to bring the situation under control."

Privately run prisons account for about 6 percent of the U. S. prison population -- and that population is expected to grow over the next decade.

The industry is highly consolidated, and its reach is growing.

At the same time, the federal government has stopped building prisons, and states such as Arizona are discovering it's cheaper to ship their prisoners elsewhere than to build prisons of their own.

Also, states such as Indiana are starting to see private prisons as a moneymaker because demand is so high and the supply of beds is not, said Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the watchdog Private Corrections Institute.

"The market is so tight that there's a bidding war going on," he said.

GEO Group has started building more of its own facilities, in addition to managing them, as it does in New Castle.

"You can't be evicted from your own facility," Hie said.

However, Kopczynski said GEO Group faces the same problems as the rest of the industry. Turnover at private prison companies is about 50 percent, compared with about 15 percent at public prisons, he said.

"They answer to the shareholders," he said, "so they make cuts whenever possible."

Inmate imports suspended by New Castle riot

By TOM MURPHY
Wednesday, April 25, 2007 12:47 AM CDT http://nwitimes.com/articles/2007/04/25/ap-state-in/d8oneik80.txt

NEW CASTLE, Ind. - Indiana officials suspended plans to accept
hundreds of more inmates from Arizona following a two-hour riot at a
state prison run by a private company.

Authorities were investigating whether the two-hour fracas that
involved about 500 inmates started Tuesday afternoon because some of
the newly arrived prisoners from Arizona were upset about their
treatment at the medium-security men's prison.

The riot, during which two staff members and seven prisoners suffered
minor injuries, involved inmates from both states, and none escaped
from the New Castle Correctional Facility, officials said.

Prison guard Larry Savage said he, two other guards and three
maintenance workers barricaded themselves in a room as dozens of
inmates tried to break in before a prison response team arrived about
15 minutes later.

"They were wrapped up in masks, with sticks, knives, shanks," Savage
said of the inmates. "They were just flexing their muscles and they
wanted to show that they could take the prison over at any time, and
that's what they did."

Inmates set mattresses and paper afire in the courtyard and destroyed
furniture, broke windows as some armed themselves with clubs before
the prison was secured, officials said.

Indiana Department of Correction Commissioner J. David Donahue said
the riot began after a group of inmates from Arizona took off their
shirts in the prison's recreation area to show staff they wouldn't
comply with orders. They had been told to keep the shirts on.

Some troubles continued hours after order was restored, as at one
point the staff set off several percussion grenades inside the prison
after some inmates became unruly, Donahue said.

The disturbance occurred six weeks after the first of some 600
Arizona inmates began joining 1,050 Indiana prisoners at the facility
about 45 miles east of Indianapolis.

Donahue said he has delayed the transfer of 600 more inmates from
Arizona until authorities can reassess the condition of the prison.

"This system is different than what they are accustomed to," Donahue
said.

Indiana House Speaker Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, criticized the
Daniels administration's decision to take in inmates from Arizona.

"You are bringing outside elements into a prison situation and also
bringing their gangs and their culture," Bauer said. "These prisoners
also have friends and families (back in Arizona). I think it was
inevitable. ... I think it was a bad idea from a financial standpoint
of view and a social point of view."

Some of the newly arrived inmates had complained about a lack of
recreation and other programs, said Trina Randall, a spokeswoman for
GEO Group Inc., the Boca Raton, Fla.-based company that in January
2006 took over the prison's management.

The injured staff members suffered cuts and scrapes, while the
injuries to inmates involved tear gas exposure and minor cuts. All
seven inmates were treated at the prison, Randall said.

Arizona Department of Corrections spokeswoman Katie Decker said at
least some of the transferred inmates had complained about being
moved, which was prompted by the state's shortage of prison space.
She said the inmates sent to New Castle were "carefully picked"
before being transferred and could have "no predisposition to violence."

Gov. Mitch Daniels praised the response by prison staff and police
agencies to the disturbance.

"Corrections is a high-risk business managing high-risk offenders,"
Daniels said in a statement. "These events always remind us of the
unseen bravery and service of those who protect us by guarding those
who have harmed society in the past."

Indiana's agreement with Arizona came nearly three months after a
plan fell through under which California was to send 1,260 of its
inmates to the prison. That plan was scrapped because of a lawsuit
against California over the possible transfer and a lack of inmates
willing to volunteer to make the cross-country move.

Savage, the prison guard, credited the prison's emergency team with
saving his life.

"Our weapons team kept them down," he said. "Because of them I get to
go home tonight and see my three kids and my wife."

Associated Press writers Charles Wilson in New Castle, Ken Kusmer and
Mike Smith in Indianapolis and Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to
this story.

Doubts smolder in day of mayhem
Hundreds riot at New Castle prison

By Tim Evans, Karen Eschbacher and Vic Ryckaert, tim.evans@indystar.com
April 25, 2007
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070425/LOCAL1803/704250424/0/ZONES04

NEW CASTLE, Ind. -- A riot Tuesday by Arizona inmates at the New Castle Correctional Facility is the latest in a string of uprisings by prisoners shipped to other states and has renewed debate over the practice in Indiana.

Department of Correction officials said nine people -- two prison workers and seven inmates -- suffered minor injuries in separate disturbances involving a total of about 500 Arizona and Indiana prisoners during a two-hour period Tuesday afternoon.

State officials have temporaryily halted the transfer of any additional out-of-state prisoners to New Castle as they investigate the incident.

Commissioner J. David Donahue said the Arizona prisoners may have been upset because Indiana prisons have different rules, including a ban on smoking and limits on personal items inmates can have in their cells.

The Arizona prisoners are kept separate from Indiana inmates at the facility 50 miles east of Indianapolis.

The riot prompted a legislative leader to call for the state to cancel the Arizona deal.

"The idea of bringing in people from another state who bring along their gangs, allegiances and different alliances immediately was a mixture that was bound to bring trouble," said House Speaker B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend.

But even before Tuesday's riot, Arizona officials had decided to temporarily stop sending inmates to the New Castle prison because a recent visit raised "serious security concerns."

Dora Schriro, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, visited the New Castle Correctional Facility on Thursday and found insufficient staffing for her state's 630 inmates, said Katie Decker, a spokeswoman with the department. Schriro also was concerned about where officers were stationed.

Arizona is paying Indiana $6.1 million to house its inmates. Gov. Mitch Daniels and others supported the deal in part because the prison was only about half-full.

The New Castle prison is state-owned, but Indiana contracts with GEO Group of Florida to operate it. The first 104 prisoners from Arizona arrived March 12.

Decker, the Arizona corrections spokeswoman, said Arizona would prefer to keep its prisoners in-state but can't accommodate the growing inmate population. Arizona also sends some inmates to a prison in Oklahoma.

Tuesday's disturbance is the latest example of riots led by prisoners shipped to other states for incarceration. There have been at least five similar riots since 2000, including two in the past four years involving Arizona inmates.

The incident has also raised concerns about the state's contract with a private firm managing the New Castle facility.

The state signed a contract with GEO Group in September 2005 to run the prison for four years with an option for three two-year extensions. Officials with the company declined to comment Tuesday on the riot.

Daniels, a Republican, said the fact that the prison is privately managed did not have anything to do with the riot, and his office released a history of disturbances at government-managed Indiana correctional facilities to help support his point.

"In fact, the management there responded beautifully, as did the public authorities," said Daniels, who has sought to privatize parts of state government.

But Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker disagreed and said privatization of the prison likely contributed.

"What happened today is a tragedy. I think it all ties back to the fact that (the governor) has privatized essential government services," Parker said.

House Minority Leader Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, cautioned people not to rush to judgment.

"I think we need to find out exactly what happened, who is responsible and how prison officials reacted," he said. "This is not the first prison riot in national history, nor is it the last."

Tuesday's trouble began about 2 p.m. as a group of Arizona inmates became defiant as they were being moved from a dining hall to their cellblocks, said Donahue, the DOC commissioner.

Donahue said many of the inmates began removing their shirts, apparently in a show of solidarity for the "noncompliance," and one guard was either knocked or pushed to the ground.

A group of Indiana inmates -- who are separated from the Arizona prisoners by fences -- became aware of the disturbance, and about 500 of the prison's 1,668 inmates became involved, he said.

Donahue said some rioters were armed with pool cues, mop handles and broomsticks. Some threw billiard balls. Rioters broke scores of windows and set several outdoor fires before guards used a chemical agent to quell the disturbance.

Guards first isolated the areas of disruption, giving inmates time to settle down, Donahue said. The guards are employees of GEO.

"We don't want to put additional folks at risk, he said.

It's not unusual for flare-ups at privately run prisons with out-of-state inmates, said Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the watchdog Private Corrections Institute.

For one, prisoners often end up far away from their relatives and friends, making visits difficult.

"How do you expect the family to stay in touch," he said, "when they're in Arizona and they have to fly all the way to Indiana?"

In addition, companies such as GEO Group have different rules, based on the contracts they have with different states. For example, prisoners from one state might be allowed to have food more times per day or better medical care than prisoners from another state.

Guards did keep the prison populations apart, as all management companies are required to do, but that rarely stops the flow of information, Kopczynski said.

Once one group learns the guards are treating another group better, prisoners can become resentful, angry and violent. That kind of unequal treatment doesn't usually happen in public prisons, because the prisoners are from the same state.

But transferring prisoners out of state is becoming more common as states run out of beds and seek cheaper alternatives to building new prisons.

Donna Leone Hamm, director of Middle Ground Prison Reform, an Arizona-based nonprofit inmate advocacy group, said Tuesday's riot didn't surprise her.

She said her organization has been contacted by inmates and their relatives who said prisoners were shipped off to Indiana against their will and with little notice.

Because Arizona transports its least troublesome prisoners, well-behaved inmates felt they were being punished for playing by the rules, Hamm said. In addition, some couldn't bring along personal property, including televisions, she said.

Katherine Farabaugh's fiance, Mikel Gibson, was transferred to Indiana more than a month ago.

"I had talked to him the day before, and I got a call the next morning saying, 'I'm in Indiana,' " the Arizona woman said. "They took him with nothing but the clothes on his back and shipped him on a plane like cattle."

Gibson has less than seven months to go on a three-year sentence for burglary.

Star reporters Erika Smith, Kevin O'Neal, Mary Beth Schneider, Theodore Kim and Bill Ruthhart and the Arizona Republic contributed to this story.

IMPORTING INMATES

The state signed an agreement last month to house Arizona prisoners at the privately managed prison in New Castle. The first 104 prisoners arrived March 12; 1,200 were expected altogether. About 600 have arrived so far.

• Indiana's end of the deal: Indiana is to receive an average of $64 per prisoner per day from Arizona. The one-year contract is supposed to generate $6.1 million in revenue for Indiana and can be terminated at any time if Indiana needs the space for in-state offenders. Gov. Mitch Daniels said the agreement would create 230 jobs at the facility.

• Arizona's end: The state has about 36,000 people incarcerated, roughly 5,000 more than the system is designed to hold, according to Katie Decker, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Corrections. The state's prison population could grow by more than a third by the end of 2011, according to a report released this year by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.

• Other details: Arizona prisoners were to be kept separate from Indiana inmates. Only medium- to minimum-security adult inmates were to be sent to Indiana -- those who had committed crimes such as burglary, robbery and aggravated assault. Not to be transferred: inmates classified as high-risk offenders, sex offenders or those with escape histories or recent history of prison disciplinary action.

ABOUT NEW CASTLE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

• Established: 2002.
• Security level: Medium.
• Capacity: 2,416.
• Inmates: A total of 1,668 inmates, including the Arizona inmates, live at the prison.
• Housing: Dormitories.
• Management: It's state-owned but privately managed by The GEO Group, a Florida-based company. It is the only prison in the state that is privately managed.

OTHER RIOTS INVOLVING OUT-OF-STATE INMATES

The riot Tuesday at the New Castle Correctional Facility is the latest uprising involving prisoners moved from one state to another.

Since 2000, at least five similar riots have taken place in other states:

• September 2004: Inmates at the Lee Adjustment Center, a private prison in Beattyville, Ky., burned the facility's administration building and caused extensive damage to a dorm during a riot. Twenty-six inmates -- 15 from Vermont and 11 from Kentucky -- faced charges. The riot occurred after several hundred Vermont inmates were added to the prison.

• July 2004: A riot occurred at the $47 million Crowley County Correctional Facility in Colorado shortly after the arrival of new inmates from Washington state. Thirteen inmates needed treatment, including one with a severe stab wound, but no one was killed.

• May 2004: More than 500 Arizona inmates rioted at the Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Okla., a private prison where more than 1,200 Arizona inmates were being housed because of crowding at state facilities. The riot lasted several hours, and dozens of inmates were injured.

•January 2003: An uprising by 82 Arizona inmates at a private prison in Texas caused $15,000 in damage. Inmates flooded dorms, tore up mattresses, destroyed TV sets and broke windows at the Newton County Correctional Center.

• September 2000: As many as 20 inmates from Hawaii smashed windows, computers and TV sets at an Arizona prison after an inmate complained about the way his rice was cooked. Three people were injured, including a guard, who was captured and assaulted.

Source: Nexis news archives

New Castle site only recently a prison

By RODNEY RICHEY, rodney.richey@heraldbulletin.com
April 24, 2007
http://www.theheraldbulletin.com/local/local_story_114212248.html

The private firm that assumed control of the New Castle Correctional Facility in 2006 — The Geo Group Inc., formerly Wackenhut — signed the agreement at the end of September 2005. The contract covered an initial term of four years, with three two-year extensions.

The 2,416-bed, medium-security facility was taken over by GEO in January 2006. For many years, the site itself had been occupied by the New Castle State Developmental Center. In its history, that facility had also been known as New Castle State Hospital and the Indiana Village for Epileptics.

The $123 million medium-security prison, which opened in 2002, was designed to house more than 1,800 inmates and employ about 750 state workers.

Florida-based GEO Group describes itself as “a world leader in the delivery of correctional, detention and residential treatment services to federal, state and local government agencies around the globe. GEO offers a turnkey approach that includes design, construction, financing and operations.”

The corporation also reportedly serves governments in Australia, South Africa, Canada and Great Britain, operating 63 correctional and residential treatment facilities in North America.

GEO changed its name from Wackenhut — a company that had been the target of some criticism for its stern procedures in operating prisons, including a scathing 2002 report on CBS’ “60 Minutes II” — in November 2003. Wackenhut reportedly still operates security guard services in many states, but is no longer connected with GEO.

(Information supplied by the Indiana Department of Correction Web site, the GEO Group Web site and the CBS News Web site, as well as other Internet sources.)

Posted by lois at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2007

Western MA: Opening for New Jail for Women Delayed. Sheriff to Seek 56 Additinal Cells.

" Lajoie said the sheriff's department continues to work with legislators to obtain additional bonding to build a 56-cell unit onto the new jail. He estimates that that project could cost between $7 million to $10 million."

Center Street jail opening delayed
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
By HOLLY ANGELO
hangelo@repub.com

CHICOPEE - The opening of the $26.1 million women's regional jail on Center Street, originally planned for this spring, will be delayed until late September.

"We have a delay in the delivery and installation of the electronic security system," said Lawrence V. Lajoie, assistant superintendent for the Hampden County Sheriff's Department, yesterday. "It is a big deal. This delay is very disappointing to us."

WFI of Delaware is the company in charge of the security system. Lajoie said he and others with the sheriff's department will meet with the company on Thursday to find out the reason for the delay.

The jail was scheduled to open in early June, Lajoie said. Construction on the 210-bed facility is finished and the permitting process for plumbing, elevators and other building operations is currently taking place, he said.

"If it was carpeting, we could live without it," said Patricia A. Murphy, the superintendent of the new facility. "Without the security system in place, we can't operate."

The doors, locks and cameras are among the operations controlled by the electronic security system.

"It's very specific," Lajoie said. "Every facility operates differently. It's a unique system."

Murphy said a transition team has been in place for the past year writing policy and procedures, scheduling training, ordering equipment and hiring staff.

"We had a plan in place for training staff and a moving plan. We'll still use that plan, but at a later date," Murphy said.

The jail will hold female prisoners from Hampden, Hampshire, Berkshire and Franklin counties who are sentenced to terms of 2½ years or less. There will be special programs designed to help the female inmates deal with issues of addiction, domestic relationships, mental health and trauma, parenting and economics.

"It will allow us to deliver more treatment and programming. Having the space allows us to function as a full facility for women," Murphy said.

Lajoie said the sheriff's department continues to work with legislators to obtain additional bonding to build a 56-cell unit onto the new jail. He estimates that that project could cost between $7 million to $10 million.

http://www.masslive.com/chicopeeholyoke/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-1/117740677691960.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)

New Castle, IN: "Full Scale Riot" at GEO Prison

April 24, 2007
‘Full Scale Riot’ at Indiana Prison, Mayor Says
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:07 p.m. ET, NY Times

NEW CASTLE, Ind. (AP) -- Inmates staged a two-hour riot at a medium-security men's prison Tuesday, injuring two staff members and setting fires in a courtyard.

Indiana Department of Correction spokeswoman Java Ahmed said more than one cell house was involved in the disturbance at the New Castle Correctional Facility, about 43 miles east of Indianapolis.

Corrections officials sent emergency squads and county and state police to the prison. New Castle Mayor Tom Nipp said the entire city police force was also activated.

Helicopter pictures showed officers in riot gear standing outside the prison fence and at least two fires burning in the courtyard.

Authorities later secured the prison perimeter and confirmed that no inmates escaped, although some were still out of their cells, Indiana State Police Sgt. Rod Russell said.

Authorities had also accounted for all staff members.

The prison is managed by the GEO Group Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla., according to the Indiana Department of Corrections Web site.

The prison, built in 2002, can house about 2,200 inmates. It currently has about 1,000 prisoners from Indiana and 630 from Arizona.

In March, Arizona and Indiana reached an agreement on housing up to 1,260 Arizona inmates.

Arizona Department of Corrections spokeswoman Katie Decker said at least some of the transferred inmates had complained about being moved, a step that was necessary because of the state's shortage of prison space.

''They're obviously resentful because they had to leave the state,'' she said, adding that it was too early to say whether the transfers played any role in the riot.

Decker said the inmates sent to New Castle were ''carefully picked'' before being transferred and could have ''no predisposition to violence.''

The prison housed an average daily population of 450 in 2005, according to the DOC web site. It also has a psychiatric facility that treats inmates who are bused in from other prisons.

GEO Group last year contracted with the Indiana Department of Correction to assume management of the prison. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Prison-Riot.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Boston Globe Editorial: Hard Time for State Prisons

Boston GLOBE EDITORIAL
Hard time for state prisons
April 24, 2007

OUTGOING Correction commissioner Kathleen Dennehy confronted a culture of secrecy, tolerance of inmate abuse, and rigidity when she took control of the state prison system in 2003 after the ouster of her predecessor by then-Governor Romney. But now it is the reform-minded Dennehy who is under a cloud, and who has been asked to leave her post by Governor Patrick, raising questions about what kind of leader is needed next at the Department of Correction.

The job of overseeing 11,000 inmates and a hard-shelled correction officer union is among the toughest in state government. But it has been tougher than it needs to be due to the absence of any independent oversight of the troubled department. Bills to establish both an inspector general office to review charges of staff misconduct and an external oversight board to review general policies and practices languish in the Legislature. And courting the Legislature was not one of Dennehy's strengths, as noted by the failure of the House to back Patrick's proposal to increase the department's budget by $30 million.

The Correction department needs an outsider at the helm. The department now strains under a suit in federal court seeking to modify the use of long-term solitary confinement for mentally ill prisoners. Nine inmates have taken their own lives since the beginning of 2006. This week, the Globe Spotlight Team uncovered a trail of errors that led to the wrongful confinement of 14 prisoners, including one man who was held for more than four years after his release date. These injustices stem not only from flawed technical systems, but from a departmental culture that accepts a high level of risk for inmates. What Dennehy calls "a quagmire of sentencing structures" was at the root of the wrongful confinements. But deeper still is the problem of some of her staffers who didn't care enough to get it right.

On paper, Dennehy seemed the right person to lead the department. She is a strong public manager who can point to significant accomplishments, including no-nonsense discipline of assaultive correction officers, better staff training, higher quality substance abuse programs, and reductions in sick time. But the 31-year employee of the department could never fully make a clean break from the Correction culture in which she rose. She speaks convincingly of the need for transparency and accountability. But murkiness still remains, including in the important area of prisoner classification.

Numerous studies since 2005 point to the reforms needed in the Correction department. The job doesn't require a visionary. Instead, it calls for a first-rate manager with broad correction experience, a strong mandate from the Patrick administration, and no ties to the current system.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2007/04/24/hard_time_for_state_prisons

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

April 23, 2007

New Pages on the RCPP website-Comix from Inside and Writing from Prison

The Real Cost of Prisons Project has added two new categories to our website: Comix from Inside and Writing from Prison.
New materials are posted continuously so be sure to check and check back.
Materials can be downloaded and used in flyers, publications, etc.
Go to www.realcostofprisons.org and then to the new pages.

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

NY Times Editorial:Prison Horrors for the Mentally Ill

April 23, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Prison Horrors for the Mentally Ill
The State of New York took a step toward basic human decency when it agreed to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of mentally ill prisoners, who often endure horrific neglect and mistreatment. The settlement, which must be approved by the courts, provides for a range of welcome changes, including better care and monitoring for the severely ill people being held in solitary confinement or disciplinary lockdown, typically for 23 hours a day.
It still falls far short of what’s needed and is not a substitute for the sweeping reforms vetoed by former Gov. George Pataki last year. The Legislature should pass that bill again and Gov. Eliot Spitzer should promptly sign it. Maltreatment of mentally ill prisoners is a national shame. People who suffer from delusions and hallucinations are far more likely than non-disabled prisoners to break rules. When they are confined in their cells, their symptoms worsen. All too often they harm themselves.
A 2003 study found that nearly a quarter of the inmates in lockdown were mentally ill. Of those, nearly 45 percent reported that they had tried suicide and nearly a third reported self-mutilation. The settlement provides slightly better treatment and better suicide prevention in lockdown. But the basic problem is that severely ill inmates should not be held in lockdown at all. The mental health bill would ban disciplinary confinement for the seriously mentally ill. It would also require the prison system to expand treatment programs and give mental health professionals more influence in deciding treatment options. The measure would more than pay for itself by reducing danger and disorder behind bars, shortening prison stays for the mentally ill and increasing the likelihood that they would manage to stay out once they are released. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/opinion/23mon3.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fEditorials

Posted by lois at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Revolving Door for Addicts Adds to Medicaid Cost

NY Times article and letters to the editor follow.
April 17, 2007
Revolving Door for Addicts Adds to Medicaid Cost
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

With grim humor, some doctors in New York call them “frequent fliers” — addicts who check into hospital detoxification units so often that dozens of them spend more than 100 nights a year in those wards.

Through its Medicaid program, New York spends far more than other states on drug and alcohol treatment, including more than $300 million a year paid to hospitals for more than 30,000 detox patients. One reason for the high cost is that $50 million is spent just on the 500 most expensive patients, at a cost of about $100,000 a person. These patients check in and out of detox wards, on average, more than a dozen times a year — a practice that experts say would not be tolerated in most states.

In the state’s 2004 fiscal year, one patient was admitted to such units 26 times at 17 different hospitals around New York City, spending a total of 204 nights, Medicaid records show. In fiscal year 2005, there was one patient who spent 279 nights in detox wards, at a cost of about $300,000.

New York State spends more than enough money to provide all the needed treatment, but “the dollars are being spent in the wrong settings,” said Deborah S. Bachrach, the state’s Medicaid director. In Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s campaign to overhaul Medicaid, she said, “this is very high on our agenda.”

George Epps, 59, was a heavy user of alcohol, cocaine and heroin and says he went through detox programs around New York City 20 to 25 times over several years. “I would come out of detox and rent a room, squander my money on drugs and women, be homeless again for a while, and check back into detox,” said Mr. Epps, who added that he had been clean for more than six years.

He was far from being one of the most extreme examples, but he says he understands the thinking of the repeat patient.

“I would tell myself I was just a brother who needed a rest, not somebody who had a problem,” he said. “I could mimic what they said with such grace and conviction, they would swear I was cured.”

Among state officials, doctors who treat addiction, service groups dedicated to helping the homeless and mentally ill, even the addicts themselves, there is remarkable agreement on why the treatment system in New York is overpriced and inefficient.

In other states, most addicts who go through detox programs do so on an outpatient basis, while in New York the vast majority are inpatients. Medicaid rules in New York also encourage hospitals to provide the most expensive kind of inpatient detoxification, though it is often not medically necessary, while many other states favor a less expensive form of inpatient treatment.

And in New York, when patients are discharged — typically after about five days — the needed transition to an outpatient treatment program often never occurs. That is one reason many patients do not fully recover from their addictions and return to detox wards, experts say.

The system suits the most frequent patients — most of them homeless, mentally ill, or both — who see the programs as a source of shelter and food. And the most expensive treatment, which usually involves some sedation, can reduce the discomfort of withdrawal better than other methods.

Some drug users, especially those on opiates, also set out to clean their systems so they can reduce the dose needed to get high, according to addicts and those who treat them. For a homeless addict, the cost of each dose is a major concern.

But at its core, experts say, the overuse of costly inpatient programs is connected to the lack of housing for homeless people. People are less likely to admit themselves to hospitals, and more likely to adhere to treatment programs, when they are not living on the streets. For more than a decade, the city and state have invested in such housing, including some that accept residents who are not yet drug-free, but demand for housing still far exceeds supply.

“For this small group of what are basically professional inpatient detoxification users, it’s really a whole series of linked problems, and none of the parts of the system work very well,” said Dr. Richard N. Rosenthal, an addiction specialist and chairman of psychiatry at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. “There’s been some progress on each element, but not enough.”

The most intensive form of treatment, “medically managed” withdrawal takes place in a hospital, usually involves some sedation, and requires a great deal of care by doctors and nurses. The next level, “medically supervised withdrawal,” can be done in a hospital, or sometimes on an outpatient basis, and requires less medical intervention and less staff.

In New York, Medicaid pays an average of more than $100 a day for outpatient medically supervised withdrawal, and close to $400 a day for the inpatient version.

But it pays more than $1,300 a day for medically managed detox — and state officials estimate that more than 40 percent of that is profit for the hospitals. Hospital executives say the margin is not that high, but they concede that the most expensive form of detoxification is a significant money-maker.

As a result, many hospitals offer that program, but not the cheaper ones. By law, hospitals cannot turn away emergency patients, and drug or alcohol withdrawal is considered an emergency. So about 80 percent of the detox patients handled by hospitals in New York are treated at the most expensive level — often because it is the only one available.

Federal officials say they do not keep state-by-state Medicaid records, but experts and state officials say it is clear that New York spends far more on drug treatment than any other state, because other states mostly provide outpatient treatment. Figures compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services support that claim, showing that New York has more hospital admissions for drug or alcohol abuse — whether paid by Medicaid or someone else — than California, Texas and Florida combined.

Of the patients in medically managed detox in New York, “about 80 percent of them are uncomplicated and could be provided with a lower service,” said Karen M. Carpenter-Palumbo, commissioner of the state’s Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services.

Spitzer administration officials say the state needs to pay less for the top level of care, and possibly pay more for the others, to spur the development of those services. That fits with the governor’s plan to review what Medicaid pays for all services, with an eye to encouraging less expensive forms of care.

But those officials also know that when George E. Pataki tried twice as governor to change the detox payment system, the hospital industry, which has been losing money over all, persuaded the Legislature to protect one of its few sources of profit.

Everyone in the field agrees that drug treatment would be more effective and less expensive if a patient consistently went to the same hospital and the same set of doctors.

But in New York, a hospital has no way of checking a patient’s history at other hospitals. The state has talked for years of making that information available right away, and requiring that patients be transferred to their “home” hospitals, but to no avail.

Beyond medically managed and medically supervised detox, there is the least intensive form, called medically monitored withdrawal, which is often done in a residential treatment center, to remove addicts from the influences that contribute to their drug use. The cost per day is comparable to outpatient detox, but patients can stay for weeks.

But under rules laid down decades ago by the federal government, which pays half of New York’s Medicaid bills, Medicaid will not pay for drug treatment in a residential center, as opposed to a hospital. The state pays for a limited amount, using non-Medicaid funds.

In interviews, several current and recovering addicts who have also been homeless said they would happily accept less expensive forms of treatment, as long as they were given shelter. Sam Tsemberis, executive director of Pathways to Housing, a nonprofit group based in Manhattan, works with many such people.

“People use it instead of the shelter system,” he said. “It’s safer, you get three hots and a cot, the meals are better than a shelter, the beds are better, you get a clean change of clothes.”

When patients are discharged from hospital detox wards, the hospitals are supposed to refer them to follow-up treatment, usually through other organizations.

“The handoff doesn’t happen,” said Shari Noonan, who was the acting commissioner of the state substance abuse office last year. “There are no incentives for the hospital to make sure it happens.”

Medicaid records show that in New York State, 80 percent of patients do not have any form of outpatient treatment soon after leaving hospital detox. For almost half of them, the next drug treatment they get is another detox admission.

Ms. Carpenter-Palumbo said the state is looking into ways to correct those failings, providing incentives to hospitals to follow up, and assigning case managers to track patients. But again, such steps might require getting stable housing first.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/nyregion/17detox.html

April 23, 2007
When an Addict Finishes Detox (4 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re “Revolving Door for Addicts Adds to Medicaid Cost” (front page, April 17):

We applaud New York State’s efforts to reduce costly inpatient detoxification services and improve the overall quality and outcomes of care. It is essential that savings from these efforts be reinvested in effective community-based chemical dependency services.

Housing remains a critical issue, and New York City and State have committed to programs that will build 1,500 units of supportive housing for people with addictions, increase case management and provide detoxification services in homeless shelters.

Yet much more remains to be done to reduce chemical dependency in New York City. We must scale up our use of “brief intervention,” a technique proved to reduce problem drinking, and continue to expand the use of buprenorphine, the first new treatment for opiate addiction in four decades.

Joshua Rubin
Assistant Commissioner for Mental Hygiene Policy
New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
New York, April 18, 2007

•

To the Editor:

For homeless substance abusers undergoing detoxification, the transition to a long-term treatment program strongly influences whether they will stay clean.

Fumbling this transition increases the likelihood of a relapse, and in my research this factor is especially significant for the homeless. A return to the chaos of city streets typically lays waste to well-intentioned plans for outpatient follow-up.

In studies of homeless substance abusers from Boston and Birmingham, Ala., one treatment component consistently stands out as essential: a roof. Unless New York assures its homeless a secure environment in which to continue addiction treatment (and commits the necessary funds), the revolving door of detoxification will continue to spin.

Stefan G. Kertesz, M.D.
Birmingham, Ala., April 17, 2007
The writer is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine.

•

To the Editor:

It’s important that we not blame homeless substance abusers seeking detoxification for the high cost of these services in hospitals.

I have seen many of these “frequent fliers” come into our out-patient programs burdened with multiple psychiatric diagnoses, chronic health conditions like H.I.V./AIDS and hepatitis C, criminal backgrounds and long histories of drug-treatment failures.

I believe that our treatment programs for this population are too rigorous, all too often reinforcing a sense of failure and despair. Many participants are simply not ready to be abstinent. We need to develop interim models that can meet them on their level and help them to learn about their conditions and develop the necessary coping skills.

Programs like these could allow the homeless drug user to “graduate,” as a way of building self-esteem and a sense of accomplishment that could ultimately lead to abstention from drugs or alcohol.

Howard Josepher
New York, April 18, 2007
The writer is executive director of Exponents, a nonprofit group helping people with drug problems and H.I.V./AIDS.

•

To the Editor:

New York State’s heavy use of inpatient detoxification does indeed relate to issues beyond the hospital, such as lack of housing and inadequate management of the transition to outpatient treatment.

But it is critical that the public understand that inpatient detoxification is necessary when a lesser level of care would be unsafe, such as when patients have seizures, histories of delirium while detoxifying or cannot abstain from drugs or alcohol after several outpatient attempts.

When the state’s Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services asserts that 80 percent of patients in medically managed detoxification are “uncomplicated,” it is using the word the way Medicaid billing does. This fails to take into account problems such as mental illness that impede addiction recovery.

Hospitals implicated in this problem must be part of the solution and address the broader system of services that is failing these patients.

Richard N. Rosenthal, M.D.
New York, April 18, 2007
The writer is chairman of the psychiatry department at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/opinion/l23addicts.html

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

CO: Some say a proposed 1,250-bed women's facility would boost the small town. Others see it as a blight. Voters will decide.

"I don't see people saying 'Let's move to Hudson with its truck stop and prison and build a home."'
Hudson debating prison plan
Some say a proposed 1,250-bed women's facility would boost the small town. Others see it as a blight. Voters will decide.

By Monte Whaley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated:04/23/2007 12:00:25 AM MDT
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5728438

Hudson - Hope for this small prairie town may lie in a proposed women's prison, supporters say.

But other residents say a prison could ruin the town.

A 1,250-bed facility could bring in enough jobs and revenue so Hudson could pave its streets, hire its own police force and become a growing hub like its neighbors.

"I sit here and watch Fort Lupton and I watch Keenesburg and even Lochbuie do well and grow and I cannot figure out why our community is anti-growth," said Ed Rossi, ex-mayor of the community of 1,500. "Somewhere along the way someone has to help this town move forward."

But some say a prison doesn't mean progress. They have launched an anti-prison campaign like the successful one in Ault - another struggling Weld County town. There a private prison was touted as an antidote for a dreary economy but was attacked as a blight on the community.

"I can't imagine a worse image for Hudson right now," said Laura Moreland, who started Citizens Against the Hudson Prison. "I don't see people saying 'Let's move to Hudson with its truck stop and prison and build a home."'

Moreland wants Hudson's 500 or so registered voters to say "no" to the Cornell Companies Inc. prison on May 8. That's when they will be asked to rezone 320 acres of mostly scrub brush just northwest of I-76.

If the rezoning is approved, the town will annex the land and the prison will be built on about 40 acres, say town officials.

Mayor Neal Pontius said he's happy to let the voters decide something so controversial.
Moreland - who lives in nearby Fort Lupton - said the prison will reflect badly on not only the town but on nearby homes and ranches. She also is attacking assertions that the prison will bring up to 147 jobs to Hudson and pump $27.5 million into the town over its first 10 years.

She cites a Denver consultant's report - Harvey Economics - that says benefits of a prison will be overshadowed by infrastructure costs, water and utilities woes, and security risks.

"People are saying 'Well, this will pave our streets.' But at what cost?" Moreland said. "The growth will eventually come here, so let's don't rely on a prison."

The Houston, Texas-based Cornell was awarded the $16 million annual contract to build the Hudson prison last year by the Colorado Department of Corrections. The company runs prisons in 18 states, including a youth facility in Cañon City.

Locating a medium-security prison in Hudson was considered ideal because it is away from a major population center but still close to the metro area, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Alison Morgan. Hudson is about a 25-minute drive from Denver.

Ault was also considered a good spot for a 1,500-inmate men's prison to be built by GEO Group Inc. last year. But those plans have since stalled, due in part to questions over whether a prison official worked improperly with GEO to win the Ault contract.

"The bottom line was that only some town board members and a few businesses wanted the prison," said Ault resident Phil Tidwell, who led the anti-prison push.

Pontius, the Hudson mayor, just wants what's best for the town. "This is a good town with a lot of good people," he said. "If we do this, we want it done right."

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

OR: Prison costs shackling Oregon

"The chief sponsor of Measure 11 is Kevin Mannix, a former legislator and Republican candidate for governor. Mannix, a Salem lawyer, is gathering signatures for another ballot initiative that would expand mandatory minimum sentences from 14 months to 36 months for eight types of drug and property crimes, from selling methamphetamine to burglary. The state reports that about 3,700 offenders a year were convicted of crimes listed in the Mannix initiative in recent years, and more them half of them were placed on probation. But it's difficult to accurately predict the impact on state prisons. Officials originally forecast that Measure 11 would add far more prisoners to the system than it actually did because analysts didn't foresee that prosecutors would use the leverage of Measure 11 sentences to obtain guilty pleas for lesser crimes carrying shorter sentences.
If it qualifies for the November 2008 ballot, Mannix's initiative will spark renewed debate over the effectiveness of incarceration in fighting crime. Mannix argues that Measure 11 reduced violent crime, and his new version will do the same for property crime. "Measure 11 cost money, but it didn't blow the budget," Mannix says. "When it comes to property crimes, my assertion is that the cost of not incarcerating offenders will be more than the cost of incarceration. . . . We all pay it through hidden costs and insurance, and the poor pay the most."

Prison costs shackling Oregon
The benefits of tough sentencing laws diminish as the prison system expands, researchers say
Sunday, April 22, 2007

EDWARD WALSH
The Oregonian

Oregon is on the verge of a milestone: In the next two years, the state will spend tens of millions more tax money to lock up prison inmates than it does to educate students at community colleges and state universities.

The trend results from more than a decade of explosive prison growth largely fueled by Measure 11, the 1994 ballot initiative that mandated lengthy sentences for violent crimes. Since then, the number of inmates has nearly doubled and spending on prisons has nearly tripled.

As legislators and the governor debate how much money to spend on schools and higher education, there is little discussion in Salem on spiraling prison costs.

Oregon taxpayers now spend roughly the same money to incarcerate 13,401 inmates as they do to educate 438,000 university and community college students. But spending on prisons is growing at a faster rate than education and other state services.

The Department of Corrections and Oregon Youth Authority budget is projected to grow 19 percent in the next two years, to $1.66 billion, under Gov. Ted Kulongoski's budget -- $174 million more than what Kulongoski proposes to spend on universities and colleges.

University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer has warned lawmakers of a "growing crisis in Oregon and nationally at the intersection of corrections systems and other public priorities."

That's because the state budget essentially is a zero-sum game. Education, human services and public safety, including the Department of Corrections, account for 93 percent of state spending. Without tax increases, money that goes to one of those isn't available for the others.

Why do prison costs soar beyond population growth? Since June 1995 after Measure 11 took effect, the prison population has grown from 7,539 to 13,401 inmates, including 5,387 Measure 11 offenders.

To keep them locked up, the state has built three prisons and expanded five others the past decade. Another new prison -- Oregon's 14th -- opens this fall. A 15th prison, probably in Medford, would open in 2012.

Oregon is not alone -- a prison boom has reshaped the national landscape. The federal and state prison population has grown from fewer than 190,000 in 1970 to 1.5 million by 2005, due in large part to tough-on-crime laws that imposed longer sentences for violent and habitual offenders.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Oregon's annual per inmate cost of $24,665 made it the nation's 24th most expensive prison system to operate in 2005.

Decline in crime levels off

With so many criminals locked up, both Oregon and the nation have seen a steady decline in violent crime rates. In Oregon, there were about five violent crimes -- homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- per 1,000 population in the 1980s compared with 2.8 crimes in 2005.

But the decline has leveled off in recent years. A growing consensus among researchers concludes that the benefits of longer sentences diminish as a state prison system grows. Their studies show that each new cell added to a prison system has less impact on crime than earlier additions because so many career criminals already are locked up.

After reviewing numerous studies of the link between incarceration and crime rates, the Vera Institute of Justice in New York said in a recent report: "Analysts are nearly unanimous in their conclusion that continued growth in incarceration will prevent considerably fewer, if any, crimes -- and at substantially greater cost to taxpayers."

Such findings have spurred states such as Washington to study alternatives to building more prisons. In a report last year commissioned by the Legislature, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy concluded that expansion of proven treatment and prevention programs would reduce the need for new prison beds. Steve Aos, associate director of the institute, estimates such programs would save taxpayers as much as $2.6 billion in prison construction and operations between now and 2030.

Diminishing returns

Experts suggest that Measure 11 has reached the point of diminishing returns.

A recent study by the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a state agency, concluded that the number of crimes prevented each year by adding one inmate to the Oregon prison system has declined from nearly 30 per new inmate in 1994 to slightly more than 10 crimes in 2005.

The cost-benefit ratio of prison expansion has also diminished. In 1994, each additional $1 spent on incarceration yielded $3.31 in reduced crime costs, the study said. By 2005, the benefit per $1 spent was $1.03, barely above the break-even point.

Michael Wilson, an economist at the criminal justice commission and co-author of the study, said the calculation was based on an estimate of the costs of various types of crimes, including the costs to victims, to determine the dollar benefit of each crime that is prevented through incarceration. Because the number of crimes prevented per each new inmate declines as a prison system grows larger, the ratio of that benefit to the costs of incarceration also declines.

Craig Prins, executive director of the justice commission and the study's other co-author, says their findings suggest that the Legislature should explore alternatives for fighting crime.

"That's what we gave up to build the prisons, and I see this session as a time to take advantage of that, to try to treat their addictions and change their thinking. I think there's evidence it's a good investment."

The Legislature has cut programs for offenders such as alcohol and drug abuse treatment and education programs, particularly after the recession forced deep cuts across state government in 2003.

It was during this time, according to the study, that the cost of paying off the debt accumulated during the building boom exceeded the cost of the treatment programs inside the prisons. Debt service to finance prison construction soared from $20 million in 1995-97 to $134 million in the next biennium.

Kulongoski's 2007-09 budget proposes to restore treatment programs. His budget calls for increasing mental health services from $17.7 million to $28.9 million, increasing drug and alcohol abuse treatment from $2.1 million to $8.1 million and increasing education programs from $15.4 million to $16.8 million.

"This is the first time in probably the last 10 years that we've been able to invest and make a commitment to treatment issues in the corrections system and the juvenile justice system," said Joseph O'Leary, Kulongoski's senior adviser on public safety.

O'Leary estimates 75 percent to 80 percent of Oregon inmates need alcohol and drug treatment.

"We have to ask ourselves, if 98 percent of these people in prison are eventually going to get out, isn't it smart to be doing something with them while they're in custody to try to increase the odds they're not going to reoffend and create new victims?" O'Leary said.

Others would go beyond expanding treatment programs. David Rogers, executive director of the Partnership for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group, recommends that lawmakers increase the amount of time inmates can earn off their sentences beyond the existing 20 percent cap and extend a modest "earned time" benefit to Measure 11 inmates, who now aren't eligible for that benefit.

Oregon Department of Corrections Director Max Williams knows that running a prison system is expensive. "We are a cost center not a profit center," he likes to say.

But Williams argues that cost comparisons between his department and higher education can be misleading because universities and colleges have tuition and other sources of funding while prisons have only taxpayers.

He's impressed by the research of Aos in Washington and Prins and Wilson in Oregon on the diminishing returns of building more prisons. But Williams, a former Republican legislator, said decisions about public safety require more than economic calculations.

When Oregon voters approved Measure 11 in 1994 and reaffirmed that decision in 2000, Williams said, they made a choice about how they want the state to deal with certain crimes and the people who commit them.

"It is about the concept of . . . appropriate punishment, and that's written into our constitution. It's about personal responsibility and accountability."

Sequel to Measure 11

The chief sponsor of Measure 11 is Kevin Mannix, a former legislator and Republican candidate for governor. Mannix, a Salem lawyer, is gathering signatures for another ballot initiative that would expand mandatory minimum sentences from 14 months to 36 months for eight types of drug and property crimes, from selling methamphetamine to burglary.

The state reports that about 3,700 offenders a year were convicted of crimes listed in the Mannix initiative in recent years, and more them half of them were placed on probation. But it's difficult to accurately predict the impact on state prisons. Officials originally forecast that Measure 11 would add far more prisoners to the system than it actually did because analysts didn't foresee that prosecutors would use the leverage of Measure 11 sentences to obtain guilty pleas for lesser crimes carrying shorter sentences.

If it qualifies for the November 2008 ballot, Mannix's initiative will spark renewed debate over the effectiveness of incarceration in fighting crime.

Mannix argues that Measure 11 reduced violent crime, and his new version will do the same for property crime.

"Measure 11 cost money, but it didn't blow the budget," Mannix says. "When it comes to property crimes, my assertion is that the cost of not incarcerating offenders will be more than the cost of incarceration. . . . We all pay it through hidden costs and insurance, and the poor pay the most."

Critics of an incarceration strategy contend that the decline in violent crime cannot so easily be linked to Measure 11. In a 2004 study, Judith A. Greene, an analyst at Justice Strategies in New York, compared what happened in Oregon and New York from 1995 to 2002.

Both states experienced a sharp reduction in violent crime. But New York, unlike Oregon, also cut its incarceration rate. More effective policing tactics instituted under then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani are widely credited with the crime reduction.

The drop in Oregon's violent crime rate during the 1990s cannot be attributed primarily to Measure 11, Greene said in the report. The effect of the longer sentences would not be felt until years later, after inmates remained in prison beyond their likely release date under the old sentencing system.

"Measure 11 has cost Oregon an enormous amount of money," Greene said in an interview. "Here in New York, we're getting equal or better results, and we're saving money. If it were true that incarceration was the cause in Oregon and better policing was the cause in New York, you'd certainly choose better policing. You would choose the one that costs less."

William Spelman, a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, did some of the pioneering research on how states reap diminishing rewards as they build more prisons. He says the effectiveness of an incarceration strategy "depends mostly on who you're putting in that prison bed."

"If you are putting away drug offenders or burglars, it's almost certainly a waste of taxpayer money," Spelman says. "If they're armed robbers, maybe it does make sense."

Edward Walsh: 503-294-4153; edwardwalsh@news.oregonian.com
and Republican candidate for governor. Mannix, a Salem lawyer, is gathering signatures for another ballot initiative that would expand mandatory minimum sentences from 14 months to 36 months for eight types of drug and property crimes, from selling methamphetamine to burglary. The state reports that about 3,700 offenders a year were convicted of crimes listed in the Mannix initiative in recent years, and more them half of them were placed on probation. But it's difficult to accurately predict the impact on state prisons. Officials originally forecast that Measure 11 would add far more prisoners to the system than it actually did because analysts didn't foresee that prosecutors would use the leverage of Measure 11 sentences to obtain guilty pleas for lesser crimes carrying shorter sentences.
If it qualifies for the November 2008 ballot, Mannix's initiative will spark renewed debate over the effectiveness of incarceration in fighting crime. Mannix argues that Measure 11 reduced violent crime, and his new version will do the same for property crime. "Measure 11 cost money, but it didn't blow the budget," Mannix says. "When it comes to property crimes, my assertion is that the cost of not incarcerating offenders will be more than the cost of incarceration. . . . We all pay it through hidden costs and insurance, and the poor pay the most."

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/11770539031703
90.xml&coll=7

Posted by lois at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)

MA: State orders review over prison errors. Causes sought for late release of 14 inmates

State orders review over prison errors
Causes sought for late release of 14 inmates

By Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff | April 23, 2007

The Patrick administration said yesterday it is ordering a sweeping review of state prison operations to make sure errors that led to the wrongful confinement of at least 14 inmates -- one for more than four years -- are corrected and not repeated.

Responding to a Globe Spotlight Team report yesterday about a series of sentence miscalculations, Public Safety Commissioner Kevin M. Burke called the mistakes unacceptable and said the state Department of Correction violated its moral and ethical obligation by not notifying the inmates about the errors.

"None of this is acceptable," Burke said. "There is no reason for any kind of error given the system and the numbers of lawyers who examine these cases. And the governor feels the same way."

Burke said he was puzzled by Correction Commissioner Kathleen M. Dennehy's explanation for why one inmate, Rommel Jones, was not informed that he had been kept four years beyond his lawful sentence. Dennehy said that because Jones had a mental illness, she was concerned that he would not be able to fully understand what had gone wrong. She wanted him to learn of it after the department's lawyer contacted his lawyer.

"The explanation I saw in [the Globe] puzzled me, to say the least," Burke said. "That isn't an explanation as far as I'm concerned. That's not acceptable and the commissioner knows that it's not acceptable."

As the Globe reported last week, the Patrick administration has asked Dennehy to leave her post. She will join the Bristol County sheriff's office next month.

"The commissioner is leaving and we will review the entire situation to make sure that there is no misfeasance involved or someone who needs to be disciplined," Burke said. "There will be a review when a new commissioner comes on board to see what steps need to be taken. . . . I can guarantee you that there will be a fix to that situation."

Jones told the Globe that when he was released from prison last summer, he went to Shattuck Hospital voluntarily.

Dennehy said that while Jones may have ultimately been at Shattuck on his own accord, he had been ordered there by a court -- something she took into account as she weighed how to notify him of the department's error in his sentencing. "I believed that it was morally compromising to advise the inmate in such a state and directed full disclosure be made attorney to attorney," she said in a prepared statement yesterday. That disclosure did not take place, though she said she was assured on two occasions that it had. She said an investigation into the lapse is under way.

Scott Harshbarger, a former attorney general who led a 15-member panel that conducted a top-to-bottom review of the Correction Department after the 2003 prison slaying of pedophile priest John J. Geoghan, said strong management, not another blue-ribbon panel, is what's needed now.

"This is a kind of managerial problem that's simply unacceptable," said Harshbarger, who called himself a supporter of Dennehy. "It's the kind of thing that just undermines the credibility of the administration. It's clearly a significant problem."

Harshbarger quit the prison oversight panel in late 2005, saying that Mitt Romney , governor at the time, had neglected the issue as he was preparing for his run for president.

"I'm hopeful that the next commissioner will be looking to implement common-sense things that we need to be implemented for accountability," Harshbarger said. "This is one that begs for answers. We need strong accountability in the DOC."

Legislative leaders have examined the operations of the state prison systems, called for hearings into the sentencing errors, and renewed their bid for an independent board to oversee the Department of Correction.

"How do you compensate somebody for time served beyond their sentence?" asked state Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat and chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. "How do you repay lost days of a life? You can't put a price on what is unjust and morally repugnant. It's extraordinarily upsetting."

Barrios said the mistakes warrant a full airing before a legislative committee, and he said he would confer with his colleagues this week about how best to make that happen.

"It is not just appropriate as a matter of policy but, indeed, morally required of us to ask these questions as to why these policies continue to be applied."

State Representative Kay Khan, a Newton Democrat who has worked on correction issues for 12 years, said the Spotlight Team report underscored what she called a history of "bureaucratic and administrative incompetence" dating to the dawn of the Weld administration.

She said the $12.2 million Inmate Management System, which went on line in 2004, should be capable of calculating prisoners' sentence s accurately. Dennehy said many of the more complicated sentences need to be manually reviewed.

"It seems to me that [$12.2 million] would be an adequate amount of funding to allow the system to keep a close eye on what they're doing. My question is: Why isn't it working?" said Khan, who also called for hearings on the issue. "You've got a 10,000 [person] prison population and the public deserves to know what's going on in this system."

State Representative Ruth B. Balser, the House chair of the Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse, said she, too, was troubled that Jones learned of his late release from a reporter six months after it occurred .

"It's an outrageous insult to the mentally ill," Balser said. "He has a mental illness. It doesn't mean he's not intelligent. It's the worst kind of stigma that somehow because he was mentally ill he had somehow lost his rights."

Dennehy said last week that if the Globe had not discovered the mistake that robbed Jones of four years , he still would not know about it.

The other 13 inmates held too long also were not alerted. Letters went out to them Friday after the Globe's inquiries.

Jones is scheduled to meet with James R. Pingeon , director of litigation for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, today to discuss potential legal action against the state.

"The DOC's failure to apologize to Mr. Jones for the mistakes that cost him four years of his life, or even to tell him about the mistakes, shows the hypocrisy of what DOC professes are its core values: Responsible, Respectful, Honest, Caring," Pingeon said yesterday.

"Instead of taking responsibility for its mistakes, the DOC hoped no one would notice," he said. "Commissioner Dennehy's attempt to justify the cover up by blaming it on Rommel's mental illness shows a troubling lack of basic human decency and suggests that even now she is more interested in protecting DOC's public image than in fixing its own deep-seated, systemic problems."

"We expect a new commissioner to take a fresh look at every aspect of the operation," Burke said.

Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com
Links to the Spotlight article and case documents at the following URL:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/23/state_orders_review_over_prison_errors/

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

April 22, 2007

MA: Correction system 'mess' held inmates past their time. Man imprisoned four years too long

Correction system 'mess' held inmates past their time
Man imprisoned four years too long

By Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff | April 22, 2007

As Rommel Jones sat praying in the middle of his prison cell on a chilly spring evening two years ago, he was certain he heard a soothing voice that carried buoyant news.

You're going home tomorrow, it told him.

After intermittent prison sentences that stretched back into the 1980s, when he was a thief battling drug addiction and mental illness, he was eager to pack up. And when morning broke, he politely greeted his jailers at the medium security prison in Shirley.

"I'm leaving today," he recalls telling them. "My sentence is over."

Instead, Jones was whisked out of his cell and placed on a mental health watch at the adjacent maximum security prison for two weeks.

Jones does sometimes hear voices; he has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. But, in this case, he or the voice inside was absolutely right about the sentence.

He should have been headed home that day in May 2005. His time was up. In fact, it had been up for years.

But in what prison officials now acknowledge is one of the state's "most egregious" cases of wrongful imprisonment, Jones was held until last July, more than four years beyond his rightful sentence.

And Jones was far from the only inmate mistreated in this way.

At least 13 other inmates have been held beyond their release dates, the outgoing correction commissioner, Kathleen M. Dennehy, said after inquiries from the Spotlight Team. One of the 13 was held a year and a half too long.

For the state Department of Correction, already under fire for allegedly shoddy treatment of mentally ill inmates, the errors call into question its ability to perform one its most basic functions, deciding when it is time for the jailhouse door to swing open.

It is a failure that could open the state to costly court claims.

"It's absolutely stunning incompetence," said James R. Pingeon, director of litigation for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, who is scheduled to meet with Jones tomorrow morning to discuss potential legal action against the department.

In the case of Jones and several other inmates, the department did not comply with a court order that modifies some sentences for time spent on parole. In other cases, the department relied on a sometimes-faulty computer system that tracks time served, credits for good behavior and other factors that go into sentencing or simply botched the math.

The failures were compounded by something like indifference.

When the Spotlight Team first confronted department officials earlier this year about the error that robbed Jones of four years of freedom, they called it a bookkeeping anomaly that had little or no practical effect on his quality of life.

They have since retreated from that position and acknowledged a more basic ethical lapse. Department officials never told Jones of their error, even after he was belatedly released July 5. He only learned of it months later from a Globe reporter.

The other inmates held too long were also kept in the dark.

Dennehy said her expectation had been that a department lawyer would inform Jones, through his lawyer, at the time of his release. Dennehy said she believed that Jones's mental illness would have made it impossible for him to fully grasp what had gone wrong.

Trying to make him understand might even have been unkind, she said. "I think we could be criticized for explaining this to someone . . . with the history of mental illness that this individual has."

But Jones understands what was done to him, and grieves how much he lost.

In the four years he was mistakenly detained, Jones missed his mother's wake, lost contact with his teenage daughter, and endured the daily perils of life behind bars. where his mental illness meant a ping-pong existence between life in a prison cell and the psychiatric wards of Bridgewater State Hospital.

"She doesn't know me," Jones said softly over a recent lunch at the Prudential Center, referring to Dennehy. "She's saying they made a decision not even to say anything because they didn't think that I would be intelligent enough to understand. That's horrible. That's one of the saddest excuses that I've ever heard. All she had to do is just try me. I'm more intelligent than they know."

Teen hoodlum
As a teenager, Rommel Jones beat people up and stole their wallets. He was, he now ruefully concedes, a hoodlum.

Growing up in Dorchester, he dropped out of school after the 10th grade -- he later earned his GED -- and was often high on crack cocaine, smoking $200 worth a day and drinking heavily.

Along Newbury Street, he hustled for cash to feed his habit, strictly obeying his personal dictum to never hector women.

"Rippin', robbin', runnin'," he explained. "Then I just got strung out, you know?"

He was first arrested as a 17-year-old for shoplifting and, a year later, was sentenced to jail for assaulting a man and stealing his wallet. It contained $13.

Now, at 40, Jones does not diminish the seriousness of his offenses. Behind his stern visage is a soft-spoken man on the edge of middle age who seems content to sit in his room listening to soft rock, sipping afternoon coffee, reading his Bible, and anticipating weekend services at church.

Sober for nine years, he said he now accepts that mental illness is part of who he is. "I'm not [saying] that I don't have a mental illness, because I do," he said. Today, with medication to ease his symptoms first diagnosed when he was 19, he is able to live safely outside the rigors of an institution.

Jones's treatment at the hands of the department is not just a glaring example of the agency's administrative shortcomings. His journey through the Massachusetts prison system also offers an instructive glimpse of life inside the walls for the mentally ill, who make up one-quarter of the state's prison population, according to department statistics.

By 1988, Jones was in the custody of the department, which operates the 17 state prisons. Over the next 10 years, he would be paroled three times, once for six years, only to be returned to prison, often for possession of drugs.

In 1995, a mental health clinician declared that his psychosis was in remission. But a year later, in a sign of the episodic nature of his condition, he was on a mental health watch in MCI-Norfolk with no belt, no shoelaces, and no sharp objects allowed.

Jones's condition frequently landed him in Bridgewater State Hospital, a medium-security facility where those charged with or convicted of crimes receive mental health care. Unlike his treatment elsewhere in the system, Jones said, his care at Bridgewater often was very good.

But it was not without incident. He sometimes refused his medication and once had it injected forcibly into his thigh. More than once, he was placed in four-point restraints there. He trashed his room. But, after periods of psychosis, he also improved.

"I'm almost 30 years old, and I'm starting all over again," he said in 1996, according to department medical reports. "I am a good person. I just need to get my act together. I have learned a lot about my illness. All of those years, I had schizophrenia and I never knew how bad."

His medical records, obtained with his permission, are replete with references to Jones's religious fixation, something he called a genuine devotion to the Bible, but which department clinicians, who had chronicled his delusions, took as a clear signal of psychosis. However, there were lengthy periods of lucidity, too.

Throughout the years, it was not unusual for Jones to ask prison officials to check the proper length of his sentence and to make sure he was getting the credits the department allows for stretches of good behavior.

"If you don't write in to get your dates calculated, they beat you out of good time," he explained. "You've got to stay up on it."

And Jones did, always receiving assurances from department officials that they were on top of things.

On May 21, 2002, he saw the Parole Board, which is also supposed to check his time served against the sentence he received, and again received bad news. As usual, his petition was denied.

Ten days later, he was seen by a Bridgewater State Hospital clinician just before 2 p.m. "Mr. Jones reports that he is doing well," the clinician wrote. "He said that his parole was denied but he is doing OK. Reports no side effects from medications. Neatly dressed, pleasant, mood good. . . . Stable on current meds."

If prison officials had been doing their job properly, Jones would have doubtless been doing much better. May 31, 2002, should have been a day of elation for him.

It was the date on which he should have been freed from the care, custody, and control of the state Department of Correction.

Arcane science
Calculating prison sentences -- taking into account time off for good behavior, disciplinary history, and arcane court guidelines -- can be a complex undertaking. Few know that better than Dennehy, who will leave her commissioner's post next month for a job with the Bristol County sheriff's office.

And few people know better than her how dysfunctional the department sentence tracking system had become.

During sworn testimony in 2005, she counted herself among an estimated 12 people in the state who truly understood how the system was supposed to work. "I used to be expert in sentences, used to even train judges and lawyers," she said in an earlier deposition.

Dennehy was testifying in the whistleblower case of Jean Lahousse, a veteran department employee, who complained that she was transferred in retaliation for complaining that sloppy work was keeping inmates locked up after their release dates.

"I think it is fair to call it a mess," Dennehy said of the sentence computation system.

In that case, which Lahousse won, Dennehy said mistakes were well known.

"You can't trust the dates in the system," she said, according to a transcript of her deposition. Sentences "need to be manually verified and, you know, quite frankly some of the biggest horror stories we have [are] when an inmate steps forward and says, 'I have been in this system for 25 years and you have lost 300 days of good time,' which is almost a year."

But none of the mistakes approached the magnitude of the Rommel Jones case. And because the harm was to a notably unsympathetic population, locked-up felons, they drew almost no attention.

Most sentence computations are now done by the department's computer network, the $12.2 million Inmate Management System that went on line in 2004.

The system mostly works well, said Carol Mici, the department's director of classification, though it must be regularly updated to deal with difficult cases.

David Slade, the department's sentencing counsel, called late releases "sufficiently rare" and said that in his 18 years of sentencing work for the prison system he could not recall a single instance in which a prisoner had successfully sued the department for being held too long.

Further, department officials maintained in January, even if they had made a mistake with Jones, the real-world effect on his life was negligible. He was at Bridgewater and even if he had been released on time, they said, he would have remained there on civil court order even after his prison sentence ended.

But Jones and his lawyer say that is little more than department spin and simply untrue.

"They would have sent me to the [Shattuck] Hospital the next week, and I would have been on the street," Jones said. "Because if my commitment ends, they can't hold me. When my sentence is over, they can't hold me no more. They've got to let me go."

And when the department finally discovered its error last summer, that is precisely what happened.

As his release date, the erroneous one, finally approached early last summer, Rommel Jones checked in with officials at Bridgewater State Hospital to make sure his paperwork was in order.

"I spoke to the [staff member] at Bridgewater and I said to her: 'You know, I should be wrapping soon. Can you check the records and calculate my good time for me?' " He recalled her reply: Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it. Don't keep coming to me with this nonsense. "So I left her alone," Jones said.

And things appeared to be running smoothly. In fact, Jones got what he thought was an unusual prison parting gift: Officials said they had checked his dates and told him that they had made a tiny error. He should have been released the previous week, they told him. It was time to leave.

Jones packed up his belongings, and at midmorning on July 5, 2006, he boarded a department van that took him to Shattuck Hospital, where, as a voluntary admission, he began to prepare for his life after prison with the help of the state Department of Mental Health.

"I don't want to live off the state," he told Bridgewater officials before he left. "I want to work and take care of my daughter."

What Jones did not learn until the Globe contacted him in January was that the extra week in prison had actually been an extra four years.

How could such an error have been made?

Jones went to prison on consecutive sentences, a 20-year term to be followed by another 10-year sentence. What prison officials missed was the effect of a 1995 court decision that said that when an inmate is out on parole, the two sentences must run concurrently.

"Consecutive sentences turn into concurrent sentences when you are on parole," said Pingeon, the MCLS litigation director. "And Rommel got paroled. He got paroled three times."

One of those stints on parole lasted nearly six years, a period that proved critical to his sentence miscalculation.

In a later interview, Mici, the classification director, acknowledged that the consequences of the court decision were beyond the capability of the prison's computer system. The calculation had to be done by hand. But the department missed it.

"A mistake was made," said Dennehy. "And as soon as it was made, it was corrected."

But no one bothered to tell Jones.

"I'd call this unlawful false imprisonment that was the result of gross incompetence and deliberate indifference," Pingeon said.

He represented the inmate, Stephen Crooker, who brought the case leading to the 1995 ruling that now governs sentence calculations such as Jones's. Each time an inmate moves from institution to institution or appears before the Parole Board, Pingeon said, the sentence dates are supposed to be reviewed.

"Multiple people in the Department of Correction who should have been familiar with the Crooker decision were not," said Pingeon. "That's scary, because of the consequences not just to Rommel Jones, but to other people. If they don't understand Crooker, it makes you wonder what else they don't understand."

There have been more mistakes, in fact, than the department was willing to concede at first.

Prison officials said they had reviewed their records to make sure other inmates were not similarly affected. In February, Mici said a review had uncovered 25 inmates affected by the court decision, none of whom had been held beyond their sentence wrap-up date.

But after the Globe's initial inquiries, the DOC did a more extensive examination. And last week it acknowledged that 13 more inmates in the last four years were affected by what Dennehy called "out and out errors that resulted in people who should have been released to the street not being released to the street."

In those cases, the length of time of the wrongful confinement ranges from one day to 34 days, from 101 days to 515.

Four of the 13 were held because of the same miscalculation that kept Rommel Jones behind bars four years too long.

In a letter faxed to the Globe on Thursday, the department said notices about the sentence miscalculations were being mailed to the affected inmates. Those letters, which went out Friday, will offer inmates a meeting with the department to discuss the error. They also will include the telephone number of a department lawyer, "should the inmate's attorney wish to discuss the implications" of the mistake.

Dennehy, in a memo last week to her boss, Public Safety Secretary Kevin M. Burke, said the department's technology staff is studying how to avoid similar errors in the future.

She said the department has held four training sessions to make sure similar mistakes are avoided, and she rejected any suggestion that the problem is systemic. "It's your worst nightmare to have a late release," she said.

When asked whether Jones would have been told about his late release if the Globe had not confronted the department about it, she replied: "He would not know it."

Eyeing settlement
In early February, Nancy Ankers White, the department's general counsel, sent a message to Rommel Jones through the Committee for Public Counsel Services. When the letter finally reached Jones at Shattuck Hospital more than a month later, he was not sure what to make of its dense legalese.

"Should Mr. Jones choose to pursue any legal avenues he may have, please be advised that the Department of Correction is open to discussing the matter further with you," White's letter read.

It held the prospect, as yet unfulfilled, of an apology. Jones read it and stashed it away.

Pingeon said he will discuss with Jones tomorrow his legal alternatives. State law imposes a $100,000 cap on damages as a result of negligence by state officials, he said, but if a court determines that Jones had been falsely imprisoned, that cap does not apply. The department said Friday it did not intentionally hold Jones past his time and that the cap should apply.

For his part, Jones has no calculus by which to measure what the state has taken from him.

He wishes he could have been with his mother in her final days. He wishes he could have had the chance to watch his daughter grow up.

"My daughter doesn't even talk to me any more," he said. "We used to write each other like once or twice a week. She just got tired of praying and waiting -- nothing happening."

Still, he is reconnecting with the family he lost touch with while in prison. He is touch with his father and occasionally visits his only sibling, an older brother.

For now, Jones is savoring the little things that a year ago would have been treasures.

"Just freedom," he said last winter. "I haven't been able to really get out there and live yet. I need to get my own space. I want a single room. For the last eight or nine years, I've been sharing a room with people."

That changed a month ago when he moved into a group home in Mattapan. He has his own dresser, a nightstand, a bed to call his own.

"It's nice. It's small. It's quaint. It's all right," he said, smiling into a late-afternoon sun in the home's second-floor living room. "I just want to get a vehicle, get an apartment, get a job, get a bank account."

He said a settlement with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts might help him accomplish those things.

But if there is one thing Rommel Jones learned from the state, it is how to be patient. For now he's finding solace in his Bible and taking things day by day.

"I don't feel lucky at all," he said. "I'm just glad that it's over. I'm ready to move on with my life."

Spotlight team members Michael Rezendes, Francie Latour and Beth Healy contributed. Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com. The Spotlight Team can be reached at spotlight@globe.com or at 617-929-7483.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/22/correction_system_mess_held_inmates_past_their_time/

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

April 21, 2007

Bard College Program: Maximum Security Education

60 Minutes
Maximum Security Education
April 15, 2007(CBS) The United States is good at getting criminals into prison: we have over two million people incarcerated right now, more than any other Western country. But what we're not good at is keeping them out once they've served their time—half of all ex-cons end up right back in the penitentiary.

No one doubts that one of the best ways to rehabilitate criminals is through educating them while they're in prison, but who wants to pay for prisoners to go to college when most people have trouble coughing up money for their own kids' education?

Correspondent Bob Simon found one college that does. Bard, an elite private college is offering true liberal arts degrees to some inmates in New York state. It's not what you’d imagine goes on behind the bars of a maximum security prison. And by the way, the program doesn't cost taxpayers a dime.

It looks and sounds like an ordinary college graduation ceremony: there are caps and gowns, the handing out of diplomas. But a group of men receiving their degrees from Bard College will not be leaving to go out and make their mark on the world—they are inmates at the Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in New York state.

Most prisoners ended up at Eastern Correctional Facility by committing violent crimes, like assault, rape, and murder, with sentences ranging from seven years to life. It’s not the type of place you'd expect to walk into and find the inmates studying 18th century European history.

The Bard College program, which is privately funded, has been in this prison for six years and the academics are tough. One inmate tells Simon he and other inmates study five or six hours a day, outside of class, to make the grade.

The classes they take change each semester but what they have in common is that they're not practical courses—they’re true liberal arts courses, like English, sociology, philosophy, and German.

Salih Israel pushed for a German course because, he says, he wanted to be able to read German philosophers in their original language. "I mean, you’ve got Hegel, you have Marx, you have Kant. A lot of those prevailing ideas – they’re in German," he explains.

Salih Israel, by the way, is serving 20 to 40 years for shooting a woman in the course of a robbery.

"What do you say to somebody who says you should be learning a trade, some vocational training, instead of all this philosophy?" Simon asks inmate Joe Bergamini.

"Well, a vocational training will teach you how to do something, to have a job, but it doesn’t teach you how to think, and I think that’s the problem a lot of men in prison have is that they’re not thinking, they’re reacting. And a vocational program might give you the skills, to have a job, but it’s not gonna give you skills to have a life," says Bergamini, who is in prison for killing his own mother 16 years ago.

Reshawn Hughes shot and killed a man the following year. He was far from being college material. Before he was incarcerated, Hughes admits he had never read a book. Now, he says he hopes to continue his education until he gets his Ph.D.

Wes Caines has already served 17 years for taking part in a shootout in which one man died and another was seriously injured.

He knows how lucky he is to be getting an elite education from Bard. "They made an investment in people that society had written off and people who even today feel that we shouldn’t have this opportunity," Caines tells Simon.

Not every prisoner gets the opportunity; only about 10 percent of the inmates who apply to the college program are accepted. Prison life can be so routine and depressing, it's no wonder that these men jump at the chance to escape with their minds, if not with their bodies.

Travis Darshan dropped out of school when he was 14. When he was 17, he was arrested with two friends for robbing and killing a taxi driver.

Darshan never dreamed he'd get a college education. Asked how he felt when he got in, Darshan tells Simon, "Oh, I was elated. I was elated. It was, it was almost like they told me I was going home. … I really was. I felt like it was a new chapter in my life that it gave me a chance to start over."

"To these people locked up, this is just a psychological lifesaver. A string of hope even if their release is 10, 15, 20 years out," says Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, a liberal arts college located about an hour from the prison but in every other sense worlds away.

The majority of students at Bard are white and privileged, like Max Kenner, who came up with the idea of the Bard prison program when he was a student in the 1990s. He had been volunteering in prisons and knew the inmates were hungry for an education, but few opportunities were available to them.

"I did not encounter one single superintendent who wasn’t enthusiastic about the possibility of starting a college within that prison," says Kenner, who visited numerous prisons.

Asked if it is hard to get professors to teach in the program, Kenner tells Simon, "No one has once taught for us and not wanted to do it again."

Professor Tabetha Ewing teaches European history at Bard College, and last fall she also started teaching the same European history course to the prisoners.

How did she feel when she found herself in a room with prisoners and no guard?

"As soon as we shut the door and we began working, it was the most amazing experience," Ewing says. "We had an immediate rapport. And they took themselves and the work so seriously that I didn’t have a moment to consider the absence of a guard."

"Did you have to make the course easier for the prisoners than you did for the students at Bard?" Simon asks.

"Once I was there three weeks, I just made it harder," she says. Ewing had to make the course harder, she told Simon, because the inmates studied harder.

The student-inmates have a room where they can study if they have free time during the day. Computers there, by the way, do not have Internet access. But much of their studying is done at night in their cells, surrounded by a constant din.

It may be hard to feel sympathy for criminals. It’s also hard to get studying done here.

Travis Darshan acknowledges his cell does not make for an ideal study situation, but he says he manages by trying to block the noise out. "And when I begin to read, I try to focus in on my studies. And you kind of go into another world," he says. "You know, instead of hearing that noise, you just block it out. The distractions aren’t available when your mind is centered on what you’re reading."

Asked how the prisoners have surprised him, Bard College president Botstein says, "The most amazing thing, I have to say, the most shocking and absolutely unbelievable thing is that it takes radical incarceration, the loss of all hope to engender a genuine love of learning."

The Bard prison program isn't just at Eastern Correctional Facility—it is in four prisons in New York state and has about 120 students overall. Higher education in penitentiaries used to be common, but in 1994 Congress eliminated federal funding for prisoners to go to college and many programs folded. The issue was: why give free college educations to convicts when so many students who haven’t committed crimes can’t afford it?

"It's a fair argument but we treat inmates for medical reasons, we treat inmates for drug addiction, why aren’t we treating inmates for educational needs?" says Commissioner Brian Fisher, the head of corrections for New York state.

Fisher says every study he's read shows that inmates given a college education are less likely to commit crimes once they are released. "Education changes people. And I think that’s what prisons should do. Change somebody from one way of thinking to a different way of thinking," he says.

"It's a very liberal view of incarceration," Simon remarks.

"I don’t think so. I think it’s the logical view of incarceration. Going to prison is the punishment. Once in prison, it’s our obligation to make them better than they were," Fisher explains.

And, he told 60 Minutes, inmates in college programs are easier for the prison system to manage. They tend not to stir up trouble by fighting and arguing, although when Simon and the team ran into a group of inmates in the prison yard, they were arguing about Rousseau and Machiavelli.

Listening to them talk, one could easily have been in a college quad rather than a prison yard. They spend their free time like so many undergraduates, exercising their intellectual muscles, debating century-old notions of ethics, morality and philosophy.

Wes Caines, like most of these men, has children. He says his daughters were his inspiration to go to college. "I really wanted them to have a father figure who, when they looked at their father, he’s more than prison, he’s more than a prisoner. So everything I’ve done has been in an effort to be someone that they can be proud of," he explains.

And he wanted to show them that if he could study hard, they could, too.

Asked if they're pursuing their education, Caines tells Simon, "Absolutely. My daughter just recently got accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, and that was, I've got to tell you, that was the best feeling in the world."

Remember Reshawn Hughes, who had never read a book before being incarcerated? He’s not at Eastern Correctional Facility, the maximum security prison, anymore. He was transferred to a medium security penitentiary where he has a lot more freedom to roam around. There are no cells there; the men live in dormitories. But there are also no college programs.

"I’m sure 99 out of 100 prisoners would rather be here than at Eastern. How, this is a much easier, freer atmosphere," Simon asks.

"Depends on how you determine, define freedom. While at Bard, I learned that freedom was something much different than just a physicality, a space of physical existence. Freedom had a lot do with your ability to think. Freedom had a lot to do with your ability to communicate with others. To see the world in a different view," Hughes tells Simon.

"If you had a choice, would you go back to that maximum security prison at Eastern tomorrow if you could?" Simon asks.

"I would go right after this interview. If they packed me up, tell me, 'Let’s go.' I would go right now, just to continue my education. Yes I would. I miss the Bard program tremendously," Hughes says.

He also missed seeing some of his fellow student inmates graduate this year. Most of them hope to continue their studies in prison toward more advanced degrees. There’s no longer a lot of public opposition to college prison programs, but there’s little government funding either, and private programs like Bard’s are few and far between.

"Today we stand before you strong with hope, we stand before you strong with education, and we stand before you strong with a new sense of life, liberty and happiness that has transformed us from inmates of a prison to students of the world," says Travis Darshan.

A world, which because of their crimes, they won’t be seeing for many years.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/15/60minutes/main2685164.shtml

Posted by lois at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

U.S. Erects Baghdad Wall to Keep Sects Apart

April 21, 2007, NY Times
U.S. Erects Baghdad Wall to Keep Sects Apart
By EDWARD WONG and DAVID S. CLOUD
BAGHDAD, April 20 — American military commanders in Baghdad are trying a radical new strategy to quell the widening sectarian violence by building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods.
Soldiers in the Adhamiya district of northern Baghdad, a Sunni Arab stronghold, began construction of the wall last week and expect to finish it within a month. Iraqi Army soldiers would then control movement through a few checkpoints. The wall has already drawn intense criticism from residents of the neighborhood, who say that it will increase sectarian tensions and that it is part of a plan by the Shiite-led Iraqi government to box in the minority Sunnis.

A doctor in Adhamiya, Abu Hassan, said the wall would transform the residents into caged animals.
“It’s unbelievable that they treat us in such an inhumane manner,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re trying to isolate us from other parts of Baghdad. The hatred will be much greater between the two sects.”
“The Native Americans were treated better than us,” he added.
The American military said in a written statement that “the wall is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.”
As soldiers pushed forward with the construction, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates insisted to the Iraqi government that it had to pass by late summer a series of measures long sought by the White House that were aimed at advancing reconciliation between the warring Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs.
Whether Parliament meets that benchmark could affect a decision that the Bush administration plans to make in late summer on extending the nearly 30,000 additional troops ordered to Iraq earlier this year, Mr. Gates said.
His words were the bluntest yet by an American official in tying the American military commitment here to the Iraqi political process. It reflected a growing frustration among Bush administration officials at Iraq’s failure to move on the political elements of the new strategy. President Bush’s new security plan here is aimed at buying time for the feuding Iraqi factions to come to political settlements that would, in theory, reduce the violence.
In recent weeks, Democrats in Congress have been intensifying pressure on the president, through negotiations on financing for the war, to set political deadlines for the Iraqis and tie them to the withdrawal of American troops.
Speaking to reporters after talks with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Mr. Gates urged Parliament not to adjourn for a planned summer recess without passing legislation on sharing oil revenues, easing the purges of former Baath Party members from government positions and setting a date for provincial elections.
“Our commitment to Iraq is long term, but it is not a commitment to have our young men and women patrolling Iraq’s streets open-endedly,” he said, adding that he told Mr. Maliki that “progress in reconciliation will be an important element of our evaluation in the late summer.”
This is not the first time the Bush administration has set a timetable for Iraq to pass the reconciliation measures. Late last year, the White House gave the Iraqi government a goal of March to pass the legislation. March came and went, and senior administration officials shrugged off the missed target, saying it was counterproductive to press the Iraqis on the issue.
Mr. Gates’s demand, with its strong hint of conditions attached, could force the Bush administration into a corner.
If progress on the reconciliation measures proves impossible before the target date, as many Iraqi politicians say they believe, American officials will have to decide whether to follow through with the veiled threat. American military commanders have already indicated privately that it may be necessary to extend the troop reinforcements because the time between now and August is not be long enough for the new strategy to work.
A senior White House official in Washington said that Mr. Gates had not threatened to remove American troops if Mr. Maliki cannot act by midsummer. Instead, the official argued, “He simply said what everyone has said, which is that the process of political accommodation has to speed up.”
President Bush spoke with Mr. Maliki in a secure video conference on Monday morning and also emphasized the need to pass the legislation, aides said.
Mr. Maliki’s office issued a statement on Friday saying that the prime minister was confident that steps toward reconciliation could be achieved this year.
Mr. Gates delivered his message at the end of a week of major political turmoil and security setbacks for Mr. Maliki’s government. Mr. Maliki’s strongest political supporter, the firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, withdrew his six ministers from the cabinet. Car bombs in Baghdad killed at least 171 people on Wednesday, puncturing Iraqi confidence in the security plan.
Ceaseless violence is what led American commanders in Adhamiya to build a wall to break contact between Sunnis and Shiites. It is the first time the Americans have tried a project of that scope in Baghdad. The soldiers jokingly call it “The Great Wall of Adhamiya,” according to military officials.
Commanders have sealed off a few other neighborhoods into what they call “gated communities,” but not with a lengthy wall. In the earlier efforts, American and Iraqi soldiers placed concrete barriers blocking off roads leading into the neighborhoods and left open one or more avenues of egress where people and vehicles were searched.
Soldiers did that to a degree in the volatile district of Dora during a security push there last summer. More recently, American and Iraqi Army units have closed off almost all roads into the western Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Amiriya and Daoudi. Residents of Amiriya say violence dropped when the roads were first blocked off late last year, but has gradually increased again.
Adhamiya is different, because it involves the building of a three-mile wall along streets on its eastern flank. It consists of a series of concrete barriers, each weighing 14,000 pounds, that have been transported down to Baghdad in flatbed trucks from Camp Taji, north of the city. Soldiers are using cranes to put the barriers in place.
Once the wall is complete, Iraqi Army soldiers will operate entry and exit checkpoints, Capt. Marc Sanborn, a brigade engineer for the Second Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, said in a news release on the project issued this week by the American military.
The wall “is on a fault line of Sunni and Shia, and the idea is to curb some of the self-sustaining violence by controlling who has access to the neighborhoods,” Captain Sanborn said.
Adhamiya has been rife with violence throughout the war. It is a stalwart Sunni Arab neighborhood, home to the hard-line Abu Hanifa mosque, and the last place where Saddam Hussein made a public appearance before he went into hiding in 2003. Shiite militiamen from Sadr City and other Shiite enclaves to the east often attack its residents, and Sunni insurgent groups battle there among themselves.
“Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street,” Capt. Scott McLearn, an operations officer in the area, said in a written statement.
Abu Hassan, the doctor in Adhamiya, said his neighborhood “is a small area.”
“The Americans and Iraqi government should be able to control it” without building a wall, he said.
Many Sunnis across Baghdad complain that the Shiite-led government has choked off basic services to their neighborhoods, allowing trash to pile up in the streets, banks to shut down and health clinics to languish. So the wall raises fears of further isolation.
A spokesman for the American military, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said at a news conference on Wednesday that the military did not have a policy of sealing off neighborhoods.
The American military has tried sealing off entire cities during the war. The most famous example is Falluja, in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar Province, where marines began operating checkpoints on all main roads into and out of the city after laying siege to it in late 2004.
On Friday, a child was killed and nine people were wounded in a mortar attack in Baghdad, and 19 bodies were found across the capital. Hospital officials in Mosul said they were treating 130 Iraqi Army trainees suffering from stomach illness, in a possible case of mass poisoning at a training center north of the city.
An American soldier was killed and two wounded in a rocket attack on a base in Mahmudiya on Thursday night, the military said.
Sahar Nageeb and Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad, and David E. Sanger from Washington.

//www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/world/middleeast/21iraq.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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

IL; Bill would restrict sex offenders at the polls

Please go to this URL for comments in response to this Bill which are NOT in support of this legislation.

http://www.sj-r.com/sections/news/stories/112656.asp

Bill would restrict sex offenders at the polls
By LAURA CAMPER
STATE CAPITOL BUREAU

Published Friday, April 20, 2007

Child sex offenders would be banned from voting in polling places in schools under a bill passed by the Illinois House Thursday.

House Bill 263, which sailed through on a vote of 110-3, would require a child sex offender to vote early or by absentee ballot. The current election code allows the offender on school grounds to vote, though they cannot go there otherwise.

Rep. JoAnn Osmond, R-Antioch, said she had sponsored an earlier bill that would have closed the schools on Election Day, but it was defeated in committee. Rep. Roger Eddy, R- Hutsonville, a co-sponsor of HB 263, brought the legislation to her, Osmond said.

"We were both looking at the same concept of how not to have any child sex offender in the school area at all," Osmond said. "I feel this was a good way of doing it by not denying him or her the right to vote, but giving specific parameters where (the sex offender) should go to vote."

Rep. Careen Gordon, D-Coal City, who voted against the bill, questioned its constitutionality.

"It would be the only group of people that we would single out in this state to restrict where they are allowed to vote," Gordon said.

"The right to vote is a constitutional right," she added. "It's something we hold very, very dear, and when you decide to pick out a group, as horrible as they may be - and I am the first in line to vote for stronger laws on sex offenders as a former prosecutor - but we end up on a slippery slope."

Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, offered a similar sentiment.

"It's hard for me to believe that we have to undermine the right to vote in this instance without really taking into account that there might be other steps we could take," Yohnka said.

A similar bill passed the Illinois Senate on March 29 by a vote of 57-0.

Senate Bill 417 would ban everyone subject to the Sex Offenders Registration Act from voting in schools and libraries. The legislation also requires the Illinois State Police to provide each election authority a list of registered sex offenders within their jurisdiction, who would in turn give a list to each election judge.

Yohnka said the ACLU opposes both bills.

"It's curious as to why suddenly there's an issue with sex offenders, as opposed to really providing safety and security in the school," he said.

Gordon agreed.

"The reason why we keep them out is because of the offenses that they've committed," she said. "If they are going there to vote, it's a completely separate situation. Even a regular person can't randomly walk around a school on Election Day."

The State Board of Elections is neutral on the bill, said Cris Cray, director of legislation for the agency.

"This has been a really hot topic for the last three years," Cray said. "We've had a lot of legislation dealing with sex offenders and voting."

She said the board is still analyzing the bills.

Posted by lois at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

VT: Officials try to solve 'unsustainable' prison costs

Rutland Herald, Rutland, VT

Officials try to solve 'unsustainable' prison costs
April 20, 2007

By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau

MONTPELIER ‹ The problem has been clear for years. The number of Vermonters in custody or under supervision of the state's corrections system has been growing at a rapid rate, causing prison overcrowding and an expense the state will have trouble supporting, according to officials.

While changes have been made to try and address the issue, the results have been slow in coming, frustrating lawmakers and officials.

At a meeting Thursday, leaders of the judicial, executive and legislative branches of state government reaffirmed their commitment to do something about the problem. And they enlisted the help of the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan policy research organization that has helped other states in that effort.

"Costs continue to rise at very rapid rates," Gov. James Douglas said. "There is clearly more we need to do."

Some changes to state law in recent years are promising, although it may be some time before their full impact is felt, said Sen. Richard Sears, D-Bennington, chairman of the judiciary committee.

For instance, one problem has been offenders being returned to prison for violating requirements of their release, but not committing new crimes. So the state has put in place "graduated sanctions" or variable punishments that stop short of prison for some offenders.

And limiting how long nonviolent offenders are on probation has helped lower the number of released offenders in that system by roughly 2,000.

But implementing other recommendations of study groups has been tougher. The state is ready to build another work camp to house low-risk offenders, but has had trouble finding a town willing to host such a facility.

"We are working on citing the second work camp," Douglas said. "It has been more challenging than we anticipated."

It is also difficult to build housing for former inmates, and some offenders remain in prison because they have nowhere to go on the outside.

Although a study recommended putting 400 offenders under electronic surveillance, freeing up prison space, only about 30 are in the program, Sears said. The Legislature had approved 100 such slots.

The number of people in Vermont prisons, or being shipped to private out-of-state facilities at state expense, continues to grow and the corrections budget is expected to be roughly $128 million this year. That is significantly more than the state spends on higher education.

In 10 years, the state's incarceration rate has increased 73 percent, while violent crime has increased 2 percent. Property crimes have dropped 31 percent, said Michael Thompson, director of the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments.

Meanwhile, the national incarceration rate went up only 19 percent, he added.

There are now more than 2,000 offenders incarcerated in Vermont's corrections system.

But there are also hopeful signs, officials said. For one thing, Vermont's extremely low crime rate results in a low incarceration rate overall. Something needs to be done, said Rep. William Lippert, D-Hinesburg, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, "It's frankly unsustainable in terms of the cost to state government," he said.

But Lippert added that he is hopeful that with the commitment of the leaders at Thursday's meeting the Justice Center can help Vermont reverse the trend of prison population as Connecticut did.

"We have been caught between two pressures," Lippert said. "One of which is to get tough on crime."

He said that is not necessarily a bad thing, for instance in the case of strengthening drunk driving laws and domestic violence awareness.

"Simultaneously we have the pressure of growing costs," Lippert said. Other states, including Connecticut, have discovered that public safety can be improved while fewer people are put in prison, Lippert said.

For instance, Thompson's research shows there may not be a correlation between incarceration rates and improved public safety, Lippert said. The very fact that many Vermont offenders are housed out of state could be helpful, Thompson said.

That is because lowering the prison population in states that use local facilities can take time to save money because more prisons already exist. In Vermont, a lower population of inmates would mean almost immediate savings.

"There is an interesting opportunity it presents," Thompson said. "For every bed out of state you save, it is instant cash back into the coffers."

President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, said another place the state should examine is how it deals with nonviolent offenders.

"Vermont has an unusually low number of criminal offenders behind bars and a high number of substance abusers, folks who need mental health services and young men who had difficulty learning to read," he said. "We are not talking about serial killers and rapists."

"I find it extremely disappointing we haven't made more progress," Shumlin said.

Matthew Valerio, the state's defender general, said it is a hopeful sign that the governor, legislative leaders, three justices of the Vermont Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Paul Reiber, and many corrections and law enforcement officials attended the meeting Thursday.

"This can be an important help if we can get some momentum for change," he said.

The state has already started ‹ and will do more, said Speaker of the House Gaye Symington, D-Jericho.

"We have done solid work in Vermont," she said. "There is some traction here for building on what we have done."

At the same time, few involved in the process are under any illusion about the difficultly of making changes needed to lower the prison population. Commissioner of Corrections Robert Hofmann said all three branches of state government, as well as local municipalities and law enforcement officials and others have to work together to make those changes.

"It's like juggling flaming Rubik's Cubes," Hofmann said.
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070420/NEWS03/7042
00348/1004/NEWS03

Posted by lois at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2007

The story of John Valverde: The Politics of Incarceration

04.18.2007
The Politics of Incarceration
By Anthony Papa
READ MORE: New York, George Pataki
Former Governor George Pataki's legacy of not freeing rehabilitated violent offenders is alive and well in New York State. Today thousands of parole petitioners are ready to return to society as productive citizens but remain stuck in prison because of the politics of incarceration.
This unwritten policy persists in spite of newly installed Governor Elliot Spitzer's attempt to correct the criminal justice sector, as evidenced by his recent calls to remove the exorbitant charges on collect calls.

Statistically it is a not-so-well-known fact that offenders that commit crimes such as murder are actually less likely to return to jail than nonviolent offenders. Nevertheless, after completing their sentences and coming to terms with their crimes, they are still wasting away in New York State gulags. Time and again the parole board fails to weigh all of the relevant statutory factors together with the prisoner's positive accomplishments and productive behavior while incarcerated. Instead, the parole board focuses almost entirely on the nature of the petitioner's crime.
A case in point is the story of John Valverde, a 36-year-old Queens man who recently was denied parole for his third consecutive time. He has already served 15 years of a 10- to 30-year sentence for ending the life of a freelance photographer, Joel Schoenfeld, a 47-year-old West Village photographer with a history of enticing young female models to his studio and sexually assaulting them. In 1991, Schoenfeld raped his 19-year-old model girlfriend. After unsuccessfully seeking help from the police - powerless to act without the brutalized and traumatized victim coming forward - John Valverde, then a 21-year-old student, confronted Schoenfeld. The ensuing argument turned violent and John shot and killed Schoenfeld. The single bullet fired that night changed not only John's life forever but also that of his family. His mother, brother and sister have fought endlessly to free John and themselves from the nightmare of his continuing ordeal behind bars.
John regrets the act he committed ending the life of an individual who took the honor away his former girlfriend many years ago. I know this because I was with John during his time of remorsefulness at Sing Sing prison when I was serving a 15-to-life sentence under the Rockefeller Drug Laws. In 1995, we both graduated from the New York Theological Seminary. Despite the negative environment that surrounded him, John managed to transcend the prison experience by finding purpose in his life through helping others. He taught religion, volunteered as a tutor for men who could not read, and worked with AIDS patients.
The hard time John served in a maximum security prison transformed him from the 21-year-old boy who had made the biggest mistake of his life into a man who now understands the horror of his crime. Apparently all inconsequential in the view of the parole board, which offered the following reasoning in John's case: "The violence displayed in this crime outweighs everything else."
Why are violent offenders, who seem to be ready to return to society, being hit by the parole board on a continuous basis? The answer is simple. Politicians and parole officials are afraid of granting parole to violent prisoners out of fear of falling from grace in the eyes of the public. Recently, the New York Parole Commissioner was demoted from his position by Governor Pataki after causing and uproar with the release a high-profile offender involved in the murder of two upstate police officers.
If we look at the history of why violent offenders are routinely denied parole we can see how it could have evolved out of the cash incentives for new prison construction given by the federal government to states that ended parole for violent offenders in 1994 under the (VOI/TIS) Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This law was devised to give states fiscal incentives to build prisons if they in turn enacted laws that result in violent offenders serving 85% of their sentences. Grants were made available for states to build more prisons coupled with an effective end to parole. From 1996 to 2000, New York State received around $200 million under this Act.
On April 20, family and friends of John Valverde will gather in front of the Albany Supreme Court in New York to rally on John's behalf, and in support of overturning the parole board's latest denial. We are calling on Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who represents the parole board, to look into the totality of facts in this case so John and his family may receive proper judicial relief.
It is time for the parole board to free model prisoners like John Valverde. We cannot minimize the seriousness of the crime he committed but neither can we minimize the tragedy of his plight to regain his freedom. He is just one of many individuals who have paid their debt to society for the crimes they committed but kept in prison because of the "Politics of Incarceration."
Anthony Papa is a communications specialist for the Drug Policy Alliance.

HispanicsAcrossAmerica
For Immediate Release
April 16, 2007
***Media Alert***

Rally to Free John Valverde!!!
Powerful NY Parole Board Refuses To Grant Model Inmate Freedom
Mateo Questions Increasing, Unjustified Denials for Eligible, Deserving Inmates

Fernando Mateo, President of Hispanics Across America, will hold a press conference and rally to call for the release of prisoner John Valverde, a model inmate who has been serving over 14 years behind bars for ending the life of a serial rapist. John’s immediate family, including brother Frank Valverde, as well as numerous friends and supporters will be driving up from New York City to join the rally.

“In the interest of justice, we need to seriously examine New York State’s parole system. We are concerned that John, like so many other inmates, is receiving pre-determined blanket parole denials without a fair and comprehensive hearing. He was a kid with no criminal background who committed a tragic act in a moment of desperate rage. He has given over 14 years of his life to the State in exchange. He has met all the requirements for parole and then some and poses no threat to society. And still, he is behind bars at the cost of taxpayer dollars. The time for this madness to end must be now.”

WHO: Fernando Mateo, President Hispanics Across America
Valverde Family: Frank Valverde (brother), Florence Valverde (mother), Adriana Valverde (sister), Jesenia Valverde (sister)
Numerous Friends, Supporters

WHAT: Rally and Press Conference
(**That morning the Court will be hearing John’s request for judicial review of the Parole Board's most recent denial.**)

WHEN: Friday, April 20th 2007.
Rally Begins at 2pm p.m.

WHERE: In front of the Albany Supreme Court
16 Eagle Street, Albany, NY 12207

WHY: The system of parole was designed with individuals like John in mind. But despite his impeccable record, he has been denied parole three times and will have served 16 years in prison before having another opportunity for parole.

Over the years, thousands of people, including community leaders, former parole board members, and elected officials, have called for John’s parole. The Parole Board has stated that John is not a threat to society and solely rested its most recent denial on the severity of John’s crime - something he can not change.

BACKGROUND on JOHN VALVERDE:

In brief, John a young college student with no criminal history, ended the life of a Manhattan serial rapist known as the “Beast of West Street”. This man had raped John’s girlfriend, in addition to numerous other women. After going to the police on four separate occasions and being told there was nothing they could do, John confronted the offender on his own, and in a moment of rage, shot and killed the rapist.

During the trial, the jury acquitted John of murder, finding that he acted under extreme emotional distress. Instead of murder, John was convicted of manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon. John was sentenced to ten to 30 years in prison.

At the ten year mark, John was eligible for parole, as long as he met all the standards outlined in Executive Law 259-i and displayed remorse, responsibility, redemption and rehabilitation. It seems that few have fulfilled the requirements of the Executive Law in a more exemplary fashion than John.

John has accepted responsibility for his heinous actions and is genuinely remorseful for what he has done. The Parole Board has stated that John is a model inmate. He has an unblemished disciplinary record. In prison, John has earned a paralegal certificate, a Bachelors degree from Mercy College and a Masters degree from the New York Theological Seminary, served as an HIV/AIDS peer counselor and a theology instructor, gained acceptance into CUNY law school twice, and completed numerous training and leadership programs.

John is currently serving at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, the Annex, in Stormville, New York.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-papa/the-politics-of-incarcera_b_46224.html

Posted by lois at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

MO:: Baking Soda Ban Suggested to Control Crack

Baking Soda Ban Suggested to Control Crack
April 19, 2007

A Missouri state lawmaker has proposed banning baking soda from store shelves in order to prevent drug dealers from using it to make crack cocaine, KFVS-TV reported April 9.

Rep. Talibdin El-Amin, a Democrat from St. Louis, is proposing that baking soda only be sold behind the pharmacy counter to prevent crack production, similar to restrictions on cold medications intended to hinder the illicit manufacture of methamphetamine.

"That's maybe going overboard," said Sikeston, Mo., resident Greg Colwick. "I would think baking soda is an item you're just used to picking up. It's convenient to do."

Some pharmacists agree, saying that the law restricting sales of formerly over-the-counter cold medicines has already become a hassle for them.

http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2007/baking-soda-ban-suggested-to.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=32259274

Posted by lois at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

MA: Kathleen Dennehy, State Prison Commissioner Will Not Be Reappointed

Prisons chief Dennehy leaving post

By Ken Maguire, Associated Press Writer | April 18, 2007

BOSTON --Gov. Deval Patrick's administration will not reappoint the state's prison commissioner, Kathleen Dennehy, who rose through the ranks to become the first woman to lead the system.

A source close to the matter confirmed that administration officials told Dennehy she won't be reappointed by Patrick's new public safety secretary, Kevin Burke. The source asked to remain anonymous because the decision has not been announced.

Dennehy, who has led the Department of Correction since being appointed by former Gov. Mitt Romney in December 2003, will begin a new job May 7 as superintendent of security operations for the Bristol County sheriff's office, Sheriff Thomas Hodgson said. Her annual salary will be $110,000, he said.

"She has such a breadth of experience in the field," said Hodgson, who oversees about 1,400 inmates in six jails.

Dennehy and Burke had no comment, according to their spokesmen.

Patrick also declined to comment specifically, but said he'll mostly support the decisions of his top brass.

"I don't discuss personnel issues," he said after a Statehouse news conference. "I have asked each of the secretaries to build a team. They are systematically doing that, looking at people who are incumbent in the job, and looking at people who are outside. They're going to make those decisions and make recommendations to me, and on the whole I'm going to defer to those decisions."

It's common for new administrations to replace incumbent department heads.

"I approached her and told her if the administration looks like it's going to switch gears, to get in touch with me," Hodgson said. "She contacted me and said in fact she would be interested."

Dennehy was named acting commissioner in December 2003 by Romney, who formally appointed her three months later.

She replaced Michael Maloney, who was forced out of office amid mounting criticism after the slaying of pedophile priest John Geoghan in August 2003 at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley.

Dennehy joined the department more than 30 years ago and rose through the ranks, becoming superintendent at MCI-Framingham, the sole facility for women inmates in Massachusetts. She was named deputy commissioner in 1997, when former Gov. William F. Weld selected Maloney over Dennehy for the top post.

Dennehy currently earns between $120,000 and $128,000 a year.

There have been 10 suicides in the state prison system in the past 16 months. The latest was Jarred Aranda, a 27-year-old who was undergoing a psychiatric evaluation at Bridgewater State Hospital. He hung himself in a shower room.

That death was the third suicide in Massachusetts state prisons this year, after seven last year. Those are up from one suicide in 2004 and four in 2005.

A federal lawsuit filed last month claims inmates with mental illnesses get inadequate oversight, contributing to an increase in suicide attempts. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court by the Disability Law Center Inc. claims one-quarter of the 11,000 inmates in the state prison system are mentally ill, and criticizes the DOC for keeping hundreds of inmates in isolation for too long.

The state's inmate suicide rate was about 27 per 100,000 inmates during the 10-year-period that ended in 2006, according to a state-commissioned report issued in February. That was nearly twice the rate nationally, according to data for 2002, the report said.
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/04/18/prisons_chief_dennehy_leaving_post/

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

April 18, 2007

NY: Deal to Provide Some Help Mentally Ill Prisoners

"Gov. Eliot Spitzer and lawmakers set aside more than $50 million for construction of special housing this year and about $2 million more each year to hire staff in the Office of Mental Health staff and Department of Correctional Services. Funds for new Office of Mental Health staffing will grow to $9 million when construction is completed. "Through a considerable investment of state resources in the budget this year, the Spitzer administration has committed to providing significant improvements to the services and housing available for mentally ill inmates," said Christine Pritchard, a Spitzer spokeswoman."

Democrat & Chronicle
Rochester, NY

4/18/07

Deal to help mentally ill prisoners
Those in solitary with psychiatric disabilities to get more treatment

Cara Matthews
Albany bureau

(April 18, 2007) ‹ ALBANY ‹ As advocacy groups announced a lawsuit settlement Tuesday that will grant mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement more treatment, others called on the state to end the practice of isolating prisoners with psychiatric disabilities.

The settlement, which has to be approved by the court, requires that severely mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement, known as the "box," receive at least two hours a day in out-of-cell treatment.

The state will set up residential programs for 405 prisoners with serious mental illness, which are in addition to 310 beds the state made available after litigation began in 2002. Inmates in a 100-bed residential unit, part of the 405 total, will get four hours of out-of-cell programming, in addition to an hour of recreation.

"It's going to make a tremendous difference. Currently, there are people with serious mental illness who are very, very ill in SHU (special housing units), receiving little treatment, and many of those people are discharged directly from those solitary confinement cells to the street," said Cliff Zucker, executive director of Disability Advocates Inc., which brought the lawsuit against the state.

"And, obviously that's not good for the mentally ill individuals, nor is it good for the safety of the general population. So it's in everybody's interest to have good mental-health treatment in the prison system," he said.

Former inmates who spent time in the "box," families, prisoners' rights groups and lawmakers said Tuesday that the settlement and about $54 million included in this year's budget for mentally ill inmates will make conditions better but more improvements are needed.

Keeping people with psychiatric disabilities in isolation units amounts to torture and often exacerbates their illness, they said. They cited cases in which inmates have taken their own lives under those conditions.

Senate Corrections Committee Chairman Michael Nozzolio, R-Fayette, Seneca County, said he would move legislation to ban solitary confinement for people with serious mental illness out of his committee next week. Assembly Corrections Committee Chairman Jeffrion Aubry, D-Queens, is the sponsor in his house. Lawmakers passed the bill last year but former Gov. George Pataki vetoed it.

"We want the prisons in this state to be safer and more humane. That is our bottom line," Nozzolio said.

The legislation calls for giving correction officers training on how to work with severely mentally ill inmates and requires outside oversight of how those prisoners are treated.

"The winds of the budgetary climate change daily so that what may be policy today could be changed tomorrow. If you have in place a statute, that makes it ironclad, at least ... it will be much more permanent," Nozzolio said.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer and lawmakers set aside more than $50 million for construction of special housing this year and about $2 million more each to hire staff in the Office of Mental Health staff and Department of Correctional Services. Funds for new Office of Mental Health staffing will grow to $9 million when construction is completed.

"Through a considerable investment of state resources in the budget this year, the Spitzer administration has committed to providing significant improvements to the services and housing available for mentally ill inmates," said Christine Pritchard, a Spitzer spokeswoman.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070418/NEWS
01/704180355/1002/NEWS

Posted by lois at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Protesters still defiant against T. Don Hutto

Protesters still defiant against T. Don Hutto

By Daniel K. Lai
4/16/07
http://taylordailypress.net/articles/2007/04/16/news/news01.txt

Following a second three-day trek from the state capitol in Austin, roughly 75 protesters staged a five-hour protest and candlelight vigil outside the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor Sunday.

“We're not going anywhere,” Jose Orta, founding member of the Taylor League of United Latin American Citizens Council, said. “Just by being here we are making a difference. It's the little things that we can see happening. We're not going to move a mountain overnight. We'll take our victories as we get them.”

The 512-bed facility, which was remodeled and reopened in May 2006 under contract to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement service as a detention center for families, caught the eye of several human rights organizations following a Dec. 16 protest march against the detention of children. Previously, the facility housed county prisoners and federal detainees under various contracts with law enforcement agencies.

“We're here because we think this violates everything America stands for,” Jay Johnson-Castro of Del Rio said. “There is no longer this feeling of ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' in this country. The government baits immigrants with a promise of liberty and then they profit off of their incarceration.

“This isn't about keeping immigrants out of the country because it would be a lot cheaper to send them back home, not incarcerate them.”

According to the lease agreement between Williamson County and Corrections Corporation of America, which operates the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, the county agrees to subcontract all aspects of the facility's operations to CCA. In exchange, CCA receives payment of about $2.8 million from ICE to house up to 512 inmates. The company pays the county an administrative fee of $1 per day per inmate held at the facility.

“When people come here, they give up everything just to get here,” one of the protesters said Sunday. “I don't know what it would take for me to give up what I have and flee; it would have to be something awful. These people have given up so much already and then to be put in prison is just heart breaking.”

Elgin resident Magdalena Padron, said, as a mother, the issue of detaining children has affected her personally.

“There are no words to explain how I feel,” she said. “We're in a free country. To see them locked up in a free country doesn't make any sense.”

During a preliminary injunction hearing on Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Texas law school's immigration clinic and an international law firm, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks called the continued detention of children in “substandard conditions” at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center an urgent problem.

In March, the ACLU filed the suit on behalf of 10 immigrant children, challenging their detention at the center. Since then, all but three of the cases have been dropped since seven of the 10 families have already been sent home.

The lawsuits - which charge that the children are being imprisoned under inhumane conditions - claim the detainees were subject to psychological abuse from guards, received poor medical care and inadequate nutrition at the center while their parents await immigration decisions.

Sparks set an expedited August trial date.

“As far as I'm concerned, this is a showdown between American democracy and American tyranny,” Johnson-Castro said.

“The government speaks on illegal immigrants who commit crimes,” one protester shouted. “For every one that does, there are hundreds who do not. No one mentions the thousands of dollars immigrants pay into Social Security of which they will never see a dime of. When it comes to the argument of our government having to spend taxpayers' dollars to capture these immigrants, I don't think so. I think these people are enriching us in more ways than one.”

Posted by lois at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

The Angola 2- Life in Solitary Confinement: 12,775 Days Alone

Life in Solitary Confinement: 12,775 Days Alone
By Brooke Shelby Biggs, AlterNet
Posted on April 17, 2007, Printed on April 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50663/

Around midday today, Central Time, two men in Angola Prison in Louisiana will quietly mark the moment, 35 years ago exactly, when the bars of solitary confinement cells closed behind them. They will likely spend the moment in their 6 by 9 concrete cells reading, or writing letters to their hundreds of supporters around the world. And most of America and the rest of the world will still have never heard of them, or that in the United States of America, it is still possible to spend a life sentence in solitary confinement without interruption and without any real means of appeal. Americans shamefully imagine such things happen offshore in places like Guantanamo, or in totalitarian countries half a world away. Not here, though. Certainly not here.

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox are those men, who along with Robert King, are known as the Angola Three. (King established his innocence and was released in 2001 after almost 30 years in solitary.) Collectively, the three of them have spent 100 years in solitary confinement. Wallace asked this week, "Where is the justice?"

It was also on this day in 1972, that Brent Miller, a young, white, newlywed prison guard, was discovered in a pool of his own blood, stabbed 32 times. Brent Miller was a popular, athletic, handsome local boy who dreamed of leaving Angola with his young wife as soon as he could get a job in the nearby paper mill or up in Oklahoma. He never got a chance.

And based on long-lost evidence uncovered by a new team of attorneys and investigators over the past year and a half, it is clear Miller hasn't received justice, either. Woodfox and Wallace were placed in solitary and under suspicion of the murder the day it happened, and were later convicted of Miller's murder following trials highlighted by key testimony by inmate witnesses who were promised items such as cigarettes and the warden's recommendation of a pardon for their testimony. One of the state's inmate eyewitness was a legally blind certified sociopath. Another inmate repeatedly confessed to the murder to his fellow inmates and assured them that the prison administration knew he was guilty, but wanted to make examples of Woodfox and Wallace, known activists and Black Panthers.

But this anniversary, unlike the 34 preceding it, has a tinge of hope to it. Wallace and Woodfox, convicted separately of Miller's murder by all-white juries, have finally begun to attract some measurable attention.

Two very important legal cases are wending their way through the courts on this anniversary. The criminal case addresses the now publicly documented payoffs of the state's key witness in the murder trials. The other tackles a legal issue that could reverberate across the country -- is indefinite solitary confinement a violation of the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment?

By what few and murky laws exist, prisoners assigned to solitary should receive access to due process by which they can appeal their placement in solitary. For the Angola Three, the biweekly "hearings," during which they may use their clean records of good behavior to argue for their release back into the general population, long ago devolved into farce. Wallace reports that for decades now, he has been led into the room for his hearings, has not not permitted to present his arguments, and has been simply handed a piece of paper, already filled out, stating that the prison administration has denied his appeal and that he will stay in solitary because of the "nature of the original offense." The appeals boards do not pretend anymore that there is anything meaningful in the charade. The same fiction plays out for Woodfox and did for King during his years on the solitary block.

At least once, according to Wallace, current warden Burl Cain offered to release Woodfox and Wallace back into the general population if they renounced their political views and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. (The megalomaniacal Cain is to media attention what a lobotomized moth is to an incandescent bulb; he wrote a book and has done hundreds of interviews about his "reformist" approach to penology, which involves converting prisoners to Christianity and holding the hands of those being executed so that his face would be the last they'd see before Christ's.)

According to Sam Spital, one of the attorneys from Hollland & Knight, which represents the Angola Three in the civil suit, the lawsuit also challenges that there is "no legitimate penological reason for keeping our clients in CCR, and (2) there is persuasive evidence that, in light of the duration of their confinement and their advancing age, our clients are at risk of and/or have already suffered serious physical and psychological harm -- it is cruel and unusual punishment to keep our clients in CCR, which violates the Eighth Amendment." Should the suit go to trial as expected within the next few months and should a verdict be rendered in the three men's favor, the face of (and regulations surrounding) solitary confinement in America could change drastically for good. The case could serve as a precedent, forcing accountability by prison administrators to reserve solitary as a last-ditch and temporary measure with sharply defined restrictions. In an age of Supermax prisons where huge populations of prisoners spends months and years in solitary, the ramifications could be enormous.

For the Angola Three, it could mean monetary damages, and release from solitary into the general population at Angola.

George Kendall, lead attorney on the case says, "We are moving to trial and we are quite hopeful to win."

Among the evidence are reports made by leading psychologists noting the terrible toll of solitary over long periods. King has spent the six years since his release campaigning for the release of his friends, and helping expose the abuses inside Angola Prison. Of his 29 years he said, "Being in solitary was terrible. It was a nightmare. My soul still cries from all that I witnessed and endured. It does more than cry -- it mourns, continuously. I saw men so desperate that they ripped prison doors apart, starved and mutilated themselves. It takes every scrap of humanity to stay focused and sane in this environment. The pain and suffering are everywhere, constantly with you. But, it's was also so much more than that. I had dreams and they were beautiful dreams. I used to look forward to the nights when I could sleep and dream. There's no describing the day-to-day assault on your body and your mind and the feelings of hopelessness and despair. By any logical and apparent reasons, I should be anything but what I am today, but sometimes the spirit is stronger than the circumstances." King now runs a small candy business making pralines, which he calls "Freelines," from a recipe he had used to make the candy in a tin can in his solitary cell.

In 2003, when the ACLU was handling the civil case, a Louisiana magistrate was shocked by the filings she read: "The present matter, of course, involves confinements of 28 to nearly 33 years, durations so far beyond the pale that this court has not found anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence."

Late last year, the criminal case for Herman Wallace took a great step forward when evidence was presented at a hearing held inside Angola's prison walls, proving that a prison snitch who served as the state's main witness was paid for his testimony against Wallace with a carton of cigarettes a week for life, living quarters in a house on a hill with his own room and a TV, no work duty, and privileges unheard of by other inmates. It was further shown that the administration and many of the guards lobbied on behalf of the inmate for a pardon, which he eventually got.

The commissioner who presided over the hearing recommended that Wallace's conviction immediately be overturned. The judge in that case granted two extensions to the state to prepare a response, and both parties now await a decision on when and if Herman Wallace may see his day in court again. Ever hopeful and almost never bitter, Wallace said from his cell this week, "Albert and I have been in solitary confinement for 12,775 days. We're two men who are innocent of a crime we never committed. The state just won't let go."

Meanwhile, Woodfox, who was tried separately albeit on essentially the same evidence and testimony, has filed his last-ditch habeas corpus appeal in the hope that new evidence and developments in the other cases might provide him one last shot at freedom.

Said Scott Fleming, one of the criminal defense attorneys representing the Woodfox and Wallace, "I've been representing Albert and Herman for nearly a decade. Even so, they were placed in solitary confinement before I was born. Their cases are getting more serious consideration from the courts than they ever have, and we are all hoping this nightmare is nearing an end."

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/50663/

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

Inmates vs. Animals: U.S. Fails the Test of Civilization

Inmates vs. Animals: U.S. Fails the Test of Civilization
By Ben Zipperer, AlterNet
Posted on April 18, 2007

Legend has it that in the fifth century the Asian monk Telemachus ran into a Roman arena to stop the brutality of the gladitorial games. For his interruption, the indignant crowd stoned him to death, but his actions impressed Emperor Honorius enough to put an end to the fights.

The past millenium and a half has arguably witnessed a general improvement in the cultural level of society, in particular many countries having preserved and extended their intolerance of sports that brutally exploit the disadvantaged. Today even cock fighting and pitting canines against each other are illegal in most industrialized nations.

Remnants of gladitorial combat nevertheless persist, notably at two prison rodeos in Angola, La., and McAlester, Okla., where Americans buy tickets to watch inmates wrestle bulls and participate in crowd favorites like "Convict Poker." Also called "Mexican Sweat," the poker game consists of four prisoners who sit expectantly around a red card table. A 1,500-pound bull is unleashed, and the last convict to remain sitting wins. Especially thrilling for the audience is the chaotic finale "Money the Hard Way" in which more than a dozen inmates scramble to snatch a poker chip dangling from the horns of another raging bull.

Unlike prisoners of ancient Rome, convicts at the annual Angola and Oklahoma State rodeos aren't physically forced to compete in the games, or even executed after their performance. Instead, they're paid handsomely -- upwards of $200 for winning "Convict Poker," or $100 for successfully grabbing the chip in "Money the Hard Way." A tour guide clarifies the basic economics: "Since $100 is worth about four months' pay to these hardened criminals, be ready for one hell of a scrap for that c-note."

There are of course some ethical concerns. When "someone raises a question about the propriety of the rodeo," a Washington Post article explains, the focus remains on the abuse of bulls and broncos, like the pleas of the animal rights group PETA to cancel the rodeo on animal cruelty grounds. An official from In Defense of Animals writes elsewhere that the event provides inmates with "the right to torment and abuse frightened animals in front of a cheering audience." Moral questions don't arise about the propriety of cheering while bulls pummel convicts.

Prison rodeos may be rare, but it shouldn't be surprising that the mainstream toleration they receive stems from the willingness of the United States to incarcerate 2.2 million of its people. While less than one out of every 20 humans lives in the United States, almost one quarter of the world's prisoners sit in American jails. The U.S. criminal justice system has no parallel in the contemporary world. History, however, reveals the origins of the system's scope, in addition to the national obsession of denying criminal offenders the decency and rights normally afforded to other humans.

More Americans in prison

In the international race to incarcerate, the United States dominates, with few rivals and no rich countries within shouting distance. Incarceration rates across countries are best measured as shares of national populations. Last year, for every 100,000 people in the United States, 738 were in prison. Second-place Russia, whom the United States succeeded in 2000, currently boasts a rate of 603, but the only other OECD country with a rate above 200 is Poland at 229. The U.K. incarceration rate of 145 is the highest of any Western European country. Although African-Americans suffer the greatest relative burden of U.S. imprisonment, the incarceration rate for whites in the United States is still more than three times the OECD average.

To its credit, the United States hasn't always imprisoned such a large share of its population. Incarceration rates were steady, sometimes falling, and always below 200 throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The prison population rate rose sharply from 1973 to 1980, and then skyrocketed, more than tripling over the past 25 years.

What caused such a tremendous spike in imprisonment? Increases in crime rates surely made some contribution, but the road to prison involves other components of the criminal justice system, like prosecutorial and judicial decisions, and the time served in jail. Isolating these factors during the period from 1980 to 1996, Carnegie Mellon professor Alfred Blumstein and Bureau of Justice statistician Allen Beck conclude that only 12 percent of state incarceration growth resulted from the increased number of offenses. The rest of the prison population growth was due to decisions to incarcerate arrested individuals and their subsequent sentence length -- namely, policy choices made by legal and political representatives.

Coinciding directly with this astounding expansion of the prison population is the U.S. "war on drugs." Nonviolent drug offenses accounted for less than 8 percent of prisoners in 1980, but by 1993 that share had risen to about 25 percent, where it remains today. By contrast, more than half of those imprisoned in 1980 were violent criminals, who now comprise a bit less than half of the prison population. As a proportion of illicit activity, drug use therefore either tripled in just slightly over a decade and then stabilized, or the focus and severity of U.S. penal and sentencing policy shifted dramatically.

International comparisons also reveal the stark and decisive contribution of criminal justice policies to incarceration rates. Cross-country crime surveys from the late 1980s through the present place the United States slightly above average, but well within the range of Western European criminal activity. The United States is now, of course, off the charts in terms of incarceration, imprisoning on a per capita basis six times the average of other OECD countries.

Incarceration rates in the United States and Finland were not dissimilar in the mid-1960s. Over the following 30 years, the United States saw a near fivefold increase in the rate of violent crime and a threefold increase in the rate of imprisonment. Violent crime also rose in Finland by a factor of three, but over roughly the same period, the promotion of sentencing alternatives to incarceration and deliberate reductions in the length of prison sentences helped to cut the Finnish incarceration rate by more than half.

Assessing these trends, criminologist Michael Tonry writes that whereas U.K. punishment policies were originally not out of the ordinary compared with Western Europe, since 1993 England and Wales "have consciously emulated American crime control policies," resulting in the near doubling of the prison population. In Germany, despite a doubling of the violent crime rate between the early 1960s and 1990s, "no radical decisions were made to increase or decrease the imprisonment rate," and so the German incarceration rate stagnated and even fell somewhat over this period. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that incarceration rates are driven primarily by policy choices, not by crime rates or inexorable laws of nature.

Permanent exclusion

Unsatisfied with mere prison sentences, the United States especially has decided that offenders should continue to pay for their crimes even after release. Some states prohibit hiring teachers or child care workers with criminal records, and drug felons are often denied the occupational mobility necessary for employment in general due to required suspensions or revocations of drivers' licenses. Federal law also allows states to deny offenders public housing, or to bar welfare benefits or food stamps from drug felons, sometimes permanently. Drug-related records can invalidate eligibility for student loans or aid. Even exile has its place in the United States: Foreigners with certain criminal convictions are increasingly deported, a practice which grew twelvefold between 1989 and 2004.

Some of these punishments isolate the United States from the rest of the industrialized world. Most states in this country deny current prisoners the right to vote, some bar felons from voting during probation or parole, and a few strip the vote from felons for life. Although the United States is hardly alone in denying voting rights to the imprisoned, many European nations, including Denmark, Ireland, Spain and Sweden, even allow current prisoners to vote. Nonetheless, the United States appears to be the only democratic country that indefinitely disenfranchises nonincarcerated felons. The United Nations Human Rights Committee recently proclaimed that these felon disenfranchisement practices violate international law, namely the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party.

Crediting the United States for such exclusionary policies would be unfair. Like prison rodeos and gladiatorial games, these traditions have deep roots in history, as outlaws in ancient Rome and Germanic tribes were likewise deprived of conventional human rights. The United States of today embraces the legal and moral standards of medieval Europe, where disenfranchisement and other practices amounted to what was called "civil death." Criminals there were consequently "dead in law," prevented from performing the normal legal functions of citizenry.

Coupled with the severe and disproportionate toll of the criminal justice system on black America, the reach of civil death is staggering. More than 13 percent of African-American men cannot vote because their felony conviction puts them in prison or on parole, or just simply denies their suffrage. In eight states, at least one out of four black men is disenfranchised. Christopher Uggen at the University of Minnesota and Jeff Manza at Northwestern University calculate that felony disenfranchisement affected a total of 5.4 million Americans in 2004.

Criminal offenders are not only excluded from society by imprisonment and post-prison sanctions, but also due to the subtle fact that those in prison are ignored by most measures of economic well-being. For instance, the unemployment rate measures the nonworking share of the labor force -- those who are actively seeking work. Omitted from this definition, however, are the institutionalized and in particular the incarcerated.

Sociologists Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett note that while Europe is regularly chastised for high labor inactivity, counting the imprisoned as unemployed drastically changes the economic standing of the United States among European countries. In 2004, the standardized U.S. unemployment rate for men was 5.6 percent below the OECD average of about 6.2 percent. Including the prison population as unemployed raises the male U.S. unemployment rate to 7.9 percent, exceeding the modified OECD average (6.6 percent), and placing the United States below only the top five high unemployment countries of Europe.

The point is not that the incarcerated should be counted in the conventional unemployment rate, but rather that vast numbers of able-bodied men are forcibly removed both from civil society in general, and from our very conception of it. Rates for employment, poverty, inequality and virtually every socioeconomic indicator exclude the incarcerated. Prisoners' invisibility to society in conjunction with civil death -- in the United States, at least -- cannot possibly help to ensure their human rights.

Nearly a century ago Winston Churchill remarked that "the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country ... [these actions] mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it." U.S.-style criminal treatment includes disenfranchisement, exile, prison rodeos and innumerable other practices that punish, exclude and effectively erase millions of people. Do these signs constitute our virtue? Are we failing the test of civilization?

Ben Zipperer is a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/50428/

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

April 17, 2007

CA: New prison beds for women rejected by legislative committee

CURB Press Release 4-17-07
New prison beds for women rejected
by legislative committee

SACRAMENTO- Plans to build thousands of new prison beds for women were rejected today when the Assembly Public Safety Committee rejected AB76, even after the bill's author, Assemblymember Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View), stripped thousands of new prison beds for women from the bill.

"This is a great victory for those locked in California's women's prisons and anyone who cares about real solutions to California's prison crisis," said Marina Sideris of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a statewide coalition who opposed the bill.

In January 2006, Gov. Schwarzenegger announced that the CDCR had identified 4,500 people in women's prisons who didn't need to be there. Instead of developing a plan to release them and provide transitional services, the CDCR proposed building 4,500 new beds in urban mini prisons, called Female Rehabilitative Community Corrections Centers.

"Building more prison cells isn't the answer to prison overcrowding. Building smaller prisons isn't the solution to having women in prison who don't need to be there " said Susan Burton of A New Way of Life from Los Angeles. "It is time to move our focus and our tax dollars away from prison construction and towards rehabilitative solutions."

"A truly 'gender responsive' policy would start by discharging the 4,500 people the CDCR identified as no longer needing to be in prison," said Vanessa Huang of Justice Now. "It's fiscally irresponsible to spend taxpayer dollars to expand a system that's devastated families across the state. Instead of wasting money locking up more Californians, we should be investing in the public resources independent of the criminal legal system that women and transgender people need to keep our families and communities whole and intact."

The defeat of AB 76 also spelled the end of plans to institute a "Female Offender Reform Master Plan," which had also concerned many advocates. "Leaving thousands locked up in Chowchilla after the CDCR has determined they don't need to be there isn't the answer. The Legislature needs to find ways to get people back to their children, back to their communities, and out of prison," said John Lum of CURB. "We urge the Legislature to lead us in the right direction by ensuring that prisons are not the only place where Californians can receive services."

Shachie Day, a woman currently imprisoned at Central California Women's Facility, said this is a crucial opportunity for legislators to both enable "more free world staff providing services like counseling and job training that is actually useful for finding work on the outside" and "build more sober living homes, rather than small prisons. Sure, these services would take money. But they're a lot cheaper than the economic and social costs of prison expansion."

Posted by lois at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2007

NY: Spitzer's controversial plan to reform prisons

Spitzer's controversial plan to reform prisons
State paying to maintain empty beds

By Brendan Scott
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070416/NEWS/704160322
(Maps and graphs at this URL)

Times Herald-Record
April 16, 2007
Albany — It was the silver lining to the black cloud that hung over New York throughout the 1970s and 80s. As crime rates soared, the state built dozens of prisons, including eight in the mid-Hudson, adding thousands of jobs to the wobbly upstate economy.
Now, that cloud seems to have lifted. Crime has plummeted. Alternative sentence programs have proliferated.

The state, meanwhile, has been left to pay the multimillion tab for securing thousands of empty prison beds across the state. In response, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has a plan sure to stir controversy in places where prisons remain the largest employers.
He wants to shut some down.
In his first budget plan, Spitzer proposed creating a commission to study the state's sprawling prison system and mark some of its 70 facilities for closure by year's end. The likely targets? Medium and minimum security facilities, places like Fishkill, Woodbourne and Wallkill.
But the idea proved less than popular with the Legislature, especially in the state Senate, where upstate Republicans hold sway. Lawmakers made sure a closure commission was not in the budget that passed April 1.
Few, however, expect that will be the end of the effort to shutter prisons.
The prison population has fallen to 63,304 from a peak of 71,472 in 1999, a decline of 11 percent. In that same period, the number of inmates in medium and minimum security prisons fell, 16 percent and 34 percent, respectively.
The maximum security population actually rose 2 percent, a trend attributed to tough-on-crime laws that keep the worst offenders behind bars.
As inmate counts sank, the state saved money by letting hundreds of correction jobs go vacant. Closing facilities would be the next logical step.
But any talk of prison closures can carry serious political consequences. Correctional services has a $3 billion budget and employs 31,500.
That's more than the departments of environment, health and transportation combined. It includes some 3,400 in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties.
Plus some, such as the powerful union that represents correction officers, argue that the population decline is only temporary. They point to reports of rising crime rates and a slight uptick in the number of inmates in state custody last year.
"We don't believe there's a need to close these facilities," said Larry Flanagan Jr., president of the New York Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association. "There are times of rise and fall in the prison population."
With such concerns in mind, the Legislature rejected the governor's attempt to let a commission do the dirty work of remaking the prison system. Lawmakers told Spitzer to come up with his own plan and then come to them for approval.
So, a lengthy debate appears likely.
In the meantime, prison reform advocates predict the overall decline will only accelerate. That's provided that the state continues to scale back its harshest drug laws and expand its use of early release programs.
"The prison system should not be used for economic development," said Robert Gangi, who leads the Correctional Association of New York, a state-sanctioned prisoner advocacy group. "There needs to be some means to helping the upstate economy, rather than maintaining prisons that are no longer needed."

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

MI: No End for Jammed Prisons

And informative graph at the url below:

* in 1981, prison spending represented 4.4% of the state's total general fund spending; today, prisons eat up 20% of the same budget.

* about 1 in every 3 state employees now works for the Dept. of Corrections, compared to 9.2 % 25 years ago.

_________________________________
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007704160350
Detroit News
Monday, April 16, 2007

No end for jammed prisons
Gov's inmate release plan won't solve budget and space crisis

Norman Sinclair / The Detroit News

DETROIT -- Despite Gov. Jennifer Granholm's plan to release up to 5,500 inmates to shave $92 million off the state's $686 million deficit, experts say the money and bed space crisis will continue as long as some 30 percent of the inmate population -- or 16,000 prisoners -- remains locked up even though they are eligible for parole.

"We need fundamental reforms to reduce the prison population that was driven up in the last 20 years -- not by crime but by policy choices the state made," said Barbara Levine, executive director of the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending, a prison spending-policy advocacy group.

Deputy Corrections Director Dennis Schrantz recently predicted that without the release of the 5,500 inmates, the system will run out of beds by September. And a recent Pew Foundation study predicts Michigan's prison population will increase 11 percent by 2011.

Inmate Ross Hayes, for example, has cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars for his upkeep. He was first eligible for parole 23 years ago.

Hayes was 16 in 1974 and high on drugs and alcohol when he stabbed and killed an 89-year-old homeowner who returned home unexpectedly and surprised him during a burglary.

A psychologist said Hayes had the emotional maturity of an adolescent, and a probate judge reluctantly ordered Hayes tried as adult. His lawyer advised him to plead guilty to second-degree murder in return for a life sentence with a chance for parole after 10 years.

Hayes is now 49 and serving his 32nd year in prison. He has an excellent prison record and has earned a GED and two associate's degrees. He converted to Christianity and got married in 1998.

In 2001, Dale Daverman, great-nephew of the victim, was surprised to discover that Hayes was still in prison and visited him. Since then, Daverman has been an advocate for Hayes' release.

"I am absolutely convinced that Ross Hayes is sincere and has remorse for what he did. My father, brother and I feel Ross has paid his debt to society," Daverman wrote the parole board's chairman that year.

But Hayes has repeatedly been turned down for parole.
Both parties want reform

In a statement to The Detroit News, Granholm said sweeping reforms she is proposing will reduce prison population while keeping residents safe.

"(The plan) calls for revisions to Michigan's sentencing guidelines, increased use of community-based sanctions for appropriate offenders, reinvestment of funding for local criminal justice services, expansion of the bipartisan prisoner re-entry program and paroling more prisoners into this successful program that has shown a double-digit improvement on recidivism," the governor said.

Legislative changes in sentencing guidelines in the 1990s produced "truth in sentencing" requiring prisoners to serve all their time behind bars. The change also wiped out halfway houses and community facilities used to ease prisoners back into society before parole.

The state's financial crisis is creating a new bipartisan spirit for reform. On March 29, state Rep. Paul Condino, D-Southfield, introduced a bill aimed at strengthening and spelling out parole guidelines.

It would also make the board accountable for following those guidelines to grant parole.

The bill sets guidelines for parole and makes parole decisions transparent and subject to appeal. It would also require the board to account for exceptions it makes when refusing parole.

Condino could not be reached for comment.

State Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, said he, too, has convened a subcommittee to take up prison reform of parole.

"Having practiced law in that area, I have often wondered why we got rid of the appeal process in the parole system, because it does take away the discretion of the court and gives full authority to the parole board, which has become a very political entity. I am all in favor of bringing back discretion to that process," Bishop said.

"Any way we can make the system better, we ought to be looking at it. Instead of just talking about commutation of prisoners, you've got to fix the system before you can just implode it and walk away."

The Corrections Department and the parole board are already seeing positive results by taking a less rigid approach to parole involving a group of 4,153 nonviolent non-sex offenders previously rejected for parole. Parole board more flexible

In January 2005, the board began taking second looks at the group who would not have been considered for parole again for 12 to 24 months.

That closer look resulted in parole for 2,076, according to a Corrections Department memo dated Jan. 8.

CAPPS and a State Bar of Michigan group that deals with prison issues believe other reforms need to go no further than a return to policies abandoned in 1992. At that time, Gov. John Engler pushed legislative changes that abolished a supervisory parole commission as well as the civil service parole board and replaced it with political appointees.

CAPPS calculates that adoption of Condino's bill and three other reforms could reduce the prison population to pre-1992 levels of 42,000.

The three reforms are:

Capping the time some of the 3,700 technical parole violators are serving in prison for violations that did not involve a new crime.

Reinstate good time credits similar to what inmates earn in federal and other state prisons, which would cut average sentences by 15 percent at a savings of $100 million.

Rescind a board policy that treats parolable life sentences as natural life sentences. Hayes and 800 other inmates fall into this group.

State Rep. Rick Jones, R-Oneida, who was Eaton County sheriff for 33 years and a jail administrator for five years, supports these recommendations.

"We are incarcerating people longer than the states around us at a cost of millions of dollars," Jones said.

You can reach Norman Sinclair at (313) 222-2034 or nsinclair@detnews.com.

Posted by lois at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

OSI $10 Million National Initiative to Close the Drug Treatment Gap

Top Addiction Expert to Lead OSI’s National Initiative to Close the Drug Treatment Gap

April 3, 2007

BALTIMORE—A top national addiction expert will head a new national initiative that the Open Society Institute is launching to help close the country’s drug addiction treatment gap, enabling more Americans who need drug addiction treatment to get it.

Victor Capoccia, who led the addiction prevention and treatment team at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and who previously ran a Massachusetts substance-abuse agency, will lead the new initiative, supported by $10 million from philanthropist George Soros to ensure that more Americans have access to drug addiction treatment.

More than 22.2 million Americans suffer from addiction or dependence to alcohol and drugs, according to the most recent national survey on drug use published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSA). More than 80 percent of Americans who need help are unable to get addiction treatment, either due to lack of health insurance, inadequate insurance or lack of treatment slots in communities.

The $10 million initiative will seek to close the treatment gap by underwriting local and regional education and advocacy efforts across the country to expand programs and health insurance for the uninsured. The goal is to expand comprehensive treatment systems and to improve the quality of treatment. The effort will borrow lessons from the highly successful treatment model in Baltimore.

“I have been encouraged by the success Baltimore has had in making treatment more widely accessible so that individuals and families can receive the help they need to lead healthy, productive lives,” said Soros, founder of the Open Society Institute. “Now we have the opportunity to address the issue nationally, to call attention to the short-sighted allocation of public funds, leading to a huge gap in the availability of drug addiction treatment for people without adequate insurance.”

Prior to joining the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2001, Capoccia was president and CEO of CAB Health and Recovery Services, Inc., a community-based provider of inpatient, residential, outpatient, prevention and related health services in the alcohol and drug addiction field. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Community-Based Drug Treatment and chairman of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment’s National Treatment Plan workgroup on Improving Treatment Systems. Capoccia previously was the director of Community Health Services for Boston’s Health and Hospitals Department. There, he directed the city health department’s expansion of prenatal outreach, emergency medical services, HIV prevention and addiction treatment efforts.

Capoccia will oversee the implementation of the new initiative, which will be based in Baltimore. OSI expects to announce later this year the process by which localities will be able to apply for grants.

The new national effort will build on Baltimore’s example, in which OSI-Baltimore has provided substantial funding to strengthen the city’s public drug addiction treatment system, managed by the quasi-public Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems (BSAS). Since 1998, Baltimore has made it a priority to build an expanded drug treatment system and has mobilized broad public support for drug treatment among city, state and private funders. As a result, the city has increased significantly the capacity of its public drug treatment system. Funding for the treatment system increased from $20.3 million in 1997 to $52.9 million in 2005, and the number of people receiving drug treatment in publicly-funded programs increased from 18,449 in 1997 to 28,672 in 2005.

Despite that expansion, thousands of Baltimore residents still need treatment, and local advocates continue their efforts to secure additional funding so that ultimately treatment on demand becomes a reality.

“We are thrilled to have someone of Victor Capoccia’s caliber launch this important initiative to make drug addiction treatment more accessible in the United States,” said Diana Morris, director of OSI-Baltimore. “He brings a vision and a network of resources to this difficult challenge.”

Capoccia has served as an associate professor in community planning and organization at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work. A graduate of Boston College, he holds master's degrees in social work and city planning and a doctorate in social policy from the Florence Heller Graduate School of Social Welfare at Brandeis University.

Soros announced his $10 million commitment last June during a major conference in Baltimore about successful drug addiction treatment strategies. The conference, called “Cities on the Right Track: Building Public Drug Treatment Systems,” was sponsored by OSI-Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the City of Baltimore. Among the participants were then-Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, and Providence Mayor David Cicilline.

####

Founded by philanthropist George Soros, OSI-Baltimore is a private operating foundation that supports a grantmaking, educational and capacity-building program to expand justice and opportunity for Baltimore residents. With support from a range of investors, its current work focuses on helping Baltimore's youth succeed, reducing the social and economic costs of incarceration, tackling drug addiction, and building a corps of Community Fellows to bring innovative ideas to Baltimore's underserved communities.
Related Event

OSI Conference: Cities on the Right Track—Building Public Drug Treatment Systems
Baltimore, MD
Jun. 7, 2006
OSI-Baltimore cosponsored a conference to showcase drug addiction treatment systems that are working in cities across the United States. more

You can access this page at the following URL:
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/baltimore/news/treatment_20070403

Posted by lois at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2007

NY: In the South Bronx, Unlikely Allies Fight a Proposed Jail

New York Times
In the South Bronx, Unlikely Allies Fight a Proposed Jail
The South Bronx complex would ease pressure on Rikers Island jails, such as the Robert N. Davoren Center.

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: April 15, 2007

Residents of the South Bronx have long made the point that the area needs banks, restaurants, parkland and, most critically, jobs. The last thing the South Bronx needs, some of them say, is a new 2,040-inmate jail.

A proposal by the city¹s Correction Department to build a $375 million jail in the Hunts Point section has aroused opposition from an unlikely coalition of neighbors, environmentalists, advocates for prison reform and members of the union that represents jail guards.

³They¹re essentially trying to establish a penal colony in the South Bronx,² said Elena Conte, the solid waste and energy coordinator for Sustainable South Bronx, an environmental group opposed to the jail plan.

On Friday, opponents earned more time to continue their fight after Steven E. Smith, the owner of the proposed jail site, won a temporary restraining order in Federal Bankruptcy Court that delays the plan¹s first public hearing, which had been scheduled for tomorrow. (The court proceedings were held in bankruptcy court because Mr. Smith¹s company, Britestarr Homes, is in bankruptcy protection.)

Mr. Smith, who had cooperated with the city when the Department of Correction had planned a smaller jail on the property, now maintains that the effort to condemn the entire 27-acre parcel is preventing him from developing or selling the land.

³I have everything I own invested in this property,² said Mr. Smith, who added that he believes he could sell the land for as much as $80 million.

The tract is among the largest pieces of vacant land in the city that is controlled by a single owner. For years, the property had been used as an illegal dump for construction and demolition material, and it is still filled with debris. Mr. Smith originally sought to build a power plant there.

The Department of Correction first proposed the jail ‹ which would be known as the Oak Point Detention Center ‹ last April.

Martin F. Horn, commissioner of the Department of Correction, said during an interview last week that the city needed the 2,000-bed jail to relieve pressure on the dilapidated Rikers Island jail complex. The department has also proposed reopening and expanding capacity at the Brooklyn House of Detention, which is now closed, from 700 to 1,400 inmates within five years.

In January, the Bronx House of Detention, which housed about 400 inmates, was demolished to make room for a $500 million mall. The city also operates a barge with 800 prisoners anchored off Hunts Point, not far from the proposed jail.

³This is a citywide plan to overall reduce the size of the city¹s jail system and reduce the dependence on Rikers Island and its aging facilities,² said Mr. Horn. ³Jails have to go somewhere.²

Mr. Horn said that keeping so many inmates ‹ an average of about 14,000 each day ‹ on Rikers Island presented security problems, was a chore for family members and attorneys seeking to visit inmates and was a psychological burden for the prisoners.

³Keeping all the city¹s inmates on Rikers Island is downright dangerous,² he said. ³It stigmatizes and demonizes inmates. It is New York¹s version of Devil¹s Island.²

But critics say the proposed Bronx jail, which would be the city¹s largest outside of Rikers Island, makes little sense.

The union representing corrections officers has said the $375 million needed to build the jail would be better spent on improving conditions at Rikers.

Environmentalists say they are concerned about possible toxic chemicals at the Bronx site, including mercury, barium and lead. And politicians and residents say the South Bronx has been the dumping ground for the city for too long, and that a new jail might interrupt the area¹s resurgence.

The South Bronx has one of the city¹s highest concentrations of waste transfer stations and sewage treatment plants. There is also a sprawling rail yard and a fertilizer pellet factory that residents say emits a foul odor.

³I¹ve heard every possible excuse to do something bad in the Bronx,² said U.S. Rep. Jose E. Serrano, who represents the South Bronx and has been one of the jail¹s most outspoken opponents. ³The whole situation is people forgetting how far the South Bronx has come.²

Mr. Horn bristles at the suggestion that a jail would taint the area.

³These are the sons and daughters of the city,² Mr. Horn said, referring to inmates. ³We are not noxious. We do not spew noxious fumes. It demeans the humanity of us.²

In addition to housing 2,040 inmates, the proposed jail would have 600 parking spaces and a kitchen where meals for all of the city¹s jails would be prepared. Construction would start in 2009 and be finished in 2013.

Mr. Horn said the jail would not hurt economic development in the South Bronx, and might even aid it by encouraging new restaurants and other businesses that would serve corrections officers and visitors. And no one, he said, lives within at least half a mile of the site.

³There is no evidence that the location of a jail diminishes a community,² he said.

Faced with intense opposition, Mr. Horn has been like a man waging a political campaign.

Before Monday¹s hearing was canceled, he had been scheduled to give reporters a bus tour of Rikers Island to point out the complex¹s dilapidated condition. (Some of the buildings on the island have been closed after a federal judge found them to be inadequate for holding inmates.) A spokesman said the tour would be rescheduled.

Opponents may be united against the jail, but they are split about what they would like to have built at the site, which includes a stretch of East River waterfront.

Mr. Smith would still like to build a power plant, although that plan has failed to win either neighborhood or political support. Mr. Serrano said he would like to see at least part of the tract reserved for a park.

Sustainable South Bronx has proposed building a recycling center that would create 300 to 500 jobs.

Mr. Horn said, however, that the jail plan ³is the last best chance for the city to be able to do the right thing.²
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/nyregion/15jail.html?ref=nyregion

Posted by lois at 09:04 PM | Comments (0)

IA: Plan recommends new classification system for prisons

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Plan recommends new classification system for prisons
Marshalltown Times-Republican
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DES MOINES — A revamped prisoner classification system that would place more inmates in minimum security is a key part of new recommendations to improve Iowa’s prisons.

State corrections officials on Friday had a chance to discuss recommendations made by the Durrant Group of Dubuque. Those recommendations included more than $250 million in long- and short-term construction projects to meet the demands of Iowa’s growing prisoner population.

Under close scrutiny in the report was the state’s 25-year-old system that helps determine where the state’s roughly 8,900 inmates are held — maximum, medium or minimum security facilities.

‘‘Until we take a look at our classification system and get an accurate view of who was in the prison, we can’t accurately’’ move forward with other key components of prison improvement, said Robyn Mills, chairwoman of the Iowa Board of Corrections.

Currently, the system takes into account variables such as records of violence and age to determine where an inmate should be held. But the report said that system isn’t used consistently among case managers and doesn’t provide an accurate assessment ‘‘due to missing or poorly defined risk factors.’’

While hundreds of Iowa inmates are currently eligible for minimum security, corrections officials said many remain in higher security facilities because the state lacks minimum security space.

Prison officials say putting inmates in minimum-security facilities often links them with key job and training programs that help them cope with life once they are released. That, in turn, reduces the chances that offenders return to crime.

Developing the new classification system could cost as much as $500,000, and officials said work will likely begin this year.

The Durrant Group also proposes that the state expand the Iowa Correctional Institute for Women, and consolidate all female inmates at the Mitchellville location.

Officials said that would help lower-risk offenders to be located in medium or minimum security facilities, which can offer more programs to assist with rehabilitation.

http://www.timesrepublican.com/News/articles.asp?articleID=8548

Posted by lois at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)

Maine Contemplating Sending Prisoners to Oklahoma

Maine eyes out-of-state prison

By DAVID HENCH, Staff Writer
Sunday, April 15, 2007

Maine corrections officials want to ship 125 medium-security offenders out of state to relieve overcrowding in state prisons. But civil-rights groups and defense lawyers say the plan is unfair to prisoners and their families, and could boost the likelihood convicts will re-offend once released.

The Maine Department of Corrections wants to employ a series of temporary measures to house an overflow of 245 prisoners. The plan calls for opening an empty housing unit at the state's Charleston Correctional Facility and leasing cell space from Cumberland, York, Lincoln and Sagadahoc county jails, which have excess capacity.

But the part of the plan drawing the most concern calls for shipping 125 prisoners to a for-profit prison in Oklahoma.

"It's immediately available, it's appropriate for that security level and length of incarceration, and it's also a less expensive option," said Denise Lord, associate commissioner of Maine's corrections department.

The plan is being criticized by the Maine Civil Liberties Union, the Portland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

"If Maine has a serious criminal justice problem, it shouldn't be in the business of exporting that problem to other states. We should work together to solve the problem here," said Zachary Heiden, legal director for the MCLU.

Sending prisoners far from home would cut off the community support they need to avoid re-offending when they're released, he said.

Maine corrections officials went to Oklahoma last week to inspect the facility, a prison owned by Corrections Corporation of America. They described it as clean, safe and well-run, though somewhat lacking in programs compared to Maine facilities.

The prison has been accredited by the American Correctional Association, the same organization that approved the operation of Maine's prisons, Lord said.

The Tennessee-based company is the nation's largest private prison company, and has more prisoners than all but the federal government and three states.

The company is able to house prisoners cheaper than states can because it has extensive experience in the field, and has economies of scale unmatched by most public entities, in areas such as purchasing food, medicine and clothing, said Louise Grant, vice president of marketing and communication for the company.

CCA also pays less for labor, construction, real estate and heat than many states do, she said.

Private prisons offer programming based on what is called for in individual state contracts, but typically include courses in academics, substance abuse and trades, Grant said.
It sounds adequate, but Heiden, of the MCLU, said protecting prisoners' rights often means meeting with inmates and visiting the facilities where they are housed.

He also said the proposal could have implications for public safety. "Cutting off inmates from their communities for some indeterminate open-ended period of time will reduce the chances of them being rehabilitated," Heiden said.

CRISIS DRAWS CRITICISM

Walter McKee, an attorney who is spokesman for the Maine defense lawyers, questioned the plan's urgency.

"Why are we at this emergency stage in the first place? We're talking about shipping people 2,000 miles away. Isn't this something that should have been taken care of a long time ago, before we got into this crisis situation?" McKee said.

He faulted the Legislature for passing mandatory minimum sentences during the past three sessions, exacerbating the problem.

McKee also said the distance would hamper prisoners' ability to pursue legal appeals, and to participate as witnesses in other cases.

The MCLU, NAACP and the defense lawyers association sent a letter to the legislative chairs of the Appropriations Committee urging a full analysis of the proposal.
The surge in prison population is being felt in almost every state in the country, even those with historically low incarceration rates, like Maine.

New Hampshire has about 500 prisoners more than capacity, and Rhode Island's governor recently declared an emergency to try to deal with that state's prison overcrowding.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency and tried to ship up to 5,000 prisoners out of state, but prison workers have blocked the plan with a lawsuit.

WHO WOULD GO?

About half the states in the country pay to have some prisoners housed out of state, according to Corrections Corporation of America.

In Maine, the increase appears to stem from a rise in people with shorter sentences being sent to state prison rather than county jails, and to a steady climb in the number of people sentenced for sex and drug crimes.

Maine's emergency plan calls for transferring out-of-state prisoners who volunteer and those who are from other states but committed crimes in Maine. The department also will be reviewing records to see which prisoners have not had regular family contact.

Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson said at a recent legislative hearing that the state could also use out-of-state placement for prisoners who have been problematic for state officials.

Although there is no law dictating how to choose prisoners for out-of-state transfer, there are guidelines the commissioner has said he intends to use.

The agreement with the Oklahoma prison would require prisoners to return to Maine at least six months before they are released, time to reconnect with community supports, Lord said.
The annual cost of sending the prisoners out of state would be about $3 million, compared to about $4 million if the state boarded them in Maine's county jails.

Corrections Corporation of America is active politically in Maine; it contributed $17,500 to a Republican political action committee and $6,000 to Democratic groups last year, according to state records. Lord said the company has been in contact with Maine officials over the years but was selected because it can immediately accommodate the prisoner overflow.

The spending plan now before the Appropriations Committee would send prisoners out of state for just eight months, through December, while the Legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee develops a long-term solution to the overcrowding.

If the out-of-state prisons were part of a long-term solution, the state would employ a competitive bid process, Lord said.

Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, chairman of the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, said the overcrowding situation is serious and must be dealt with now.

"It is not about the comfort of prisoners," he said. "It has everything to do with the safety of the guards and the extremely costly event for the state if a consent decree or lawsuit is applied."

The out-of-state placement might be a short-term solution, but many states that resorted to such measures in an emergency have continued to rely on out-of-state prisons.
Vermont sent a couple hundred prisoners to CCA in 2004 and now has 500 housed with the company, Grant said.

A state analysis shows the expense of using out-of-state prisons through 2010 to help alleviate overcrowding.

Diamond said the state needs a solution for the future that avoids a replay of the current crisis.

"It would just be a Band-Aid if we didn't commit ourselves to a long-term plan, a long-term solution that includes other things besides buildings," Diamond said. "If it's building buildings, that's the easy way out and the least popular way."

Staff Writer David Hench can be contacted at 791-6327 or at:
dhench@pressherald.com

CORRECTIONS CORPORATION OF AMERICA owns and operates 64 for-profit prison facilities in 19 states with a total capacity of more than 72,000 beds, up from 59,000 in 2002;

has contracts with roughly half the states as well as the federal government;

operates North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre, Okla., a medium-security prison with a capacity of 1,440.Source: Corrections Corporation of America

LEARN MORE ONLINE:Department of Justice report on prison statistics, 2005:http://tinyurl.com/325yznReport by the Maine Commission to Improve Sentencing, Supervision, Management and Incarceration of Prisoners:http://tinyurl.com/28qyvgArticles on prison overcrowding from the National Institute of Corrections:http://tinyurl.com/3a7dvk -->
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/070415prison.html

Posted by lois at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

CO: Hudson Voters Will Have Say On Proposed Prison for Women

Hudson voters will have say on proposed prison
Roxye Arellano
April 15, 2007

Laura Moreland likes the way the small town of Hudson looks with its familiar faces.But her views could soon change if a proposed 1,250-bed women's prison moves into town."I think we need to open our eyes," Moreland said. "Hudson's a cute little town."

Hudson's board of trustees unanimously voted to annex 340 acres into town limits Wednesday. About 126 acres will be used for the prison facility, said Joe Racine, town administrator.

Moreland and about five other people formed Citizens Against the Hudson Prison to educate residents on what can happen to the town if it comes.

And changes are happening.

Cornell Companies, Inc., a private prison company, won the bid through the state Department of Corrections in 2006 to build a women's prison in Hudson. Cornell officials approached the landowner who then went through the process to annex the land. The final step is to approve it for industrial use so the facility can be built.



Racine said the land annexation will not be final until the zoning is done in May.

On May 18, approximately 360 to 400 registered residents will vote in a special election on whether to approve the land annexation for industrial-commercial or agricultural.If zoned industrial-commercial, the prison facility will be able to come to town.

"The annexation process is contingent on the zoning," Racine said. "All we've done is annexed the raw land. We've got other zoning and conditional uses to go through."

Moreland said the decision could be hard for some residents. One minute they want the facility because it will bring in projected revenue, and then the next they don't want it because of what it is -- a prison.

"It's intimidating," she said. "It's that small-town mentality. They want to see things happen, but they don't want to get involved or take any action for it."

Racine said the positive move of the prison coming to town is that it will bring the utilities into an area surrounding the town's growth area, which will make it easier to attract more business to the town of 1,587 residents. Any new business building in town must provide its own water for development, so the town would not accrue a huge expense, said Racine.

"Other than to extend the water and sewer line to an area that is currently not served," he said.

Rhonda Corman, an economics professor at the University of Northern Colorado, conducted another survey, which says the town can benefit from Cornell's presence. She determined that 147 jobs would be generated from the prison coming to town. Adding that the town could be looking at $400,000 a year from property taxes. Racine said the sales tax would be incidental because it would be based on people stopping in town to do business.

But Moreland said the town has proof it can't afford even that.

A study submitted by Harvey Economics states that the prison might actually reduce town revenues.

The study states, "On its face, the summary report of the model results indicates the 'public costs to the city' exceed the 'public revenues to the city' by more than $3.5 million for years 1-10 of the project. For instance, in year two of the project operation, estimated total costs for the town of Hudson are almost $500,000, whereas town revenues attributed to the project are only $263,000. These losses occur in every year of the project, including the year of construction."

Harvey Economics staff said the $27.5 million in economic benefits to Hudson, over the construction period and for the first 10 years, is seriously flawed. It states, "Some of the numbers are double counted like wages and expenditures of those wages. And the model assumes that 80 percent of all employee-related retail sales will occur in Hudson when only one percent of the construction workforce and 15 percent of the operational employees will live in Hudson."

After reviewing the numbers, Harvey Economics staff said the annual costs don't take into account the capital costs the town will have to pay to accommodate the new employees and the new facility. It also says the services provided in Hudson does not meet the needs of the current population, yet the town anticipates a large increase in these costs in order to provide adequate services in the future.



Overall, the study questions whether the town is capable of providing for a prison.

But the idea of a facility coming is just what officials say might improve their tiny southeastern town.

"From the town's prospective, it's a business coming to town," Racine said. "That's positive."

Moreland disagrees.



"This is not good for us," Moreland said. "People need to see the Harvey Economics study."

Moreland said she made 40 copies of the study to pass around to residents. So far, she has about 15 left but is willing to offer more copies if needed.

"Growth is coming up I-70," Moreland said. "The residents just need to wait. Positive growth will come. We don't need to accept the negative growth."

What's next?

The town of Hudson's Planning and Zoning Committee members will submit their findings from the two economic surveys to the board of trustees at the April 18 meeting.

On May 18, registered voters will decide if the annexed land should remain zoned agricultural or re-zone it industrial commercial.

About Cornell

Cornell has 79 facilities in 16 states and has a service capacity of 18,477.

All of its facilities are in compliance with federal, state and local regulations and are accredited by either the American Correctional Association or the Joint Commission of the Accreditation of Health Organizations.

In Colorado, Cornell runs the Southern Peaks Regional Treatment Center in Cañon City. It is a 160-bed staff-secure facility, and is a treatment alternative to incarceration for adolescents referred through Colorado Department of Human Services and Colorado Department of Youth Corrections with mental health and behavioral issues. The facility was built in 2004.

Source: www.cornellcompanies.com
http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20070415/NEWS/104140151

Posted by lois at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Changes weighed on prison sentences

The Boston Globe
Changes weighed on prison sentences
Patrick reviews mandatory terms

By Andrea Estes, Globe Staff | April 15, 2007

Governor Deval Patrick has launched a comprehensive review of the state's mandatory sentencing laws, an effort endorsed by the attorney general and the chief justice of the state trial courts to help stop the "revolving door" in the state's prison system.

"People come out more dangerous than when they went in," Patrick told the Globe last week, explaining his administration's focus on fundamentally changing the philosophy of the criminal justice system.

Administration officials say that the mandatory minimum sentences, which eliminate judges' discretion in certain cases, drive up the cost of corrections and make it less likely that prisoners will participate in programs that could help them reenter society when they are released.

Because those prisoners cannot get out early for good behavior, critics say, they have little incentive to participate in programs while in prison. And they are barred by law from enrolling in work release, rehabilitation, or furlough programs outside their institution, according to Mary Elizabeth Heffernan, an undersecretary for public safety. Once they wrap up their sentence, she added, they are sent back into society unsupervised.

The effort to revamp these laws is part of a larger administration policy aimed at preparing criminals for life after prison, including changes to a program that allows employers to review the criminal records of potential employees.

Without a comprehensive plan to reintegrate the thousands of criminals who get out of Massachusetts prisons each year, Heffernan said, many will return to crime. Administration statistics indicate that nearly half commit a crime during their first year after release.

"The concept of the revolving door -- the governor and the secretary want to look at how we stop that," Heffernan said, referring to Public Safety Secretary Kevin Burke. "People are moving away from the breaking-rocks portion of the program. This administration is going to take a more thoughtful and appropriate look at what works and what doesn't."

Attorney General Martha Coakley said last week that minimum mandatory sentence are necessary in some cases for consistency: "If you sell a certain amount [of drugs], this is the penalty you'll get, whether you live in a poor part of town or a rich part of town."

"But it's also important to build in a way to make sure people have postrelease supervision, a time for reentry back into society in which people have some supervision and presumably access to services, whether it is job training or addiction services," said Coakley, who served as Middlesex district attorney for eight years before her election last year. "Everyone agrees the Commonwealth has suffered from the lack of any meaningful postrelease supervision. A lot of it was done in the name of being tough on crime."

Robert Mulligan, chief justice for administration and management of the trial courts, said last week that most judges would prefer eliminating mandatory sentences altogether, a step that Heffernan said the administration is not currently contemplating.

Public safety officials are talking to the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association to come up with something that would be acceptable to prosecutors. No specific proposals have been chosen or legislation drafted, she said. "It's just one part of a whole array of things we're looking at around reentry."

The administration is also looking at restricting which information is released to employers under the Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, law, which has made it difficult for released prisoners to find work.

Mandatory sentences were enacted in the early 1990s as a response to the perceived leniency of some judges and a complex sentencing system that was difficult to decipher. Now, people convicted of drug trafficking, carrying a gun without a permit, and some drunken-driving infractions are sentenced to prison terms that require them to serve a minimum amount of time, without any possibility of parole.

Under current law, for example, those found guilty of possessing at least 200 grams of cocaine automatically receive a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years. If they are caught within 1,000 feet of a school or park, the mandatory sentence increases by two years.

Coakley estimates that a third to 40 percent of the state's prisoners are serving mandatory minimum sentences.

If a judge issues a sentence greater than the minimum, the prisoner becomes eligible for programs once the minimum has been served. But many judges, bristling at their loss of discretion, have responded to the restrictions by imposing only the minimum, prosecutors and judges say, and criminals are freed as soon as their mandatory sentence is up.

Only in cases that involve an additional crime are the prisoners potentially subject to probation after their release.

"If a defendant is sentenced to a minimum mandatory sentence for possession of controlled substances and that is all they are serving, with no other charges, there is nothing hanging over them when they get out," said Heffernan.

Mulligan led a legislatively appointed commission that concluded in March 2003 that minorities were disproportionately hit with mandatory minimums, especially school zone violations.

"Most minorities don't live in suburban or rural areas," explained Mulligan. "They live in urban areas where they're always within 1,000 feet of a school."

Among other things, the commission recommended that all sentences include a period when prisoners could apply for parole, but the recommendations were never adopted.

"I'm sure the overwhelming majority of superior and district court judges would support eliminating the mandatory minimum and allowing for discretion," he said.

Patrick said Coakley will bring ideas for changes in mandatory minimum sentencing to the state's new anticrime council, which he created last week in response to the surge in gang and gun violence across the state.

Coakley said that legislation filed by Senator Cynthia Stone Creem would create a sort of hybrid mandatory minimum: prisoners could apply to the Parole Board for release after serving two-thirds of their mandatory minimum sentence.

Under the bill, paroled prisoners could be returned to prison immediately if they violate any of the terms of their release.

Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz, a Republican who opposes any weakening of CORI laws, said he is not necessarily opposed to changing minimum mandatory sentences as long as freed prisoners are subject to supervision.

"Myself and the other DAs would happily look at any proposal that would try to effectuate supervision upon release," he said. "That's incredibly important to make reentry work."

Last week, Patrick filed a separate bill that would require all released prisoners to be supervised for at least nine months.

Andrea Estes can be reached at estes@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/15/changes_weighed_on_prison_sentences?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2007

UK prisons are'radicalising' young Muslims

Fri 13 Apr 2007
UK prisons are'radicalising' young Muslims
FRANK URQUHART, The Scotsman

YOUNG Muslims incarcerated in Britain's jails are being radicalised by the prison system itself, rather than hardline Imams, a Scottish expert in Islamic studies claimed yesterday.

Dr Gabriele Marranci, a lecturer in anthropology of religion at Aberdeen University, has spent four years interviewing Muslims in jails throughout Britain in a study to discover how life behind bars is affecting their Muslim identity and their experience of Islam.

His detailed report reveals that current efforts by the prison authorities to curb radicalism within the UK's jails are in fact fostering extremism.

He said that Muslims who chose to display their faith by growing beards or wearing Islamic caps were being discriminated against in prison. The reluctance of prison Imams to talk about Iraq and other flashpoints in the Islamic world was serving only to leave young and vulnerable Muslims to be "self-educated" behind bars.

Dr Marranci, whose findings are based on more than 170 interviews with current and former Muslim prisoners, said he had uncovered no evidence to suggest that Muslim chaplains were facilitating radicalisation.

He said: "On the contrary, my findings suggest that they are extremely important in preventing dangerous forms of extremism. However, the distrust that they face, both internally and externally, is jeopardising their important function."

Dr Marranci said his study also revealed that Muslim prisoners were being subjected to stricter security surveillance than other inmates, especially when they adopted symbols of their faith, such as beards, veils and caps.

"Growing a beard is, in almost all of the establishments I visited, interpreted as 'radicalisation' of the individual," said Dr Marranci.

"Muslims who openly show their Muslim identity through symbols suffer more discrimination in general than those who keep a low profile.

"The lack of freedom of expression that Muslim prisoners suffer and the continuous atmosphere of suspicion surrounding them have the effect of increasing a sense of frustration and depression that a strong view of Islam can help to overcome."

A spokesman for the Scottish Prison Service said:

"We are not aware of any claims of any attempted radicalisation by Imams of any prisoner group."

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=565312007

Posted by lois at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

IA: 1,000 women incarcerated in a town of 2,000 by 2016

Few fear a larger women's prison
Mitchellville residents say they are not worried by a proposal to expand the state corrections facility.

By WILLIAM PETROSKI
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
April 13, 2007, Des Moines Register

Mitchellville, Ia. - It's hard to find anybody in this town worried about his or her safety, even as state officials study plans to bring hundreds of additional inmates to the state women's prison here.

This central Iowa community of 2,000 people has been home to the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women for 25 years. There hasn't been an escape from the prison since 1995, and most residents shrug when asked about their convict neighbors - 622 women serving time for murder, drug-dealing, prostitution and other crimes.

"The prison is just a fact of life in Mitchellville," said Kerri Fink, a longtime resident who was playing with his 18-month-old grandson, Brock, outside his home here this week. Having inmates residing about two blocks south of his house "is not a problem or a concern at all. They have to have a place to live," he added.

The size of the state women's prison here could increase to hold nearly 1,000 inmates under a consultant's plan that will be discussed today by the Iowa Board of Corrections in Des Moines. The Durrant Group of Dubuque has recommended spending $47 million to replace older buildings and to expand the Mitchellville facility as part of more than $250 million in short-term improvements to Iowa's prison system. Over the long term, an additional $90 million would be spent to upgrade the aging Anamosa State Penitentiary.

The consultant's proposal would consolidate all of the women in Iowa's prisons at Mitchellville. A 100-bed women's prison unit now at the Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility would be moved here, along with the state women's prison reception center, which is now at the Oakdale state prison. The construction at Mitchellville initially would include new facilities for 320 inmates to replace outdated buildings, followed by a second phase to provide space for an additional 192 women. The state expects to have 988 women behind bars by June 2016, up 29 percent from 766 women now incarcerated.

The female prison population growth is a reflection of women entering Iowa's prisons at a faster rate than men, partly because of an increasing number of convictions for drug crimes.

When state officials went ahead in 1982 with plans to convert the old Iowa Women's Reformatory in Rockwell City to a prison for men and to move female inmates to Mitchellville, there was trepidation among many residents here. Some people complained that property values would plunge, public safety would be jeopardized, and prison visitors would stir up trouble.

Mitchellville Mayor David Wieslander and Police Chief Charlie Sickels said this week that none of those fears has been realized.

"We get along fine" with the prison, Wieslander said. "It's part of the community, whether you like it or not."

The prison is surrounded by a tall metal fence topped with razor wire, and state correctional officers do an excellent job of providing security, Sickels said. About the only contact that most Mitchellville residents have with visitors is to occasionally provide them with directions to the prison, he added.

Only a handful of the 192 prison employees live in Mitchellville; most reside in Des Moines and other area communities. The prison's annual operating budget is $15.4 million.

Nicole Hale of Altoona has a 3-year-old daughter, Jordan Avon, who attends a Head Start program at Mitchellville Elementary School, just a couple of blocks north of the prison. Before enrolling her daughter, she said, she drove around the prison and didn't see anything alarming. Security at the school is tight, and Hale said she has no worries about inmates fleeing the prison and heading to the school.

State Sen. Eugene Fraise, a Fort Madison Democrat, said he considers the need for improvements at the Mitchellville prison to be the state's top priority, even more important than constructing a new maximum-security prison at Fort Madison.

The existing Mitchellville prison - formerly a state training school for girls - suffers from overcrowding and antiquated facilities that need to be replaced, state officials said.

"The women's situation is really critical, and we have a lot more women coming to prison,," Fraise said. He expects lawmakers to make decisions on prison construction in the 2008 session.

Dorothy Pickett, 62, of Des Moines, who was paroled from the Mitchellville prison in November on a robbery conviction, is skeptical of the expansion plans.

While she praised some of the prison staff for their kindness, she said the institution lacks quality programs to prepare inmates for lives outside of prison.

She also noted that many inmates suffer from mental illness, drug addiction or both. She contends existing treatment programs aren't sufficient. "They call it a place for rehabilitation, but they don't rehabilitate you," Pickett said.
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070413/NEWS10/7041
30375/1011

Posted by lois at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2007

Disenfranchising Ex-Felons By Manning Marable

Disenfranchising Ex-Felons
By Manning Marable
April 9th, 2007

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, lawmakers who opposed African American voting rights desperately considered ways to remove large numbers of Blacks from their state’s electorates without appearing to violate their constitutional rights.

In the 1960s, many southern and some western states figured out how to accomplish this: to pass state constitutional provisions, or state laws, barring individuals convicted of a felony from voting for the remainder of their lives. Since African Americans were disproportionately prosecuted and convicted of felonies in most state courts, the loss of voting rights would hit Blacks hardest.

This racist scheme – using the criminal justice system not to “rehabilitate” prisoners, but to strip them of their democratic voting rights for life – was successful. In 1968, Florida barred ex-offenders from voting for life. By 2000, approximately 818,000 Florida residents who had prior felony convictions, but who were no longer incarcerated, were disenfranchised.

The vast majority of this disenfranchised population was African-American. None of these citizens ere permitted to vote in Florida’s contested 2000 presidential election, which George W. Bush narrowly “won” by only hundreds of votes.

In the past decade, social justice, prisoners’ rights and civil rights organizations have campaigned extensively for the repeat of these repressive disenfranchisement laws. From a criminology standpoint, they are counterproductive, because they retard the re-entry and reintegration of ex-prisoners back into civil society. Hundreds of judges and even district attorneys have publicly criticized “mandatory-minimum” sentencing laws, that have been responsible for sending hundreds of thousands of mostly non-violent offenders to long prison sentences, and to disenfranchisement.

As a result, a number of states that had disenfranchised ex-felons for life, such as Texas and Alabama, in recent years reformed their laws to restore voting rights to former prisoners.

By 2007, Florida had disenfranchised 950,000 citizens who had felony convictions – the vast majority of whom were Black, Latino and low-income people. In an unexpected move, Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist changed his anti-felon position, to declare that the time had come for his state to leave the “offensive minority of states that uniformly denied ex-prisoners voting rights. `On April 5, 2007, Governor Crist persuaded Florida’s clemency board to restore voting rights to about 800,000 former prisoners.

Crist’s action was vigorously opposed by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, as well as by former governor Jeb Bush. Under the new rules, about 80 percent of the disenfranchised whose crimes were not classified as “violent” will automatically have heir voting rights restored, so long as they have paid any restitution to victims and have no pending criminal charges.

This measure will largely exclude about two hundred thousand people defined as “violent career criminals,” murderers and sexual offenders, who must submit to an investigation of their cases and a hearing before a clemency board. In practical terms, the vast majority of these former prisoners will never vote again. This raises a basic question about the “limits” of American democracy, and the danger in restricting the electoral franchise.

In every democracy throughout the world, except for most of the United States, everyone who is defined as a “citizen” has a right to vote. A “citizen” who has been convicted of any crime, including murder, remains a citizen, and thus retains his or her voting rights. In Maine and Vermont, for example, prisoner behind bars do vote. The other 48 states are not as democratic. In only a small numbers of states, including Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Oregon, and Utah, felons regain the right to vote after leaving prison.

In states like New York and Colorado, former prisoners who are on parole and still under the jurisdiction of criminal justice authorities can’t vote. In a host of states, mostly in the south and far west, ex-felons who successfully complete years of parole are no longer excluded from voting.

And in Virginia and Kentucky, ex-prisoners are still barred from voting for life. Conservatively, there are now five million Americans who are out of prison, and who have “repaid their debt to society,” but who temporarily or permanently cannot vote.

Recent developments in Florida represent a major, although partial, victory for the forces of democracy. In practical political terms, Governor Crist’s decision adds pressure on states like Virginia and Kentucky that still refuse to reform their ex-felon voting restrictions.

Civil rights and prisoners’ rights advocates need to redouble their efforts now to overturn these legal remnants of the racist, Jim Crow segregation era.

Black Star News columnist Dr. Marable is Professor of Public Affairs, History and African-American Studies, and Director of the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University.
http://blackstarnews.com/?c=135&a=3200

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

Among Architects, a Prison Design Boycott Gains Steam

Feature: Among Architects, a Prison Design Boycott Gains Steam
from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #480, 4/6/07

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as France embarked on a massive prison-building campaign, working class anarchist revolutionaries fought back by attacking the prison-industrial complex. Naming themselves Os Cangaceiros after the social bandits of the Brazilian northeast in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the revolutionaries sabotaged prison construction, published prison blueprints, and physically assaulted architects who designed prisons before being repressed and melting away into the subterranean criminal networks they had established over the previous decades.

Professionals are responsible for their behavior, the revolutionaries argued. In a communique to one prison architect they attacked, they wrote:

Letter to an Architect

Subject: Ambush

Are your wounds well healed, architect? Did you figure out why?

Shamelessly, with no discretion of any kind, centimetre by centimetre, you have conceived these cages in which even the handicapped will be locked up. Inside the walls which you have designed, individuals who are worth more than you will be beaten up on a regular basis. It is good that you have received an appetizer of what thousands of prisoners will endure to the nth degree.

To be sure, architect, this is not your company's first infamy. Considering what you build to house normal citizens, one can guess your competence to shut away delinquents. One moves easily from the tower blocks of the 13th arrondisement to prison cells.

Pig, looking at your snout up close, we were able to note from your tired face how deeply you involve yourself in your projects.

Before you were building walls, now you're going to knock them down.

Os Cangaceiros, Lyon, 29/03/90

Beginning in the 1980s, the US has seen an ever more massive prison boom and a never-ending demand for more prison construction. With the prison and jail population now approaching 2.3 million and steadily increasing, there is no end in sight. And as in France, architects are among those profiting from penal profligacy. But not all members of the profession are willing to "conceive cages."

Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) is not a revolutionary anarchist organization, but, as the name suggests, a group of architects and planners interested in social justice issues. Still, ADPSR shares with Os Cangaceiros both the belief that professionals have an obligation to help create a better society and the conviction that mass imprisonment as a solution to social problems is something to be decried, not abetted.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/files/adpsr1.gif
ADPSR poster contest winning entry, by Miguel Bermudez (adpsr.org/prisons/poster.htm)
For the past three years, ADPSR has been working proactively on an effort to get architects, designers, and planners to wash their hands of working on prison projects, the Prison Design Boycott Campaign. The campaign seeks to get architecural professionals to sign a pledge to "not participate in the design, construction, or renovation of prisons."

Between September 2004, when the campaign started, and January 2006, 500 of the estimated 1,000 to 2,000 architectural and planning professionals who would work on prison design signed the pledge. Now, according to campaign head Raphael Sperry, a San Francisco Bay-area architect, that number is up to 800.

For Sperry and ADPSR, the prison design boycott is part of a larger effort to challenge militarism and violence within American society and the US government. "We have a long history of peace and social justice work dating back to the 1980s," Sperry told Drug War Chronicle. "This campaign had its genesis in the war with Iraq. For us, the war presented us with the issue of militarism, both at home and abroad. With the peace movement so far ineffective, it seemed important to us to challenge this whole mindset at home, where people can see it on a day to day basis, and prisons are one of the biggest social justice failings of our country these days," he said.

"We are calling for an end to the expansion of the prison-industrial complex as a first step," Sperry continued. "We also want to see reinvestment in communities to provide for public safety and we want community-based alternatives to incarceration to solve problems and reduce crime."

ADPSR specifically targets the war on drugs. "The war on drugs is one of the biggest components of the rise of mass incarceration, and the drug laws and drug policy is one of the biggest problems in our criminal justice system today," Sperry said. "We use incarceration instead of treatment. That's not solving the problem, just pushing it behind the walls."

http://stopthedrugwar.org/files/adpsr2.gif
ADPSR poster contest runner-up entry, by William Arbizu & Kerstin Vogdes (adpsr.org/prisons/poster.htm)
While the campaign has yet to prevent any prisons from being built, it has raised awareness of the issue in the professional community. The campaign has been covered in numerous professional publications, correctional industry publications, and the mainstream press, and it has led to debate within the industry's primary professional organizations, such as the American Institute of Architecture and the American Planning Association.

"We have gotten a lot of attention from architects who design prisons," said Sperry. "Even many of them share and appreciate our understanding of the flaws of the criminal justice system. Raising awareness is really important because it can provide us with real room for legislative reform on criminal justice issues like sentencing and drug policy. With this campaign, we hope to add another noisy voice to those already calling for reform."

With about one-third of planners working for various government agencies, reaching them with the campaign message is a tactical goal. "These are the people who put together future prison population projections and do the planning used to create mass incarceration. Every year, they just say "we're going to need more prisons," instead of arguing for policy decisions to reduce the number of prisoner," Sperry noted.

It's not just architects and planners who have embraced the Prison Design Boycott. It has been endorsed by a number of criminal justice reform groups, including the anti-prison activists of Critical Resistance, the Justice Policy Institute, which seeks to end over-reliance on incarceration, and the November Coalition, which focuses on drug war prisoners.

"We embraced the architects' efforts early on because we agree with them that there are too many people in prison and it's essential to expand our movement," said the November Coalition's Tom Murlowski. "Architects and planners are part of the infrastructure of the prison-industrial complex, and we are very pleased to see this organization challenge the profession on this," he told the Chronicle.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/files/adpsr3.gif
ADPSR poster contest finalist entry, by Allison Colley (adpsr.org/prisons/poster.htm)
"We are working on parallel lines here. We've recently launched No New Prisons, a web site about how to stop prisons in your own communities, including examples for activists of how it's been done, like we successfully stopped the new prison here in Stevens County, Washington," Murlowski said.

While the campaign may not prevent prisons from being built, the project will advance the cause in various ways, said Sperry. "Look, if 99% of architects signed the pledge, there would still be that 1% willing to do the work, but at the level of political acceptability, if we reach a point where a majority of architects are saying the government shouldn't even embark on building new prisons, that says something. Architects are licensed by the state and have a responsibility to protect the public health, safety, and welfare, so if they are saying building prisons does not contribute to a safe public environment, that's a strong public statement," he said.

"There are a lot of young architects who say they didn't become architects to lock people up," Sperry concluded. "I hear stories of the partners in firms going after those contracts, but the young people didn't want to work on prisons. There was an internal resistance, but not a coordinated movement, so we thought we could make a public statement and make it more targeted."

The campaign pledge is not just for architecture, design, and planning professionals. Sperry and the Prison Design Boycott Campaign want anyone who understands and agrees with their position to sign the pledge on their web site.

While the methods of Os Cangaceiros may have a certain outlaw appeal, we're happy to see the architects themselves trying to take matters in hand instead.

Posted by lois at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)

Driving is Key To Jobs for People Who Have Been Incarcerated

Driving is ex-inmates' key to jobs
Study says invalid licenses slow post-prison employment, life
By ERICA PEREZ
Feb. 6, 2007

The number of people released from prison each year into Milwaukee County has increased nearly four-fold since 1993, and this population faces severe barriers to getting and keeping jobs, a new report from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Employment and Training Institute has found.

The numbers disproportionately affect young African-American males. Some 40% of those ages 25 to 29 have served time in prison, the report finds.

"That's the work force of Milwaukee," said the study's author, John Pawasarat.

The UWM study, to be released today, focuses on one obstacle to employment that faces the majority of former inmates: the lack of a valid driver's license. Many felons have had their licenses suspended or revoked - more often because of failure to pay fines or drug offenses rather than because of serious driving violations, Pawasarat said.

Of the estimated 26,772 adults in Milwaukee County who have done prison time, 62% have driver's license suspension problems, the report found. That can be a major obstacle in finding employment.

Pawasarat recommends that the state Department of Corrections and the City of Milwaukee take steps to help former prisoners who don't have serious driving violations get their licenses back quicker and less expensively.

"If you don't have a license, you don't have a prayer of getting and keeping a job over time," Pawasarat said.

Although the UWM report does not address the cause of an increase in prisoner releases, a 2006 study by Justice Strategies, an organization founded by criminal justice policy analysts Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis, points to a dramatic increase in Wisconsin's incarceration rates.

That study found that the state's prison population has doubled in the past decade, a trend that is in part owed to a surge in the number of people incarcerated for non-violent offenses, which in Milwaukee grew tenfold from 1990 to 2004.
Man's return took awhile

As part of Daunte Henderson's sentence for drug possession with intent to deliver, his driver's license was suspended for six months. But the suspension didn't start until after he was released from the House of Correction in 2002.

Henderson started looking for production, manufacturing or warehouse jobs, but most of them required a valid driver's license. On top of that, most of the work was beyond the reach of bus lines, in places such as Grafton or New Berlin.

In the meantime, Henderson worked temp jobs. Every time a permanent job came up, the companies would look elsewhere to fill the spots.

That reflects the findings of a previous Employment and Training Institute study, which reported that three-quarters of available Milwaukee-area jobs are in suburban areas that are difficult to reach by public transportation. And for many jobs, a valid driver's license is a requirement to get in the door.

A number of local agencies and non-profits have worked on driver's license recovery projects to help close the gap between the unemployed in the central city and available jobs in the suburbs.

A four-month Milwaukee Municipal Court amnesty program in 2004 offered drivers the chance to reduce their traffic fines by half, helping roughly 1,000 drivers recover licenses.

But Pawasarat makes further recommendations. The Department of Corrections should assess prisoners' driver's license status immediately after they enter a facility so that application waiting periods can be served while inmates are behind bars, he said.

Gregory Williams, assistant executive director of Wisconsin Community Services, a non-profit group that helps former offenders integrate into the community, was enthusiastic about the recommendation.

"All of these barriers that stand in front of them while they're incarcerated, they're multiplied once they get out," Williams said. "There needs to be more transitional planning."

The study also recommends that the Department of Corrections launch a driver's license restoration initiative. That would allow inmates to prepare for and take the written driver's test from behind bars, allow them to apply for a license from prison and give them ways to pay work off reinstatement and application fees, Pawasarat said.

John Dipko, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections, said the department was reviewing the UWM report and would consider its recommendations.

From Henderson's perspective, speeding up the driver's license recovery process would have been a big help to him.

Even after he got his license, it took him about four years to secure a permanent job as a plant operator trainee at We Energies in Oak Creek.

"I would've gotten a job earlier," he said.

On the Web To view the full report, go to www.eti.uwm.edu.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=562797

Posted by lois at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)

Is the U.S. Ready for Human Rights?

YES! Magazine Spring 2007 Issue:
Is the U.S. Ready for Human Rights?
Mere Justice
by Jesse Wegman

The drive to punishment is making us forget that prisoners have a right to be heard.

Scales of Justice image (Creative Commons)
The plea was straightforward, Chris O’Bryant’s court-appointed lawyer told him: Take a life sentence on each of two counts and get out in 25 years, maybe sooner.

O’Bryant had wanted to go to trial and claim voluntary intoxication—after all, he didn’t remember robbing anyone or shooting at a police officer. He hadn’t even hurt anybody. But his lawyer told him there was no such defense and urged him to plead guilty instead. O’Bryant, only 23 at the time, trusted his lawyer and did as he was advised.

The problem was, the lawyer was dead wrong: there was such a defense. Even worse, the lawyer had misunderstood the terms of the plea, which in fact put O’Bryant in prison for life without the possibility of parole. And because of a 1996 law limiting his right to get these errors addressed through a writ of habeas corpus, there’s nothing he can do about it.

The Great Writ
A writ of habeas corpus is an extraordinary legal remedy available to a person in government custody. The “writ” itself is a court order requiring the state (or federal government) to prove that it has a legal right to hold you in jail or in prison. When the government is served with a writ of habeas corpus, it must prove that your federal constitutional rights have not been violated. If the proof is not there, the court may order a new trial or sentencing, or even release you outright.

Habeas corpus has been a touchstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence for nearly a millennium. It is protected explicitly in the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has called it “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.”

It is also a universal human right. It appears in, among other places, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the American Convention on Human Rights. In short, it is a constitutional right, enshrined in international law, that offers a last line of defense for an imprisoned individual against the indifference of or abuse by the State.

But why should we care whether someone like Chris O’Bryant is able to challenge the legality of his sentence? After all, he doesn’t deny that he shot at a cop. Isn’t habeas corpus really a concern for, say, those Middle Eastern men sitting in cramped cages at Guantánamo Bay, unable to challenge their detention in any civilian court? Surely it is, and since soon after September 11 there has been no shortage of coverage of the clashes between the three branches of the federal government over this fundamental question.

But obscured by these headlines is a bigger story: the decade-long rollback of the right to petition for habeas corpus aimed at the more than 2 million people held in U.S. federal and state prisons. Tens of thousands of prisoners try to file habeas petitions each year: some of them claim innocence; most claim some form of constitutional error in their arrest or trial—but all of them are entitled not to be imprisoned illegally. By preventing them from exercising this basic human (and constitutional) right, we undercut the integrity of the criminal process, as well as the principles on which this nation was founded. And that’s a threat you don’t need to sympathize with a prisoner to comprehend.

The End of “Prisoner-Coddling”
On April 24, 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. AEDPA, as it is known, was triggered by the Oklahoma City bombing a year earlier. It was enacted in part to speed up the death penalty appeals process (that is, to execute more people, faster). But another central purpose of AEDPA—one which the bill’s backers had sought for a long time—was to restrict dramatically the availability of habeas corpus to all prisoners.

“Habeas corpus reform … is the Holy Grail [of AEDPA],” said Representative Henry Hyde in the days before the bill became law. “We have pursued that for 14 years.”

The groundwork Hyde was referring to was laid in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as an increasingly conservative Supreme Court began to retreat from rulings of the previous two decades that had made it easier for prisoners to file habeas petitions. (That availability had itself been a long time coming; until the 20th century, convicted prisoners were largely prohibited from petitioning for habeas corpus.)

Around the same time, the number of habeas petitions filed increased dramatically—100 percent between 1987 and 1996—and public pressure to stem the flow intensified. It did not seem to matter that the increase was due primarily to the ballooning national prison population—in fact, the rate of habeas filings per thousand inmates decreased during the same period. Nor did it matter that many inmates were raising potentially meritorious claims of innocence or major trial error. Habeas had become a vague yet powerful symbol of prisoner-coddling, and politicians were eager to find a way to attack it.

AEDPA, passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, codified the retrenchment that had occurred during the ’70s and ’80s. Among the roadblocks it set up were a one-year filing deadline and a near-total prohibition against filing more than one petition, even if new evidence comes to light later on.

But hardest to overcome was the “unreasonable” requirement: in order for a federal court to overturn a state court’s ruling on a prisoner’s federal constitutional claim, it must find that ruling not simply wrong, but “unreasonably wrong.” Of course state courts can, and not infrequently do, misapply federal law. But under AEDPA, unless the error is unreasonable—and it is rarely found to be—the federal court must go along with it.

Even though AEDPA drastically curtailed crucial, hard won constitutional and international human rights that have existed, in some form, for centuries, it was surprisingly easy for politicians to sell to the average voter. “The people back home won’t understand what you’ve done, but they will understand that you’ve made it harder for people to get out of prison, and that’s a good thing,” says Bryan Stevenson, executive director of Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor at New York University School of Law.

Stevenson, who has spent his career defending death-row inmates throughout the South, was among the many critics who argued that AEDPA was the wrong approach. “Instead of saying, ‘We’re convicting a lot of people illegally, we’re convicting a lot of innocent people, let’s fix that,’ what I think most politicians have said is, ‘Let’s just turn off this complaint valve. We shut this down, then it’s just not going to be a problem for us,’” Stevenson says.

Blowback
AEDPA may have made politicians look good, but its longer-term effects have become a problem for nearly everyone else.

For starters, the law was so confusingly drafted that much of the habeas litigation of the past decade has revolved around making sense of what it means. And as a result of the ever-growing prison population and the scramble to meet the new filing deadline, the rate of habeas petitions actually increased after AEPDA’s passage—from 13 filings per 1,000 inmates in 1995 to 17 per 1,000 in 2000. This irony was not lost on the law’s supporters, who countered with a proposal for a stronger dose of the same bad medicine: the Streamlined Procedures Act (SPA).

Introduced in May 2005, the SPA is ostensibly aimed, once again, at speeding up executions. But, like its predecessor AEDPA, it would set new roadblocks in the way of any prisoner seeking to challenge his or her conviction on any grounds.

So far, the bill has run into intense opposition. But it is not yet dead, and there’s no guarantee that the new Democratic Congress will defeat it.

“It’s not as if the Democrats are against restricting habeas and the Republicans are in favor of it,” says Stevenson, pointing out that it was Bill Clinton who signed AEDPA in an effort to strengthen his own tough-on-crime credentials.

Despite its historic importance as both a civil and a human right, habeas corpus has never been a get-out-of-jail-free card. Federal courts grant the writ in a minuscule number of the 20,000 to 25,000 petitions filed each year, statistics that lead some prisoners and prisoner advocates to downplay the importance of AEDPA and related legislation.

“If you look at the number of successful habeas petitions, it’s like winning the lottery,” says Paul Wright, who served 17 years for murder in Washington State, during which time he became a respected jailhouse lawyer and started Prison Legal News, an inmate-written legal newsletter he still edits today.

To Wright, the main concern is what happens before a habeas petition gets filed—that is, in the state courts of appeals. These courts—often populated by elected judges who run under tough-on-crime platforms—cursorily deny the vast majority of criminal appeals that come before them. Combine that problem with the extreme deference AEDPA requires of federal courts reviewing state-court rulings, and habeas corpus petitions often seem to be no more than a formality.

As a result, Wright thinks that the “Great Writ” looks a lot more powerful than it is. “It’s like saying you have a spoiler on the back of your car. It looks nice, but what does it actually do?”

Bryan Stevenson agrees that there have always been obstacles to the granting of habeas—such as getting lawyers, developing the evidence, getting someone, anyone, to care. The difference, he says, is that those obstacles “weren’t the law itself.” He adds, “Your opportunity, if you were innocent, to get out of jail was still dramatically greater throughout most of our history than it is today.”

Prying open the courtroom doors
Even if you’re not innocent, but you want to challenge the constitutionality of your trial, your plea, or your sentencing, habeas corpus is essentially your only hope. That’s Chris O’Bryant’s problem: even though his trial lawyer later admitted his errors, O’Bryant missed the one-year deadline for filing his habeas petition—thanks to being hopped up on a regimen of anti-psychotic drugs prison officials prescribed shortly after he arrived.

Today O’Bryant is off medications and understands the law much better—so much so that he has become a jailhouse lawyer, assisting other prisoners with their legal claims. Like him, many of them are time-barred under AEDPA from filing their own habeas corpus petitions, regardless of the constitutional issues they may raise. O’Bryant is likely to see many more of these men: now 35 years old, he will live out his days in a cell at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Lake City, Florida.

Jesse Wegman
Jesse Wegman is a writer and lawyer living in New York.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1635

Posted by lois at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

Hutto TX: Facility angers ACLU, U. Texas students

Facility angers ACLU, U. Texas students

Originally published: 4/10/07
http://media.www.stateronline.com/media/storage/paper867/news/2007/04/11/OtherCampuses/Facility.Angers.Aclu.U.Texas.Students-2833472.shtml

AUSTIN, Texas (U-WIRE) - A mundane, state-of-the-art building outside of Austin, Texas, has stirred the hearts of two radio-television-film students, numerous immigrant rights groups on campus, the University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The facility under scrutiny is the privately owned T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a for-profit immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas.

Inside, approximately 200 immigrant children and their families live in what some people are calling inhumane conditions while awaiting their court hearings.

Nine-year-old Canadian Kevin Yourdkhani wrote a message to his prime minister pleading for rescue.

"I don't like to stay in this jail. I'm only 9 years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I'm sleeping beside the wall. Please Prime Minister Harper give visa for my family," he said in his letter.

Fifteen-year-old Lithuanian Egle "Anna" Baubonyte expressed how she felt about the center in her plaintiff statement for a recently filed law suit.

"In my opinion, even if they are trying to make this place nicer and look like an actual residential center, it is still a prison to me. There's no pediatrician. Nurses don't care if babies are sick or not. They treat us like we're nothing," she said.

On March 6, the national ACLU joined with ACLU of Texas and the UT Immigration Law Clinic to file 10 lawsuits in federal court disputing the federal government's detainment of immigrant children in the residential center. Lead counsel Vanita Gupta said her first visit to Hutto left her with a serious sense of urgency to do something.

"My first trip to Hutto was in early February. I have visited many Texas prisons before, and I was shocked to find that Hutto was no different than those and that such young children were being confined in a prison," Gupta said. "I spent several days in the facility, speaking to detainees and their children and investigating the conditions."

UT student groups respond

Passersby in the rainy West Mall over the last week-and-a-half may have stumbled upon giant message boards showcasing documentation of Yourdkhani, Baubonyte and other children's pleas to be freed from the detention center. The display was organized by numerous student groups, including Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan, the Campus Anti-War Movement to End the Occupation and the Public Affairs Alliance for Communities of Color. The political organization aims to "promote the theory and practice of equality and social justice," among other goals, according to the Office of the Dean of Students. The children's hand-written pleas and formal plaintiff statements were taken off of the ACLU Web site.

Wednesday night, this array of student groups sponsored a panel on the incarceration of immigrant families at the Hutto facility. Speakers discussed litigation surrounding the center, as well as alternatives to detaining children and their families, many of whom are asylum seekers.

"In August, I got a call from a woman saying her daughter and daughter's baby were in jail in Taylor. I've never gotten a call about (a family being detained together); it's always been about an adult by themselves," said Frances Valdez, clinical instructor at the UT Immigration Law Clinic, via e-mail.

After arriving at the border, asylum seekers are detained while awaiting their asylum hearing, she said.

"They could sit in detention for months while awaiting the completion of the asylum process. If someone goes through the asylum process and is denied, they can then be deported back to their home country."

The facility

The T. Don Hutto Residential Center is unique, because it is one of two detention centers in the country that detains non-Mexican families with children from all over the world on non-criminal charges. It is run by Corrections Corporation of America, the fifth-largest corrections system in the nation and founder of the private-prison industry, according to Hutto's Web site. In May 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted with the corporation to open the detention center after converting it from a medium-security prison.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said detaining families at Hutto was part of Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff's Secure Border Initiative.

"The reason it was built was to detain families as a family unit. Before the facility existed, the families would get detained, and after they were processed and taken into custody, they were separated, because we didn't have a facility that could detain families as a unit," Pruneda said.

Prior to opening Hutto, the immigration agency's policy was "catch and release," in which immigrants would be issued a court date notice and released. According to the agency, this policy was ineffective, because undocumented immigrants rarely appeared in court.

"Some families were disregarding that notice, so therefore when they didn't show up, they became fugitives. That was somewhat part of the Secure Border Initiative and another reason for the facility to come together," Pruneda said.

Last summer, the federal government announced the end of "catch and release" and recently funded 6,700 beds in detention facilities.

Panelist Rebecca Bernhardt, immigration, border and national security policy director of the ACLU of Texas, spoke about the economic relationship between Hutto and the government.

"(Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has a contract with (Corrections Corporation of America), and CCA has a contract with Williamson County. Williamson County gets paid for doing very little," Bernhardt said.

Another panelist, UT government senior Luissana Santibanez, who is also a MEChA activist and representative for the Austin nonprofit organization Grassroots Leadership, commented on the security corporation's profiting from detainees.

"It's in their interest to keep them detained, because the government pays up to $95 per day per immigrant to keep them in a private facility," Santibanez said.

The lawsuits

Director of the UT Immigration Law Clinic Barbara Hines has been working closely with attorney Vanita Gupta on the detainees' lawsuits.

"The lawsuit is to enforce a settlement agreement that the government agreed to in 1997 that set out settlement agreements to children," Hines said.

The ACLU accuses Chertoff and five immigration officials of violating the U.S. Department of Justice settlement agreement in Flores v. Meese. This agreement required that detained children must receive proper health, educational and social provisions; be kept in the least restrictive setting possible; and be released to a family member as soon as possible.

The panelists said that each cell contains one metal bunk bed next to a toilet and that, contrary to the immigration agency's Web site, Hutto detainees have to wear prison-like garb. They said Yourdkhani's and Baubonyte's letters, alone, show a clear discrepancy between the settlement's requirements and the reality of the residential center.

Luissana Santibanez

Soft-spoken, yet firm, Santibanez spoke last during the panel. Her story rings atypical of most UT students - on top of going to class and being active on campus, she spent the last year-and-a-half supporting her three younger siblings while her mother was detained.

After being convicted of transporting undocumented immigrants within the state of Texas, her mother served a four-month prison sentence, she said.

Her mother was sent into detention under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. She was kept in security corporation's Houston Processing Center from December 2005 until being deported to Mexico three weeks ago. Like many detainees, her mother was a permanent legal resident of the United States, Santibanez said.

"The hardest thing about having a family member in detention, especially when that person was the sole breadwinner of the family, was that it had a huge economic strain on our family," Santibanez said. "Not only did I have to take care of my younger siblings, but make sure that every month my mom had enough money for toiletries, phone cards and pens and paper."

Since her mother's incarceration, Santibanez has dedicated a lot of energy to protesting the private prison industry, especially the facility in Hutto. She compared her mother's experience to that of a child.

"If it was hard for my mom, a grown woman, to deal with being detained in a prison, I couldn't imagine how traumatizing that same experience would be for children. So we're working on it," she said. "Hopefully, people from all backgrounds can join us on this. Regardless of how you feel on immigration in this country, we know people are pro-family and will eventually recognize that having children in jail is wrong."

The ACLU advocates several alternatives to the Hutto facility.

"Alternatives would be releasing children and their parents into community homes and refugee shelters and utilizing the Intensive Supervision Assistant Program, an intensive security program which electronically monitors immigrants with ankle bracelets. None of these alternatives have ever been tried out for children and their parents," Hines said.

The suggestion is calculated to be 55 percent less costly than detention, according to a study by the Vera Institute of Justice.

Last semester, Santibanez was the subject of a documentary created by two students in radio-television film professor Andy Garrison's RTF East Austin Stories class. When photojournalism and journalism senior Sarah Lim proposed the private detention center topic to her class, nobody but radio-television-film senior Jenny Alvarado raised their hand to join the project.

"A lot of people in the class were not behind it, because it covers so many different things regarding human rights and immigrant rights. It wasn't just an East Austin story; it was a U.S. travesty story in East Austin," Alvarado said.

Little did they know, a semester later the controversy surrounding Hutto would soar to the level of international news attention. The documentary, "Life's Torn: The Impact of Deportation," follows Santibanez and her siblings on a visit to see their mom in Houston. It will be posted sometime soon on the East Austin Stories Web site.

Looking forward

Since the case was filed on March 6, 9-year-old Yourdkhani was released from Hutto with his family. Six other children were, as well. Baubonyte remains in detention with her mother and sister, but the ACLU hopes to see them released like the others.

Professor Valdez from the law clinic expressed concern, however, for what the near future holds for Hutto detainees.

"We're really worried about what's going to happen this summer when the semester ends. We're trying to put together a pro-bono panel that will be able to represent Hutto detainees for free," Valdez said.

Gupta was more optimistic.

"The students will be gone, but Barbara Hines will be co-counsel. We're still going to be litigating the cases, so we're moving forward, because the judge is going to set a trial date," she said.

On Tuesday, a conglomeration of immigrant-rights groups in Austin will rally and march down Congress Avenue to champion immigration reform. One proposal, House Concurrent Resolution 64, would pressure the Department of Homeland Security to utilize alternatives to substandard detainment. The rally starts at 4:30 p.m. on the south steps of the Capitol, and the march starts at 5:30 p.m.

Posted by lois at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2007

NY: A Good Parole Model---But Always Denied

A GOOD PAROLE MODEL
BUT ALWAYS DENIED
By DAREH GREGORIAN, NY Post

April 9, 2007 -- A Queens man who shot and killed a serial sex abuser who'd raped his girlfriend has been denied parole three times, despite a sterling record behind bars.
John Valverde's exemplary conduct in prison - which includes earning college degrees, teaching other inmates and speaking out against violence - has gotten him letters of support over the years from prison guards, politicians and even the late John Cardinal O'Connor.
But the Parole Division keeps ignoring his pleas for freedom, saying he has "contempt for human life and total indifference for the law."
Nothing could be further from the truth, said Fernando Mateo, of Hispanics Across America, which is backing Valverde's bid for freedom, as are a group of Columbia law students who are filing suit on Valverde's behalf this week.
The suit calls the decision "irrational," and seeks to have a judge order a new parole hearing.
"He's shown remorse. He's rehabilitated. He deserves a chance to live again, to come out into society and show what kind of man he's become," Mateo said.
Valverde was a 21-year-old college student with no criminal record when he gunned down Joel Schoenfeld on Jan. 5, 1991.
Schoenfeld, 47, used his job as a freelance photographer to lure women into his Greenwich Village loft, where police said he'd sexually assault and rape them.
One of his victims was Valverde's 19-year-old girlfriend, whom he'd attacked after Valverde dropped her off at his Greenwich Village loft.
Valverde went to police on three occasions to try to get them to arrest Schoenfeld, who was on probation for sexually assaulting two other women.
They told him they couldn't do anything without the girlfriend's cooperation, but she was too traumatized to press charges. When Schoenfeld started calling the girlfriend, Valverde borrowed a gun from a friend and went to his loft.
After an argument, Valverde shot Schoenfeld in the head.
A jury cleared Valverde of murder charges, but he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 to 30 years.
While behind bars, Valverde finished college, got a master's degree, was certified as a paralegal, worked as a teacher's aide helping fellow inmates to read and write, taught theology and worked as an HIV/AIDS counselor.
Even a correction officer wrote a letter supporting his release, calling him "the perfect example of a model prisoner."
But Parole has been unmoved.
"The violence displayed in this crime outweighs everything else," the division said last year.
dareh.gregorian@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04092007/news/regionalnews/a_good_parole_model_regionalnews_dareh_gregorian.htm

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

Phoning Home: High Cost Calls Hinder Prisoner Rehabilitation

Phoning Home: High Cost Calls Hinder Prisoner Rehabilitation
By Henry Fernandez
April 9, 2007

My wife used to be a public defender in Pennsylvania, representing prisoners in their appeals. Over the years, several prisoners came to trust her judgment and still call our house from time to time seeking advice. As I organize our bills so we can pay them each month, I have unwittingly become heavily involved in funding criminal defense work myself. This is because collect calls from prisons, often lasting only a few minutes, generate absurd costs.

Here's an example. Three calls originating from a prison in Pennsylvania totaling 25 minutes in January and February of last year cost my wife and I $26.73, or about $1.07 per minute. Now, we don't like paying these charges, but we can afford them and they are rather limited for us as a family. We do not have a relative in prison and the calls do not come that often or last that long.

But what about prisoners trying to stay in touch with their families as they seek to rehabilitate themselves in prison and prepare for life after prison as responsible members of society? Most prisoners are poor and their families are poor. High cost phone bills force families to make bad choices. They can either not accept calls from family members in prison or they can spend money they don't have.

What archaic phone service are prisoners using to make these outrageously overpriced collect calls? Well my phone bill lists the service provider for these calls as "Verizon Select Services." I don't use Verizon so I was shocked that they could stay in business charging so much for a call. So I checked Verizon's web site and learned that for $39.99 a month (or about $480 a year), a Pennsylvania resident could have unlimited calling to anywhere in the United States including Puerto Rico.

Prisoners, however, cannot receive phone calls and in many states cannot choose which phone service to use. They must make a collect call using the service contracted for by the prison. If a prisoner tries to talk to family members once a week in Pennsylvania for just 15 minutes to stay in touch with his children or so that a sick parent knows her incarcerated daughter still cares, their families will be paying over $834 a year to stay in touch.

That's $834 for about 12 hours of talk time a year. Why should twelve hours of conversation a year from prison cost $350 more than unlimited calling for the rest of us?

I know of no social science of any mainstream political persuasion which would dictate that it makes sense to deny prisoners access to their families. Quite the opposite.

Having prisoners, the large majority of whom will return to society, maintain a connection with their families is in most cases the best thing for them. Even the Federal Bureau of Prisons appears to agree. In its 2004 Legal Resource Guide the agency says: "Telephone privileges are a supplemental means of maintaining community and family ties that contributes to an inmate's personal development."

Similarly, it makes no sense to drive the primarily poor families of prisoners further into poverty. The stronger these families are, the more likely they are to be a source of strength and support for prisoners during their time in prison and when they get out.

Poverty is a factor that increases the likelihood that someone will end up in prison. Increasing poverty among families already at risk is more than bad anti-crime policy-it is immoral.

Why do so many state departments of correction, county jailers, and even juvenile detention facilities so often charge exorbitant fees for telephone services to their captive audiences? Research done in 2004 by the Associated Press showed that California counties earned on average about half of the more than $303 million from collect calls made by prisoners over a five-year period. So at the end of the day, prisoner's families, most of which are poor, are paying a hidden tax to maintain the prisons.

While over-charging the families of prisoners continues across America, advocates have begun to win some key victories. For example, in February 2004 the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the state of New York and MCI on behalf of the families of prisoners to stop telephone over-charging by MCI/Verizon, alleging that the phone companies and the state government were charging 630 percent more for collect calls from prison than for a regular collect call.

The lawsuit is now winding its ways through the courts. Just last month New York's highest court ruled that the case could proceed after state lawyers contested whether the suit was filed in a timely fashion.

But the state's new governor, Eliot Spitzer, decided that there was no reason for New York to wait any longer to bring some measure of justice to these families. Spitzer acted to end this egregious practice-only days after he became Governor. As of April 1, New York no longer requires MCI/Verizon to pay 57.5 per cent of its profits to the state.

The Center for Constitutional Rights estimates that this should result in an immediate cost savings to families of at least 50 per cent. But across America there is still a long way to go.

States ought to stop the pathetic practice of gouging poor families who just want to keep in touch with loved ones in prison. It's mean-spirited and bad policy. It should end.

Henry Fernandez is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on state and municipal policy. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/phoning_home.html

Posted by lois at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Ex-Warden: No More Prisons

March 31, 2007, Houston Chronicle
REDUCE POPULATION
Ex-warden: No more prisons
Texas' crowding 'crisis' is self-made

By RICHARD WATKINS
AFTER decades of hard experience, experts have finally figured out that simply putting lots of petty criminals in prison for long terms is exorbitantly costly and mostly ineffective in reducing crime. Alternatives such as progressive sanctions, treatment for addiction, and careful supervision cost less and reduce crime more.

Yet now that Texas prisons are filled to capacity, a few powerful state policy-makers still want to add to the state's bloated 106-prison system. Texas is at a crossroads. The wrong decision could have tremendous ripple effects on our economy, public safety and overall welfare. The state must not elect to construct new prisons.

Evidence shows that many prisoners can be safely released, easing our self-made "crisis." "Trustees" are a case in point. Without adequate staff for our existing prison facilities (we need about 2,700 additional corrections officers) TDCJ uses inmates instead. TDCJ allows 6,200 prisoner "trustees" off prison grounds without any identification to carry out duties for guards and other staff. The vast majority of trustees, about 5,700, are eligible for parole.

The three proposed new prisons will house about 4,000 total inmates. If we simply were to spend our money to properly staff existing facilities and release parole-eligible trustees, Texas would completely eliminate the immediate need for new facilities without further policy changes. With the addition of appropriate treatment for addiction and a stronger system of probation, we could start thinking about closing older, expensive and less safe prisons.

Since the early 1990s we have added more than 100,000 prison beds, including 13,000 added since the late '90s. Although there was a nationwide drop in crime during this time, Texas' crime rate dropped significantly less than other large states although we incarcerated significantly more people. Meanwhile, researchers attribute only about one-fourth of Texas' drop in crime to prison expansion. Newly released research from the Vera Institute suggests that increased incarceration may even lead to more crime.

Ultimately, prison expansion fails to make us safer and perpetuates a cycle of criminality that can be broken with a different approach to punishment. More than half of TDCJ prison admissions annually are revoked parolees and probationers. Serving time in prison prevents individuals from becoming independent, contributing members of society, and prisons do not offer programs that rehabilitate individuals so they can succeed in the job market and provide for their families upon release.

People we put in prison who get no treatment or rehabilitation actually leave prison slightly more likely to commit new crimes, while individuals who receive treatment are far less likely to re-offend.

If someone in your family is addicted to alcohol or a drug, you know that it's hard to kick an addiction, but that when you kick, you can become a fully functioning and responsible person again. Drug and alcohol treatment, supported and guided by a strong system of probation, can give Texas back a lost resource — the economic value, creativity and responsibility of thousands who allowed their addiction to get the better of them for a time.

Instead of new prisons, the state should strengthen probation and support the expanded use of drug courts to divert people from prison to better alternatives, while seeing that the parole board follows its own guidelines to make room in our existing facilities for the violent offenders that need to be there. We already know how to make Texas safer and also reduce our prison population to the benefit of our families and our communities. Now we just need the Texas Legislature to act on the facts when it debates the budget in the coming days.

Watkins was the senior warden of the "Holliday Unit," a Texas state prison, where he was responsible for the operations of that 2,000-bed facility, the conduct of 500 employees and the annual budget of $9.3 million until his retirement in February 2005.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4677144.html

Posted by lois at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2007

Sex Offenders Living Under Miami Bridge With State Approval

April 8, 2007, NY Times
Sex Offenders Living Under Miami Bridge
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MIAMI, April 7 (AP) — Five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children has made it nearly impossible for them to find housing.
The conditions are a consequence of laws prohibiting sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children gather. Miami-Dade County’s 2005 ordinance says sex offenders must live at least 2,500 feet from schools.

“They’ve often said that some of the laws will force people to live under a bridge,” said Charles Onley, a research associate at the federally financed Center for Sex Offender Management in Silver Spring, Md. “This is probably the first story that I’ve seen that confirms that.”
The five men, who live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, are the only known sex offenders authorized to live outdoors in Florida, said Gretl Plessinger, a State Corrections Department spokeswoman.
“This is not an ideal situation for anybody, but at this point we don’t have any other options,” Ms. Plessinger said. “We’re still looking. The offenders are still actively searching for residences.”
County Commissioner Jose Diaz said he had no qualms about the ordinance, which he created.
“My main concern is the victims, the children that are the innocent ones that these predators attack and ruin their lives,” Mr. Diaz said. “No one really told them to do this crime.”
The men must stay at the bridge from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. because a parole officer checks on them nearly every night, Ms. Plessinger said.
They have fishing poles to catch food, cook with small stoves, use battery-powered televisions and radios and keep their belongings in plastic bags.
Javier Diaz, 30, who arrived this week, said he had trouble charging the tracking device he is required to wear because there were no power outlets nearby. Mr. Diaz was sentenced in 2005 to three years’ probation for lewd and lascivious conduct involving a girl under 16.
The whoosh of cars passing overhead echoes loudly under the causeway, which runs over Biscayne Bay, connecting Miami and Miami Beach.
About 100 feet away are the bay’s blue-green waters, where a family with young children played in the water this week. In the near distance, luxury condominiums rise from the coastline.
Javier Diaz said he and the other men feared for their lives, especially because of “crazy people who might try to come harm sex offenders.”
“You just pray to God every night,” he said, “so if you fall asleep for a minute or two, you know, nothing happens to you.”
The five committed crimes including sexual battery, molesting and abuse. Many of the offenses were against children.
The state moved the men under the bridge from their previous home — a lot next to a center for sexually abused children and close to a day care center — after they were unable to find housing they could afford that did not violate the sex offender ordinance.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/us/08bridge.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2007

PA: Rostraver officials hope law will lock out prisons

Thursday, April 5, 2007
Rostraver officials hope law will lock out prisons

By Jeff Pikulsky
VALLEY INDEPENDENT (PA)
Thursday, April 5, 2007
(Greensburg Prison is located in Westmoreland County as is Rostraver
Township.--Lois)

ROSTRAVER TOWNSHIP - Reacting to rumors the township is being considered for development of a state or federal correctional facility, the commissioners Wednesday approved an ordinance that would make it difficult for prisons to be built.

Board Chairman Nick Lorenzo said the commissioners heard the rumor about three months ago and later learned the township had no provisions in place regarding the construction of correctional facilities. Lorenzo said he contacted local legislators and learned there is no plan to build a prison in Rostraver. "If they would have come in here, I'm not so sure that we could have stopped it," Lorenzo said.

Regardless of the unfounded rumor, the board agreed to put restrictions in place.

According to the ordinance passed last night, a correctional facility:

- Must be built on a minimum area of 150 acres.

- Shall not be operated within 1,000 feet of a school, public playground or park, residence, child care facility, hospital, nursing home, place of worship or place of assembly.

- Must be serviced by a municipal water supply and a sanitary sewage system.

- Must have a visual screen, such as a fence or landscaped buffer, along the property lines.

- Is required to have access routes approved by the township engineer.

A site plan must be approved by township officials and county, state and federal requirements would have to be met, according to the ordinance.

The township zoning hearing board also has the right to order additional conditions " ... in order to protect the public's health, safety and welfare," the ordinance states.

Lorenzo said the commissioners, by law, cannot impose restrictions that would keep a prison from being built.

But, he said the board decided to make it as difficult to develop a prison as the law allows.

"We put a lot of 'info' in there where they've got to jump through a lot of hoops," Lorenzo said. "I don't think anybody wants a prison in their backyard. This does protect our residents, and that's what we were elected for, to protect the people."

In an unrelated matter, township Solicitor Timothy Maatta said a legal dispute could delay the $4.8 million Finley Road widening project.

Maatta said the commissioners agreed to compensate some businesses for taking over land for the project.

However, the Glimcher Group, of Pittsburgh, which has an office in the construction area, opposed the plan, claiming it is entitled to the money instead of the company from which it rents the property. Castelli Bros., also of Pittsburgh, owns the parcel.

Maatta said the issue will be addressed April 13 in Westmoreland County Common Pleas Court in Greensburg.

"It was an unnecessary delay we thought we could resolve with them over the telephone, but we have to go to court," Maatta said. "If the judge agrees that their preliminary objections are valid and orders us to do something else then, yeah, it could delay the project."

The goal of the project is to improve traffic flow on Finley Road by widening about 1 1/2 miles of the route from its intersection with Route 201 to its intersection with Rehoboth Church Road.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is paying for 80 percent of the project and Westmoreland County is picking up 10 percent of the cost.

The township is paying the remaining 10 percent from real estate tax revenue paid by businesses in the Finley Road business district.

The project is expected to begin this spring. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/valleyindependent/news/s_501324.html

Posted by lois at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2007

New Mexico Bars Drug Charge When Overdose Is Reported

April 5, 2007
New Mexico Bars Drug Charge When Overdose Is Reported
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Struggling with an epidemic of drug fatalities, New Mexico has enacted a groundbreaking law providing immunity from prosecution for people who come forward to help drug users suffering overdoses.

The act, signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Bill Richardson, prevents the authorities from prosecuting on the basis of evidence “gained as a result of the seeking of medical assistance.”

It also protects drug users themselves from prosecution if the process of seeking help for an overdose provides the only evidence against them.

The legislation, which was popularly known as the 911 Good Samaritan bill, is the first of its kind in the nation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In a statement yesterday, Mr. Richardson, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, said: “I have always been committed to prevention and rehabilitation of drug users. If we can encourage people to save themselves or others from a drug-related death or trauma, then we should do that. This bill will encourage families and friends of addicts to seek medical care and prevent their loved one from dying.”

The action was praised by the Drug Policy Alliance, which works to ease drug penalties. The group said New Mexico had the worst overdose problem in the country, with about one death a day.

“Whatever it takes to get people to call 911 to save lives,” said Tommy McDonald, a spokesman for the group in Washington.

It was the second drug measure signed in two days by Mr. Richardson. On Monday, he signed a medical marijuana bill that allows patients who are H.I.V. positive or who have diseases including AIDS, cancer, glaucoma or multiple sclerosis to relieve pain with marijuana, under a doctor’s supervision.

The governor lobbied strongly for the medical marijuana bill, which he said could hurt his presidential prospects but was “the right thing to do.”

The Samaritan bill, introduced by State Senator Richard C. Martinez, a Democrat and a retired magistrate judge from Espanola, also provides that in the event of a drug prosecution based on outside evidence, the act of seeking aid for someone suffering an overdose “may be used as a mitigating factor” in a defense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/us/05drugs.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

FL: Clemency board votes to automatically restore felons' rights

Clemency board votes to automatically restore felons' rights

By DAVID ROYSE, April 5, 2007
St. Petersburg Times, FL
Associated Press Writer

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Most Florida felons who complete their sentences will have their voting and other civil rights more quickly restored under a rule approved Thursday by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist and the state clemency board.

All but the most violent felons would avoid the need to get on a long list for a hearing before the board, which sometimes takes years. The board voted 3-1 on the immediate change, which also requires felons to pay all court-ordered restitution to their victims before becoming eligible to get their rights back.

Attorney General Bill McCollum, another Republican, strongly objected to altering the Jim Crow-era ban on felons automatically getting their rights back once they finish their sentences.

But Crist was emphatic: "I believe in simple human justice and that when somebody has paid their debt to society, it is paid in full. There's a time to move on, a time to give them an opportunity to have redemption, to have a chance to become productive citizens again."

The change doesn't affect the right to have a firearm, which still wouldn't be automatically restored. It does let felons more quickly get a license for many Florida occupations, a key concern of activists who say that is one of the largest obstacles for people trying reintegrate into society.

The issue of voting rights drew attention after the disputed 2000 presidential election, when many non-convicts were purged from voter rolls because the state's felons database was plagued with errors. Blacks have complained that the ban targeted them unfairly.

Florida was one of three U.S. states along with Kentucky and Virginia that require ex-felons to take action to restore their civil rights no matter how long they've been out of prison. Other states have waiting periods before restoration, most restore rights automatically when felons complete their sentence.

Crist's predecessor, Jeb Bush, had long opposed changing the ban. But Crist has made it clear since before he was governor that was ready to change the law from the 1800s. He rejected McCollum's assertion that it was welcoming the worst of the worst back into society too easily.

Still, Crist's plan was a compromise, carving out murderers and other violent felons who would still have to either go before the board for a hearing or at least be subject to review by board members without a hearing in some cases.

The response from advocates for felons was generally positive, but considerably muted. Many noted that restoration is still not completely automatic.

Under the change, Florida officials will automatically begin the rights-restoration process for felons when they finish their sentences. People who previously completed sentences but are still awaiting restoration of their rights will have to apply on their own because most are not tracked by the state after their release.

"It is not automatic approval - there is a bureaucratic process," said Muslima Lewis, director of the racial justice project for the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida. If it were truly automatic, she said, felons could go simply register to vote tomorrow - which isn't the case.

And for those already out, many will probably have to apply to have their rights restored because the state generally doesn't track most of them. Corrections Secretary Jim McDonough said the agency would do its best to find all felons who might be eligible. Many aren't likely to have fixed addresses, though.

Estimates of how many felons who have already left prison and haven't had their rights restored might be out there vary widely, from around 630,000 to nearly a million.

Gretchen Howard, the president of the Florida Network of Victim Witness Services, said advocates for crime victims support the new rule because of the restitution requirement.

"This provides an outstanding incentive," said Howard. She said currently there isn't much incentive, but some people who want to get their rights back might be spurred to try.

The provision requiring restitution to be paid first, however, is a problem for some advocates for ex-convicts, who say that getting their rights back makes it easier to get a job - which then makes it easier to pay restitution, not the other way around.

Voting with Crist for the plan were Republican Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Bronson and state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, a Democrat.

McCollum warned that some criminals who would now have their rights restored automatically were career criminals - half of whom were likely to commit a new crime and be sent back to prison according to state statistics on repeat offenders.

"We are undermining the rule of law ... the right to vote, the right to serve on a jury, for that matter the right to have occupational licenses are not things that should be just automatically assumed that everybody's going to have," he said.

McCollum noted that some occupational licenses would give holders the ability to enter into people's homes - such as those for pest exterminators. That could be dangerous, he said.

McCollum was defeated in an effort to change the proposal to require a five-year waiting period before the process would kick in.

"We sitting here don't have the right, the moral right, to add five years to that sentence, to add five weeks to that sentence or to add five minutes to that sentence," Crist said.

Crist has been known for years, going back to his days in the state Senate, as an outspoken advocate for tougher punishment - and reminded critics on Thursday of the nickname he had when he was known for being tough on crime.

"I believe in appropriate punishment, I'm 'Chaingang Charlie,'" Crist said. "But I believe in justice."

That drew an "Amen" from several in the audience at the meeting, including advocates for felons.

A recent federal lawsuit challenged Florida's rights ban on grounds that it disproportionately affected blacks. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument in 2005, noting Florida first banned felon voting in 1845 - before blacks were allowed to vote. The U.S. Supreme Court later let that decision stand.

The ban was put into the state constitution in 1868.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SOU_FELONS_RIGHTS_FLOL-?SITE=FLPET&SE
CTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=state.shtml

Posted by lois at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2007

CO: Sen. Tapia On the Craft Of The Moral Document

Sen. Tapia On the Craft Of The Moral Document
Cara DeGette
Apr 03, 2007 -- 6:38 PM MDT

After months of working to balance and fine tune Colorado’s proposed $17 billion budget, Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee last week unveiled its handiwork. This begins a series of discussions with Sen. Abel Tapia, the Chairman of the JBC, on the complexities of the document.

CoCo: The budget has been described by more than one person as a moral document, reflecting our societal principles...

Sen. Tapia: Well actually, it’s just been this session that we’ve called it a moral document. It was actually Governor Ritter that talked about it as a moral document, In prior years we never called it a moral document, we called it ‘The Budget."

CoCo: What’s the difference?

Sen. Tapia: One key area, and that is corrections. The prior administration felt very strongly that we should enforce our laws, we should put people in prison and we should make it awfully hard for them to get out of prison. The state of Colorado is a safer place as long as we keep people in prison.

Well, our prison population has ballooned. We have no excess capacity in terms of jail space or prison space. We are asking for proposals from private prison venders — not building our own prisons but contracting with private prisons. We’ve actually kind of made them into economic development drivers for small communities. So right now the moral issue is, do we want to spend all our money on prisons and prison growth, or do we want to slow down the growth of prisons and try to spend money in other areas, like education?

This year is a transitional year because we started with the Owens budget, and the Ritter administration just barely got on and just barely hired executive directors, so they didn’t have much to say about the budget.

CoCo: You had already been working on this budget for several months…

Sen. Tapia: Yes, we’ve been working on it since November of last year. Ritter wasn’t sworn in until the 11th of January, and he didn’t hire most of his people until into February and part of March, so, this is the Owens budget modified, by the Joint Budget Committee and by recommendations made from the Ritter administration.

The Ritter Administration put together a diversion and recidivism package because he felt we had to stop the growth of prisons, and you stop the growth of prisons three ways: One by sentencing reform and that’s only what we can do in the legislature — that would stop the growth and that’s up to us as legislators.

Second, you can put money into diversion programs and his recommendation and supplemental request was to put money into diversion packages. That means if you’re a woman and you’ve been sentenced to jail because you have a crime dealing with drugs or alcohol, we’ll sentence you, but we’ll divert you to an alcohol treatment facility, and if you successfully pass that then you don’t have to serve your prison time.

Another area we have put emphasis on is the back end, and that’s recidivism. Under Governor Owens’ administration we had something like a 50 percent recidivism average — 100 are paroled, 50 of them come back to prison within six months – six months! They come back! So that adds to our prison population. Part of the reason is, we cut a lot of parole officers. We don’t have as many parole officers watching out for people once they get out, second the community hasn’t put together any programs for community corrections.

In this budget the governor’s goal is to cut the recidivism in half. So we hired 115 more parole officers and we’ve put several million dollars into community servicing. So before they go out into society they have to go into community corrections. They still have a structure, they have to check in every night, and they have to sleep there every night. But then they go out into the world and try to make a living. Those are good things. And they integrated some health care and mental and drug and alcohol programs.

Sen. Tapia: All we saw was that we were spending money, and we couldn’t build the prisons fast enough. We’re not going to see the results for awhile — we’ll see the difference in a year or two years from now.

But I think Governor Ritter has indicated to us in terms of a moral document, that education, health care, reducing prison populations are a goal of his.

Do you want to call that a moral document, or do you want to just say you want to prioritize your dollars so that you’re not putting all your money into the punishment of people, but you’re putting the money into redirecting people to be productive citizens?

Cara DeGette is a senior fellow at Colorado Confidential, and a columnist and contributing editor at the Colorado Springs Independent. E-mail her at cdegette@coloradoconfidential.com
http://www.coloradoconfidential.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1757

Posted by lois at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

Turning schools into prisons sends wrong message

Turning schools into prisons sends wrong message
Courier-Post, NJ 4-4-07
I read another news story in the Courier-Post recently about school violence. The headline says a Winslow school is trying to fight against fear, and parents are concerned about their children and the proposed measures to increase security.

There is something new to this story: Winslow is not an infamous school in the city of Camden; rather, it is Winslow Middle School in lower Camden County.

According to a story by Courier-Post reporter Bill Duhart, this school has 1,400 students.

Several students have been arrested there: One student is accused of bringing a gun to school; another one is accused of making terroristic threats, and two others are charged with setting another student's hair on fire.

"I cannot send my son to school while at the same time worrying because he is there," said Jermaine Livingston, parent of a ninth-grader who attended the middle school last year.

The Courier-Post's story also explains the violence in Winslow is just another example of similar cases reported by other school districts to the state Department of Education that include vandalism, guns and drug abuse.

For example, Washington Township reported 160 cases between 2003 and 2004 and 128 cases between 2005 and 2006. Notably, 11 guns were confiscated in Winslow between 2005 and 2006, and 10 in Washington Township during the same period.

Over the top?

According to Gordon Sunkett, the Winslow school board president, there are plans to improve security at the schools. The plans include sealing the school doors with steel instead of the usual aluminum. Also, cameras will be installed to monitor the hallways 24 hours per day. Metal detectors will be modernized and lockers will be regularly inspected.

These protection plans are not exclusive to Winslow schools. They are a common denominator for other schools.

When I read news pieces like these, which seems to happen increasingly more often, I have to reread them so it registers in my mind that this is really happening in a school.

Steel doors, 24-hour camera surveillance, inspections, gun confiscation, vandalism, drug abuse and metal detectors belong in the most dangerous jails, not in schools.

Few bad actors

Winslow Middle School's principal, Mary Alimenti, said: "They [students] need to know that we are working hard to restore their faith and we need to let them know that we have great kids. I truly believed the staff and students and everyone here is better than the five or six students that have darkened the reputation of the school."

But right after, Sunkett is quoted as saying: "My mission is to protect children."

The question is, protect them from whom or what? Protecting students from other students? From educators? From the educational system?

The same Courier-Post story also quotes Nicole Harding, a 36-year-old mother of three students who attend Winslow Middle School.

Harding thinks "If you treat children like prisoners and animals, they'll act that way." And she added, "With leadership and backbone in the school administration, you can shift what's going on to a positive result. My guess is that metal detectors will likely create a more hostile environment."

Harding's accurate reflection makes one wonder if it is students who are responsible for the crisis in public education.

This is a subject that must be dealt with seriously. Otherwise, we should close universities where educators are trained, and future teachers should go to study under prison staff.

Not long ago, youth used to go to school to study and learn. Students had their typical problems with no serious consequences. One could never imagine there would be a day when schools had prison security systems and major criminal activity.

Parents would not have thought that sending kids to study would be reason to despair as if their loved ones were going to war. If there ever existed a safe haven for a child other than the home, it was the school. Teachers alone managed to create this healthy environment without the help of security guards.

A lead teacher would be in charge of the discipline and he or she was respected because students went to school to learn. One of the first teachings was that of authority. How did students learn? They learned with the help of school authorities.

I am not questioning educators. Whether we want it or not, they are at the center of the problem.

Things in Camden's public education and neighboring areas are increasingly worse. Somebody has to respond. Students? Why? If students are not to blame, then who?

At any rate, Harding's wise words continue to echo, "If you treat children like prisoners and animals, they'll act that way."

The writer is a columnist for the Courier-Post. His column appears on Wednesdays.
Published: April 04. 2007 3:10AM
http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070404/COLUMNISTS27/704040327/1005/Opinion

Posted by lois at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)

Prop 36: CA: UCLA Study Finds Nearly $2.50 in Savings for Each $1 Spent on People Convicted of Drug Offences Who Are Eligible for Treatment

Date: April 5, 2006
UCLA News

Proposition 36 Saves Taxpayers’ Money: UCLA Study Finds Nearly $2.50 in Savings for Each $1 Spent on People Convicted of Drug Offences Who Are Eligible for Treatment

(The full report is available online at http://www.uclaisap.org/prop36/documents/SACPA_COSTANALYSIS.pdf.)

A newly released UCLA study reports that California taxpayers save nearly $2.50 for every dollar invested in nonviolent drug offenders eligible for substance abuse treatment under the state's Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000 (SACPA), or Proposition 36. Over a 30-month follow-up period, this represented a savings to state and local government of $173.3 million for offenders entering SACPA during its first year. For offenders who completed their required drug treatment, nearly $4 was saved for each dollar expended.

Conducted by Integrated Substance Abuse Programs researchers at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the study compared the cost differences between all SACPA-eligible offenders during the program's first year with those for a before-SACPA group of similar drug offenders. Both groups were assessed over a 30-month follow-up period.

Savings related to SACPA were largely due to reductions in jail and prison time, while cost increases were due to drug abuse treatment and to subsequent arrests and convictions primarily related to later drug offenses. Probation and parole cost changes were modest as were increases in health care costs and taxable earnings.

"The cost savings are dramatic, but with increased system accountability measures and improved offender management, as well as incentives to community programs for better treatment entry, retention, and completion rates, they could rise even higher," said study co‑author M. Douglas Anglin, UCLA professor-in-residence of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. "Our suggestions for boosting those savings include further improvements in the coordination of services and continuity of care within counties, better participant screening, improved matching of services to needs, and attention to special populations of drug offenders, including minorities and offenders with psychiatric problems."

Findings:

Among specific findings outlined in the report:

· Over a 30-month follow-up period, taxpayers saved nearly $2.50 for every dollar spent during SACPA's first year, compared with a before-SACPA group of similar offenders. This represented a total saving of $173.3 million to taxpayers.

· Over a 12-month follow-up period, taxpayers saved $2.20 and $2.30 per dollar spent during the first and second years, respectively. Total taxpayer savings were $140.5 million in the first year and $158.8 million in the second.

· For drug offenders who completed treatment after entering the SACPA program during its first year, over the 30-month follow-up period taxpayers saved nearly $4 for every dollar spent.

· A disproportionately large share of criminal justice costs were observed for the 1.6 percent of SACPA eligible offenders who had five or more prior convictions in the 30 months before their SACPA-eligible offense. Costs for this subgroup were 10 times higher ($21,175) than those of the typical offender ($2,254).

The study examined costs in eight areas. Five involved the criminal justice system: jail, prison, probation, parole, and arrests and convictions. Two involved social service areas: drug treatment and health care. The final area allowed accrued costs to be reduced by taxes paid by offenders on earnings and purchases.

All analyses used the "taxpayer perspective," focusing on costs to state and local governments. Costs were adjusted to 2004 dollars using the consumer price index or, as appropriate, the medical price index.

Background

Proposition 36 was approved by California voters in 2000. Adults convicted of nonviolent, drug-related offenses and otherwise eligible for SACPA could be sentenced to probation with drug treatment instead of either probation without treatment or incarceration. Offenders on probation or parole who commit nonviolent, drug-related offenses or who violate drug-related conditions of their release could also receive treatment. Under the law, SACPA funding was scheduled to expire June 30, 2006. The governor's budget proposes to maintain the General Fund transfer to the Substance Abuse Treatment Fund at $120 million on a one-time basis for 2006–07 conditioned upon the Legislature passing reforms to the program.

The California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, in a competitive bid process, chose UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs to conduct the evaluation of SACPA over five and one-half years, starting in January 2001 and ending June 30, 2006.

The late Douglas Longshore led the evaluation over its first five years, creating an environment of scientific rigor, agency collaboration and public trust that allowed the evaluation's success. In addition to Longshore and Anglin, study co-authors include Angela Hawken and Darren Urada, all of the Semel Institute's Integrated Substance Abuse Programs at UCLA.

The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA is an interdisciplinary research and education institute devoted to the understanding of complex human behavior, including the genetic, biological, behavioral and sociocultural underpinnings of normal behavior, and the causes and consequences of neuropsychiatric disorders. For more information, see http://www.npi.ucla.edu/.

-UCLA-

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

Jail’s Return in Brooklyn Raises Hopes and Fears

Jail’s Return in Brooklyn Raises Hopes and Fears

By TRYMAINE LEE
Published: April 4, 2007, NY Times

When YaYa Ceesay’s dream of opening a soul food restaurant came true in 2003, business, at first, boomed. He had found a great spot along an up-and-coming stretch of Atlantic Avenue across the street from the Brooklyn House of Detention and quickly built a strong group of regulars.

He opened the doors each day at 6 a.m., and from then until after the lunch crowd headed back to work, his restaurant, the Soul Spot, was packed with correction officers, prisoners’ families, neighborhood residents and passers-by. Fish and grits, chicken and waffles, scrambled eggs, salmon cakes — you name it he served it.

But in June 2003, three months after his glorious introduction to Brooklyn, the jail closed and the breakfast crowd disappeared. Three months after that, Mr. Ceesay was forced to trim the Soul Spot’s menu, and he moved back its daily start time to just before noon.

When the prison population left, he said, about 20 percent of his customers went with it.

Now that the city’s Department of Correction has said that it wants to reopen the jail and double the inmate population in five years, Mr. Ceesay and many other nearby business owners are saying they will be more than happy to provide food or services to those who will work there or who will visit the people held within.

“The jail being there was really good for us,” Mr. Ceesay said. “The corrections officers and all the breakfast they ate was a big part of the business. It was good for us.”

But not everyone is quite so happy that a jail that once held 700 inmates will hold more than 1,400 if plans become reality.

Some residents in the area said that what is good for the mom-and-pop businesses might not be so good for the moms and pops whose new condominiums, many worth several hundred thousand dollars, would be just down the street from the repopulated jail.

“Go ask the parents of the schoolkids who go to Packer who will have to walk past the jail on their way to the store for a bag of potato chips,” said Corey Baylor, an investment banker who moved into a State Street condo four days ago, referring to the Packer Collegiate Institute on Joralemon Street. When the jail closed, the area surrounding the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Boerum Place, where it sits, was trying to reinvent itself. It was an unremarkable neighborhood of gas stations and hunched old office buildings. Today it is home to some of the newest high-end apartment buildings in Brooklyn. There’s a sparkling new YMCA a block away from the old jail, a high-rise is being built next door and rows of condos line State Street a block away.

Mr. Baylor said the resurrection of the jail could hurt growth in the neighborhood. He suggested that the city lease or sell the building to a company that would be able to bring in the kind of money the community needs to nurture more residents.

Correction Department officials said they want to encourage the economic gains on Atlantic Avenue, which is why they are seeking to include commercial space in the expanded jail.

Those plans do not alleviate Mr. Baylor’s concerns. “If the jail never comes online, we’ll all be very excited,” he said. “If it does come online, we’ll be extremely disappointed. What about all of those people who bought condos here and were told that the jail would never reopen?”

Onur Aktulgali, manager of a gift store near the jail, said the Correction Department plan is “not good for Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn is developing,” he said. “Nice places for shops, nice places for people to sit at coffee shops or cafes. The last thing we need is a jail next door.”

Ludner Jacques, who lives in the area and works at the Brooklyn Criminal Court building, said he has heard the buzz about the jail-reopening plan but does not understand what the fuss is about.

“It’s going to be interesting,” he said. “It makes me laugh, actually. You know, when you are paying this kind of money for a place, you don’t want to live next to prisoners. But if we can live here, and people live in this area, why not inmates too?”

From behind the counter at the St. Clair Restaurant at Atlantic Avenue and Smith Street, opposite the jail, the owner, Costas Costa, watched the comings and goings yesterday. Since 1968, when he bought the 100-year-old building where he operates the restaurant, Mr. Costa has served diner food to anyone who wants it.

“For business, it’s a good thing,” he said, wiping down the counter with a stained rag that was once white. “The area doesn’t like it. But we made good money with them there.”

Back at the Soul Spot, a few doors down from the St. Clair, Mr. Ceesay cut a few pieces of his prized meatloaf. Then he lifted his head and took a step back, chuckling.

“The neighbors act like the prisoners are going to be out in the streets causing trouble,” he said. “But they’ll be kept inside, in check. And we look forward to having them back.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/nyregion/04jail.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2007

OR: Businessmen indicted in prison-food scandal

Wednesday, March 28, 2007- Oregon Statesman Journal
Businessmen indicted in prison-food scandal
3 California men are charged with bribery, tax fraud

The Associated Press
March 28, 2007

EUGENE -- Three California businessmen were indicted in federal court on accusations that they bribed a former Department of Corrections official into taking food they had trouble selling elsewhere.

Charged with bribery and tax fraud in Eugene on Monday were: Howard Roth of Sherman Oaks, Calif.; and Michael Levin and William Lawrence, both of Santa Clarita, Calif. The men are key figures in Levin and Lawrence , also known as L&L.

Levin and Lawrence is the same food vendor that allegedly funneled $475,000 in kickbacks and bribes to Oregon prison system food buyer Fred Monem from early 2003 through 2006, said Special Agent Robert Salisbury of the IRS. Salisbury also asserted in court papers that Monem and his wife, Karen, received more than $200,000 in illicit payments from other food vendors.

Monem was fired from his state job last month.

No charges have been filed against Monem, and his attorney David Angeli maintains that Monem was unjustly fired. He has filed an appeal with Corrections Director Max Williams, seeking Monem's reinstatement, but has agreed with state lawyers to freeze the appeal pending the outcome of the criminal investigation.

Roth, Levin and Lawrence were named in a January search warrant affidavit that described the alleged plot and led to the seizure of cash from the Monems' home, business account and safe deposit box, according to federal court records.

Bribery carries a maximum 10-year sentence. The tax fraud charge, which alleges that the men wrote off the bribes as a legitimate business expense, carries a maximum three-year sentence.

During his time with the state, Monem won praise for using special procurement rules to aggressively pursue distressed and bulk foods on the spot market.

Statesman Journal reporter Alan Gustafson contributed to this report.

Copyright 2007 Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070328/STATE/70
3280324

Posted by lois at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

CT: State ACLU May Reopen Suit Over Women's Prison

State ACLU May Reopen Suit Over Women's Prison
Hartford Courant
Associated Press

April 2 2007

EAST LYME -- The ACLU of Connecticut is considering reopening a class-action lawsuit against state officials, based on inspection reports that allege inmates at the state's only prison for women are still being mistreated.

The civil liberties agency, whose 1983 lawsuit prompted improvements in care, said negligence at the York Correctional Institution has led to inmate deaths, attempted suicides, sexual abuse and illnesses, The Day of New London reported Sunday.

"Things are very bad," said Renee Redman, the ACLU chapter's legal director. "Something is wrong."

Redman said too many inmates - about two-thirds of the 1,400 women imprisoned at York - are taking psychotropic medication, which alters brain chemistry.

The ACLU cited court-ordered monitoring reports that have been mandated twice a year since the 1980s as the sources of its debate about whether to reopen the class-action lawsuit. Redman would not comment further on potential legal action.

A court has ordered the reports sealed to protect prisoners' privacy, and Redman would not release the documents. She called them "damning."

The state Department of Correction denied any institutional negligence or wrongdoing in response to the ACLU's allegations involving York, located in the Niantic section of East Lyme.

Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the Correction Department, said the ACLU's allegations were "very broad" and lacked details. He said the department would investigate the allegations, if given the information.

"This is a crime," Garnett wrote to The Day regarding sexual abuse, "and if we have so much as a rumor, we will investigate it and refer it to the state police. We take matters such as these extremely seriously. We strive to ensure our facilities are safe, secure and orderly."

Redman said a court-appointed panel of experts who visited York in January wrote the most recent monitoring report. The state has hired different experts during the past 20 years to perform regular on-site inspections to see that the prison is adhering to a settlement agreement from the landmark West v. Manson lawsuit.

Court documents say care at the prison was poor when the ACLU sued top officials at York, the Correction Department and the state Department of Children and Youth Services, now the Department of Children and Families.

At the time, no therapy was offered. Mothers rarely got to see their children while in prison. Male prison guards allegedly peered into showers. And inmates said they had to urinate into soda bottles because they could not get to bathrooms.

Three settlement agreements that arose from West v. Manson transformed inmate care within five years after the lawsuit was filed. A court appointed three panels of experts to review prison conditions regularly for an indefinite period to make sure York was abiding by the agreements.

One of those panels still exists today: three experts who report to a judge twice a year on mental health care at the prison.

The ACLU National Prison Project has overseen cases involving York and several other prisons, said David Fathi, senior staff counsel for the project.

"Prisoners are overwhelmingly people from impoverished and deprived backgrounds," he said. "So, compared to the general population, their health is much poorer and their medical needs are much greater, and their tendency to be addicted to substances much higher.

"Really, the goal is to have prisons that don't require court oversight to run in a constitutional manner," Fathi said.

Although the nation's prisons have seen a large increase in population during the past 20 years, Fathi said, the spike at women's prisons has been more dramatic. He said a higher proportion of inmates at women's prisons have been victims of physical or sexual abuse than those in men's prisons, and their mental health and medical problems are often more complicated.

The ACLU last interviewed inmates at York in the summer of 2005 and was told that beatings, attempted suicides and deaths occurred because prison staff did not immediately respond when prisoners called for help, The Day reported.

Inmates also talked openly about sexual abuse between inmates and by staff, said Annette Lamoreaux, former legal director for the ACLU, who now works for the NAACP in Houston. Redman said Lamoreaux is not a spokeswoman for the ACLU.

The Correction Department, in response to Lamoreaux's allegations, said employees will respond to an inmate emergency call over the intercom. Garnett said employees are trained in life-saving procedures, and they tour housing units every 30 minutes.

The agency also noted that it has received national recognition for its substance abuse program and mental health unit.

The department said it welcomes outside review.

"If deficiencies are noted, the department has a long record of commitment to rectifying those issues in concert with its contracted health provider," the agency said in a press release.

Copyright 2007 Associated Press http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-apprison0402.artapr02,0,5599460.story?coll=hc-headlines-local
This and other news about women and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2007

Letter to the NY Times by Tony Papa: The War on Drugs, Now in Schools

The War on Drugs, Now in Schools

To the Editor:

Re “Is This the Answer to Drug Use?” (March 25):

Students are now on the front lines of the war on drugs. Whether it be random, suspicionless student drug testing, or having police dogs sniffing around school lockers for drugs, students are now feeling the heavy-handedness of the government’s efforts to keep them “drug-free.”

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is trying to persuade local educators across the country to apply random, suspicionless drug tests by conducting regional summits. This policy is unsupported by available science and opposed by leading experts in adolescent health.

Instead, educators should implement alternatives to drug testing that emphasize education and discussion that will build trust between students and adults. Forcing students to urinate in a cup is not the way to keep them drug-free.

Anthony Papa
New York
The writer is communications specialist, Drug Policy Alliance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/opinion/nyregionopinions/l01island.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 06:38 PM | Comments (0)

UK: Prisoner goes to court over cost of phone calls

Prisoner goes to court over cost of phone calls

Eric Allison, prisons correspondent
Monday April 2, 2007

Guardian
A long-term prisoner has launched an attempt in the high court to stop BT charging inmates more than five times the national call box rate for phone calls, claiming it breaches human rights. The action, which began last Thursday, has the backing of the prisons ombudsman, the chief inspector of prisons and reformers.

Critics say the charges fly in the face of the Home Office's commitment to maintaining ties between prisoners and their families. It has also emerged that the Prison Service receives a 10% commission payment from BT, which operates the system, from the sale of phone credits to inmates.

The application for a judicial review of the practice is being brought by lawyers acting for Richard Davison, a prisoner at Emley jail, Isle of Sheppey. Davison, who is serving 12 years for drug offences, complained about the high cost of phone calls in 2005. After writing to BT and the Home Office, who both refused his request to reconsider the tariff, he contacted the prisons ombudsman, Stephen Shaw, who published a report into his complaint in 2006.

The report found that, in a two-month period in 2004, Davison had paid £70.08 for 34 calls. Had he been charged the public payphone rate, he would have paid only £15.20. The ombudsman upheld the complaint and recommended that the Prison Service reopened negotiations with BT to reduce the tariff. His recommendation was rejected. Mr Shaw said: "If the Prison Service is serious about implementing family ties in order to reduce reoffending, then it is essential that the average costs of calls from prisons are reduced to the levels that apply in the community at large." He also pointed out that the average prison wage is around £8 a week.

The chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, said: "Anything that gets in the way of contact clearly gets in the way of rehabilitation."

Research by the Prison Reform Trust shows that almost half the prison population suffers from low literacy, with more than 12,000 inmates having an IQ of under 75 and relying on phone calls. Lucy Keenan, who manages the helpline for the charity Action for Prisoners Families, said: "About a quarter of prisoners' families only use mobile phones and calls to those from jail are even more exorbitant."

Sean Humber, a solicitor from Leigh Day and Co, which is acting for Davison, said the charges seemed to be at odds with the Prison Service's commitment to promoting rehabilitation by keeping inmates in touch with their families. "The very high cost of telephone calls from jails effectively prevents this and represents a breach of inmates' human rights," he said.

A spokesman for BT said the company would negotiate with the Prison Service about the charges, but added: "Ultimately it is [the Prison Service] who control those costs." The Prison Service said its current policy on phone calls was "fair both to prisoners and the taxpayer since any reduction in the cost of prisoner calls would require a subsidy".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2048076,00.html

Posted by lois at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2007

NY: Bills target gangs that prey on New York State’s students

“We are here to say that if you are evil enough to threaten the life of a child, if you are evil enough to interfere with their education, and if you are evil enough to place in danger the future of our communities, you ought to be punished in a very special way,” said Rivera, D-Bronx, chairman of the Assembly’s Puerto Rican/ Hispanic Task Force.

“Gang Free School Zones,” as the plan has been designated, would amend New York State penal law and increase the penalties for engaging in gang activity on school grounds.

Bills target gangs that prey on New York State’s students

By DAN SABBATINO and CATHERINE KRAMER
Legislative Gazette Staff Writer

Mon, Apr 2, 2007

Lawmakers and law enforcers alike teamed up last week to promote a new set of bills to stop gang activities in New York state schools, however, due to a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, language in the bills needs to be amended.

A state-commissioned report indicates there has been an increase in gang violence in New York schools, and so far, there has been no legislation enacted in response to the report.

Local, federal and state law enforcement agencies, former gang members, clergy and school officials were joined by Assemblymen Peter M. Rivera and José Peralta outside the New York City Department of Education headquarters to discuss the issue and announce legislation and other measures to deal with the growing problem of school-related gang recruitment and violence.

“We are here to say that if you are evil enough to threaten the life of a child, if you are evil enough to interfere with their education, and if you are evil enough to place in danger the future of our communities, you ought to be punished in a very special way,” said Rivera, D-Bronx, chairman of the Assembly’s Puerto Rican/ Hispanic Task Force.

“Gang Free School Zones,” as the plan has been designated, would amend New York State penal law and increase the penalties for engaging in gang activity on school grounds.

But the bills need to be amended to include a definition of what constitutes gang membership because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that language in some anti-gang bills was too vague, according to Guillermo Martinez, legislative director for Rivera. The Supreme Court determined that under freedom of association, gang membership must be specifically defined in all legislation, said Martinez.

Under the new language that is to be added to the bill, gang membership will be defined as a group of three or more people forming a formal or informal alliance, network or arrangement who use common identifying signs, symbols, tattoos, physical markings or a common dress code, and who conduct in or engage in criminal activity.

For example, in one school district gang members wear Chicago Bulls jerseys to identify themselves.

However, critics of the bills say common identifying clothing is not always indicative of gang membership.

“If you like the Bulls, wear Bulls jerseys on the weekend,” said Martinez. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

The bills would make recruitment on school grounds punishable by three to seven years in prison and would require the posting of “gang free school zone” signs around more than 6,400 schools throughout New York state.

Peralta, D-Jackson Heights, said he is frustrated with the lack of action by the state Legislature, especially regarding the bills that have gained support among local law enforcement agencies and civic and religious leaders.

“The commission studied this problem for over a year and their recommendations released in May 2006 need to be taken serious and acted on with uninhibited diligence in order to provide New Yorkers with the mechanisms needed to protect them from gang violence,” Peralta said.

Peralta is sponsoring several bills, including A.1627, which would prohibit the wearing of gang-related apparel, markings or symbols; A.1682, which would establish criminal offenses for gang activity, such as making it a Class D felony to recruit minors; and A.1722, which would use a percentage of confiscated proceeds from gang members to pay for programs to deter youths from entering gangs.

Rivera, a former police officer, federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent and assistant district attorney, is also sponsoring legislation, such as bill A.1687, which would add an additional determinate sentence of imprisonment for the commission of a felony as part of gang activity. A determinate sentence between two and five years would be served in addition to any other sentence imposed for the conviction of an underlying felony and would be served consecutively with any other sentence of imprisonment. In a violent felony, or a Class A felony, the determinate sentence would be 10 years.

In addition, bill A.1688 would create the crime of engaging in criminal street gang activity and levy a $1,000 fine for such an offense.

Rivera also proposed bill A.3831, which would authorize public schools to enforce a uniform requirement for students in grades one through 12 in an effort to eliminate wealth distinctions, gang apparel and improve learning the environment for students.

http://www.legislativegazette.com/read_more.php?story=2228

Posted by lois at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

MI: It's lights out in state prisons to save cash

"It costs $1.9 billion to run the state's prison system, eating up one of every five dollars in the state's main checkbook. Taxpayers spend $5 million a day on prisons. For those reasons, Gov. Jennifer Granholm is proceeding with plans to open the cell doors this summer and fall to about 5,500 nonviolent, low-risk inmates. It's designed to save the state $92 million. But her recommended corrections budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 still calls for a 4 percent spending increase. That means the state will continue to pay more to run its prisons than it does to support its 15 public universities."

Saturday, March 31, 2007

It's lights out in state prisons to save cash
Charlie Cain / Detroit News Lansing Bureau

Hard time is getting a little harder inside Michigan prisons.

The Department of Corrections, looking to reduce its $14.4 million annual electric bill, is pulling the plug -- literally -- on some of life's luxuries for inmates and workers at 42 state prisons and eight prison camps.

While corrections officials can't estimate how much they hope to save by the new conservation efforts, they say every penny is important in the effort to balance the state's out-of-whack budget.

Their plan:
Extinguish lights on Christmas trees and other holiday displays in prison lobbies and offices.
Remove refrigerated vending machines from lobbies, prisoner housing units and visitation rooms.
Eliminate refrigerated water coolers.
Shut off TVs, microwaves, toasters and other electric devices when prison lights go out at 10 p.m.
Limit the use of electric buffers to clean floors.
Remove clothing washers and dryers from prisoner housing units and send the prison blues out to a lower-cost laundry operation.

"We need to take the reduction of energy very serious," Deputy Director Dennis Straub wrote this week to the state's prison wardens.

"Please implement these measures immediately." The department says wardens will be given a brief time to determine whether they will have any problems implementing the changes. "I don't have an exact date, but it will happen soon," said Russ Marlan, spokesman for the Corrections Department.

A prisoner advocacy group is criticizing the moves, saying they amount to added punishment. "It seems punitive, and these are just minimal cost saving measures that actually cause more harm for prisoners who have already lost a lot of privileges that we in the free world have," said Natalie Holbrook, associate at the Ann Arbor-based American Friends Service Committee's Michigan Criminal Justice Program.
She said removing food and beverage machines from visitation areas will diminish the "social setting with family members. It's ridiculous, for the most part."

Meanwhile, a House committee Wednesday unanimously approved and sent to the full House legislation that would end the sales tax exemption inmates now receive when purchasing items from prison stores.If adopted, it would generate $700,000 annually for the state.

The combined actions may appear penny-ante to some. But there are plenty of reasons corrections officials are trying to squeeze out savings.
Consider:
Michigan's prison system is housing an all-time high 51,500 inmates -- 173 percent more than two decades ago. The department says the state will likely run out of prison beds by September, a full year before expected.

It costs $1.9 billion to run the state's prison system, eating up one of every five dollars in the state's main checkbook. Taxpayers spend $5 million a day on prisons.

For those reasons, Gov. Jennifer Granholm is proceeding with plans to open the cell doors this summer and fall to about 5,500 nonviolent, low-risk inmates.

It's designed to save the state $92 million. But her recommended corrections budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 still calls for a 4 percent spending increase.

That means the state will continue to pay more to run its prisons than it does to support its 15 public universities.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070331/METRO/703310358/1022/POLITICS
Detroit News

Posted by lois at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

CO & OK: Profit puts inmates in hard spot

Profit puts inmates in hard spot

By Diane Carman, Denver Post Staff Columnist
04/01/2007 12:41:56 AM MDT

If Joe Nacchio ends up in the slammer, he'd better hope it's not one run by Corrections Corporation of America, though Qwest retirees just might feel particular glee at the thought of his working most of a day to pay for a roll of toilet paper.

About 480 inmates from Colorado have been transferred to CCA's North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre, Okla., since December, and they're finding that hard time is a lot harder in a prison run for profit.

The inmates, all culled from state prisons based on their release dates, records for compliance and nonviolent prison histories, have been rewarded for their good behavior with lousy food, fewer visits from family members, limited access to phones, delays in mail service, a lack of access to Colorado law books and prices in the prison canteen that have been jacked up in some cases to three times those in Colorado institutions.

"It seems like minor stuff to people outside of prison, but it's created a real powder keg," said Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.

Parents of inmates housed at Sayre have reported that a boycott of the commissary was organized as a prison protest, and when a guard was perceived to be harassing an inmate at lunch recently, the entire room stood in solidarity.

They worry that tensions could erupt into a riot similar to what happened at the CCA prison in Crowley County in 2004.

"The guys are really upset," said Tracy Masuga, whose son was transferred to Sayre in December.

Among the recent price hikes at the canteen were: peanut butter that sold for $1.48 in January now going for $2.34, AIM toothpaste jumping from $1.45 to $2.23, raisin bran going from $2.99 to $4.75, and a 25-watt light bulb going from $1.20 to $3.69.

In Colorado state prisons, peanut butter is $1.80, AIM toothpaste 95 cents, and banana nut granola (the closest thing to raisin bran on the commissary list) is $2.11. Toilet paper sells for 70 cents a roll in Sayre compared with 44 cents at state-run prisons.

"This might not seem like much, but we're talking about people who make literally a dollar a day," said Ann Aber, an attorney with the Colorado Public Defender's office. "It's arbitrary and inexplicable exercises of power like this that can create a really incendiary situation."

Alison Morgan, chief of private prisons for the Department of Corrections, said a team from Colorado visited the Sayre facility this month and talked to about 200 inmates. Complaints about the price hikes were rampant, she said, but she insisted that the prisoners' concerns were being addressed.

"The warden is looking at the commissary list and has reduced prices for about 40 items, including the price of light bulbs," she said.

Steve Owen, spokesman for CCA, said that after a brief drop in purchases from the canteen around March 9, sales have returned to normal.

Gary Golder, director of prisons for the DOC, said CDs of Colorado statutes are on order for use in the Sayre prison library, but delivery by the vendor has been delayed.

Problems with phones, mail service and other issues will be resolved, Morgan said.

As for the food, which was described as inedible by inmates two months ago and resulted in many of them reporting significant weight loss, Morgan describes it now as "fabulous."

"The previous food-service manager was fired."

State Rep. Buffie McFadyen said she has heard some of the complaints, and while she is concerned, focusing on things like commissary prices and phone service ignores the larger issue.

"They shouldn't be there at all," said the Democrat from Pueblo West.

"Sending inmates out of state is almost guaranteeing a 100 percent recidivism rate," said McFadyen, who has eight state prisons in her district. "We're taking the inmates with the best track records within our system and punishing them by sending them out of state away from their families. When inmates don't have that support system in place to help them re-enter society, it almost guarantees failure."

McFadyen said this is all part of the private-prison system's business plan.

"High recidivism rates ensure profits for their stockholders," she said. "There's no incentive to do what's best for inmates. They profit by having them come back into the system."

Owen called such criticism "completely false."

"We invest a great deal in innovative programs to rehabilitate inmates," he said. "We consider ourselves professionals."

CCA receives $54 per day per Colorado inmate. The cost to keep comparable inmates in state institutions is $77 per day, Morgan said.

Even at 30 percent less per inmate, CCA has delivered impressive profits to shareholders.

The company racked up $105.2 million in net income in 2006.

How do they do it?

"The private-prison industry makes its money out of bodies and souls," McFadyen said.

Bodies, souls and toilet paper.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5568308

Posted by lois at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Jobs at Risk After Scandal at Juvenile Facility

April 1, 2007, NY Times
Jobs at Risk After Scandal at Juvenile Facility
By BARBARA NOVOVITCH

PYOTE, Tex., March 29 — To most Texans, the West Texas State School here is the troubled institution at the center of a sexual abuse scandal that has shaken the state’s juvenile detention system.

But to the residents of this town of 129 and the neighboring communities, it is a source of badly needed jobs.

That is why about 200 people gathered outside the county courthouse in Monahans on Tuesday to oppose a state auditor’s recommendation to close the school, and why nine residents made the 750-mile round trip drive to Austin this week to address legislators on the matter.

“This facility has been a part of the community since 1965,” said Donna Garcia, community relations coordinator at the school. “It feels like a personal vendetta against this community. We feel like the Legislature needs somebody to blame this on.”

In February, news accounts reported that from 2003 to 2005 two officials at West Texas State had had late-night sexual encounters with incarcerated boys and then were allowed to resign without facing criminal charges. Responding to the disclosure, and to pressure from the Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry forced the resignation of the Texas Youth Commission board and ordered a review of all of its facilities.

The agency is currently investigating 1,200 complaints against juvenile facilities around the state.

“Obviously, we’re outraged at the kind of things that are alleged,” Judge Greg Holly of the Ward County Court said Thursday, after returning from Austin, where he addressed a legislative hearing. “Obviously the folks accused are not Ward County people. It sickens us, it bothers us — but local folks ought not to be punished.”

The schools superintendent of Monahans, Keith Richardson, said closing West Texas State, which employs 228 people, could mean the loss of 60 students in Monahans schools because their parents would have to move if they lost their jobs there.

Mayor David Cutbirth of Monahans said the job loss would damage the area’s economic diversity, which is tied to oil and gas production.

“Drilling jobs can pay up to $28 per hour, but they’re mostly for men,” he said. West Texas State offers jobs for clerical workers, teachers, counselors and men “with special training.”

Pyote now houses 238 offenders ages 12 to 20, with most ages 15 to 17, said a Texas Youth Commission spokesman, Jim Hurley.

When a reporter visited the facility, groups of young men clad in orange or blue marched in drill formation from the cafeteria to classrooms. The youngsters wear uniforms to signify their phase of “resocialization,” Mr. Hurley said. He said the youngsters’ days were structured: “They go to school, to therapy groups, behavior groups, meals, exercise and recreation, physical training, and a hour of free time in the evenings. They are up at 5 a.m. and in bed at 9 p.m.”

Nearly 4,000 youthful offenders are being held in 36 Texas Youth Commission facilities.

A Ward County grand jury will meet on April 10 to consider the accusations against the former officials of West Texas State who, according to a Texas Ranger investigation, “engaged in sexual contact with several students.”

In recommending the closing of West Texas State, the auditor cited Pyote’s remote location, its sparse labor force and its distance from medical facilities.

Judge Holly said he understood that all but 10 percent of the jobs at the Pyote facility were filled, “while some other Texas Youth Commission facilities have 20 to 30 percent openings.” He pointed out that Odessa, with several hospitals, is just 40 miles away on Interstate 20. “In time, that’s as close as any metropolitan area prisons,” he said.

Sixty percent of West Texas State counselors and teachers drive the 15 miles from Monahans (population 6,700 with an additional 2,000 outside city limits), and 40 percent from Pecos (population 9,000), 26 miles to the west, Mayor Cutbirth said.

Bob Siekman, a former teacher and a retired contractor, said that he lived next door to West Texas State and that he considered the detention center a good neighbor. Mr. Siekman blamed “the muckety-mucks, the higher-ups” for any misconduct there.

But he was more interested in pointing out that Pyote has a museum, open on weekends, devoted to the town’s earlier fame as the World War II “Rattlesnake Bomber” Air Force base, which in 1952 was temporarily home to the B-29 Enola Gay, which had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

“I climbed all over the Enola Gay when I was a kid,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/us/01texas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)