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May 31, 2007

CA: Our Opinion: Sad day when prisons trump schools

Our Opinion: Sad day when prisons trump schools
Article Last Updated:05/31/2007
Alameda Times-Star, Alameda, CA
CALIFORNIA has reached a milestone that clearly shows how misguided our priorities have become. In five years, based on current trends, California's prison budget will overtake spending on the state's universities.

Thanks in big part to the state's - and federal courts' - priorities of fixing our troubled corrections system, the state will throw more money into warehousing inmates than educating college students. No other big state in the country comes close to spending as much on its prisons compared to its universities. Have we really come to the point where walls are more valuable than knowledge?

California's new investment in prisons is in response to a federal court order to clean up the system and cut down on overcrowding where more than 175,000 prisoners are jammed into space designed for 100,000. The state will spend

$7.4 billion to build

40,000 new beds on top of a prison operating budget of more than $10 billion, which means prisons will eat up a larger share of taxpayer money. What that also means is we're putting more money into a broken system, hoping somehow it gets fixed.

That even baffles those who oversee prison construction.

"The department is in a shambles. They couldn't build their way out of a paper bag," said Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange.

Well, that's a good reason to put more money into prison construction.

In the meantime, education and other needy areas suffer. They will be deprived of as much as $330 million a year by 2011 due to out-of-control prison spending. That's to cover interest payments on billions of dollars of bonds that must be sold to finance the new construction.

"Our policies are hurting the economy of California," said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles.

If this is the way our lawmakers feel, why do they keep driving in the wrong direction?

If Nunez thinks the economy is hurting now, he hasn't seen anything yet. According to researchers for the Public Policy Institute of California, more college graduates are leaving the state than coming in from elsewhere. Researchers found that California needs to attract nearly 160,000 college graduates from other states and countries by 2025 to meet economic demands. Chances of doing so look pretty bleak.

We understand that the prison problem didn't sprout up overnight. Part of it could probably be traced back to when Jerry Brown was governor. Brown changed California's sentencing structure and sent the ball rolling toward the prison overcrowding mess we are in today. He's even admitted regret about that change.

But Brown is not solely to blame. Californians spend $40,000 per inmate per year. The powerful prison guard union shoulders part of this - while guards' base pay was $57,000 a year in 2005, a total of 182 San Quentin guards earned more than $100,000, far more than what a Highway Patrol officer earns.

We have not focused enough on rehabilitation and education of inmates, thus, we set them free unprepared and with little hope of getting or holding jobs. So what happens? California has the highest recidivism rate in the country.

It's as if our mentality has become lock 'em up and throw away the key - just look at the unrealistic "Three-Strikes" law. One man featured recently on CBS' "60 Minutes" received two jail sentences of 25-years-to-life for stealing nine children's video tapes - valued at $153.54. He had two prior home burglaries on his record, yet there was no weapon and no violence in any of the cases.

If California lawmakers can't come up with a way to revamp the system, they should look at what's going on in other states. To reduce prison budgets, other states are canceling new prison construction; paroling people scheduled for parole a few weeks earlier at savings of millions of dollars; eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenses; providing treatment rather than prison for drug offenses.

No, instead California has taken and is taking the easy way out - we build more prisons and watch our education system struggle. Where have our priorities gone?

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_6027448?source=most_emailed (cartoon at this URL)

Posted by lois at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)

Know Your Rights: A Guide to Young People's Rights in Juvenile Delinquency Court.

Know Your Rights: A Guide to Young People's Rights in Juvenile Delinquency Court. (May 2007) The booklet is designed to teach young people their basic constitutional rights as it applies to the law.
According to the Know Your Rights booklet in 2003:
2.2 million arrests were made of persons under the age of 18;
136,500 of these arrests were for violating curfew and loitering laws;
Black youth account for 27% of all juvenile arrests, even though they only make up 16% of the youth population; and
Girls account for 29% of all juvenile arrests, which represents a 45% increase in arrests of girls over a period of approximately twenty years
Additionally, the booklet cites in recent years, reports of abuse and mistreatment in youth correctional facilities have increased. For example, in 2004 there were 2,821 reports of sexual violence against youth and 26 deaths of youth in facilities.
http://www.gaultat40.info/pdfs/kyr_booklet.pdf

Posted by lois at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2007

MA: Cori: The Scarlet Letter

Cori: The Scarlet Letter
A criminal record can haunt anyone who's ever been arraigned in court - whether they're found guilty or not.
By Maureen Turner

May 31 2007

Who is Don Petigny-Perry? Your answer might depend on what document you’re looking at.

On his resumé, Petigny-Perry is a man dedicated to helping other people: He’s worked for the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office, helping ex-offenders reintegrate into society, and for the now-defunct Hampshire Community Action Commission, where he was a housing specialist. These days, Petigny-Perry estimates that he logs about 70 hours a week at two jobs: one on the overnight shift at the Grove Street Inn homeless shelter in Northampton, the other as the outreach coordinator for several single-room occupancy, or SRO, buildings in Northampton and Florence.

Petigny-Perry might seem like a very different man, though, if you’re looking at another document: his criminal record. That document runs about four pages long, beginning with a minor larceny arrest in 1971, when Petigny-Perry was 17—so long ago that, he says, that he can’t even recall the details of the incident.

There were other arrests, too, including a charge of assaulting a police officer that Petigny-Perry suggests had more to do with heavy-handed policing in his hometown (“I’m a black man in Springfield, and I jumped on seven police officers? Come on.”). In his 20s, Petigny-Perry committed several armed robberies of Springfield-area grocery stores, using the money, he says, to feed his addictions to cocaine and heroin. Those robberies landed him in prison. He was released in 2001, after serving 18 years and seven months.

In reality, of course, it’s impossible to define any person by the words on a few sheets of paper; neither his resumé nor his record can begin to capture who Petigny-Perry is, who he was, how he’s changed over his 53 years of life. Many of those changes, in fact, took place during his years behind bars: He kicked his drug habit and took advantage of the sort of prison programs—academic classes, vocational training, personal counseling—that have dried up in recent years. After his release, Petigny-Perry lived for a time at the Honor Court, a local rehab program that focuses on community service, finished a degree at UMass, and began a new career in the human service field.

But no matter who Petigny-Perry is now, his criminal record will always be with him. And he’s not alone: About 2.8 million people have records (commonly known as CORIs, short for Criminal Offender Record Information) with the Massachusetts Criminal History Systems Board. They include anyone who’s ever been arraigned in court—even if the person was found not guilty, or if the charges were later dropped. And, depending on the circumstances, those records might be considered when they apply for a job, for housing, for a loan—creating, critics say, sometimes impassable roadblocks to the very things that ex-offenders need to make a successful start at a new life.

Petigny-Perry is part of an increasingly vocal collection of activists who are pushing to change the CORI system. Their goal isn’t to eliminate the system, they say, but rather to make it fairer to people with records, more useful to the public—and, ultimately, more likely to serve the interest of public safety. To get there, they need to persuade a lot of people: nervous voters who worry about high crime rates, nervous employers who don’t want the liability that comes with hiring someone who might pose a security risk, nervous legislators who don’t want to be tagged as weak on crime.

They also need to force a public conversation about what we, as a society, really want from our criminal justice system. Are jails and prisons really part of a “corrections” system, where offenders can reform their ways and atone for their misdeeds? If so, by what standards should we decide that a person has changed for the better and poses no risk to the rest of us? Should someone who’s committed a crime be forever marked by it? Most fundamentally, do we believe that people can change?

“People have this notion: I did my time; I paid for my crime. But that’s not true,” Petigny-Perry says. “Because anybody who can get their social security number can find [their record] and give them their own form of justice.”

T he CORI system was created by the state Legislature in 1972 to modernize the maintenance of criminal records. Cumbersome paper records were replaced by a computerized format that was used primarily by people within law enforcement: police, judges, parole and probation officers, prison officials. Ironically, the new system was also intended to protect the privacy of people who had criminal records, by tightening up guidelines about who could see those records.

Any time a person is arraigned before a Massachusetts judge, a CORI is created. The record includes personal information (date of birth, social security number, occupation, spouse’s name) and the charges he or she faces. The record is updated as the case proceeds through the court system to its conclusion, including sentencing. If the person is found not guilty, or if prosecutors drop the charges, that information is included, but the CORI does not disappear.

While access to CORI records was initially limited mostly to law enforcement officials, over the years the number of organizations with access to CORIs has grown dramatically. According to a 2005 study by The Boston Foundation and the Crime & Justice Institute, more than 10,000 organizations have been certified for access to CORI records, up from just 2,000 in 1993. Those groups that, by law, have the right to review CORIs include public housing agencies and organizations looking to hire employees to work with “vulnerable populations,” such as schools, summer camps, nursing homes and hospitals.

In addition, other employers and agencies can apply to the Criminal History Systems Board, or CHSB, for permission to see CORIs in cases where, they argue, the interest of public safety outweighs the privacy rights of the subject. This group might include hotels, airlines or security firms. Individuals may also request CORIs in certain cases, including if the subject is currently on probation or parole or has recently been released from prison.

What records they see varies depending on who they are; at a minimum, applicants usually receive a report showing the subject’s prior convictions and pending charges. In some cases, the report will include things like juvenile convictions, charges that were dismissed or continued without a finding, or cases where the subject was found not guilty.

According to the Boston Foundation/Crime & Justice Institute report, the CHSB processed more than 1.4 million requests for CORIs in 2005, more than three times the number in 1998. Over the years, the state Legislature has passed new laws expanding who has access to these records. In some cases, the organizations aren’t just granted access, but are in fact mandated to evaluate the CORIs of job applicants.

The reason for this expansion is obvious and largely understandable; who wouldn’t want the reassurance that their baby’s daycare provider isn’t a violent psycho, that their grandmother’s home health aide doesn’t have a weakness for other people’s prescriptions, that the cashier they just hired doesn’t have a history of sticky fingers? There are legitimate public safety concerns that make the CORI system necessary—a point even would-be reformers take pains to make. But, they argue, the current system is filled with weaknesses and injustices and, in the long run, can compromise rather than improve public safety.

In part, the problem springs from the presentation of a CORI. Originally intended for law enforcement officials, the reports can be daunting reading for a lay person. The Mass. Law Reform Institute—a Boston-based legal services organization working on CORI reform—publishes a document called “The CORI Reader” (available at www.mlri.org/cori_project), which attempts to explain the complicated system. The document includes a six-page glossary of the various abbreviated legal terms that turn up on CORIs, an alphabet soup of CWOF (continued without a finding) and DWOP (dismissed without prejudice), HWB (held without bail) and FILE NF (filed no finding). Tossed in for good measure are several Latin terms: NOLO (Nolo contendere), NP (nolle prosequi).

Those terms might make sense to a prosecutor, but will they to the human resources manager at a corporation, or the owner of a small business looking for help? While the CHSB does offer training and information on its website about interpreting CORIs, employers are not required to take the training, and most don’t, according to the Boston Foundation report.

And while some employers may take the time to read the report carefully, others, activists fear, will automatically disregard any job applicant who has a CORI. This can be especially problematic when a person has a record for a minor incident, like a traffic violation, or when she was ultimately found not guilty, or the charges against her were dropped. Even a lengthy CORI report doesn’t necessarily mean the subject has been arrested many times; a report stemming from a single charge could have multiple entries, each reflecting court dates, pleas and dispositions.

“If you talk to the average person about CORI, most people think we’re talking about an ex-offender who’s coming right out of jail,” notes Richard Ward, program officer at The Boston Foundation. “But most people who have CORIs never served a day in prison.”

And as the number of organizations with access to CORIs has grown, the records system has become strained. The CHSB staff and budget has not kept pace with the increased demand for records. That, The Boston Foundation notes, opens the door for increased errors in reports, a problem compounded by the fact that Massachusetts, unlike most states, does not use fingerprints to verify the identity of subjects in its criminal records system.

Complicating matters are the numerous private companies that do background checks. Type “criminal records” into Google and you’ll find a flood of sites, with names like criminalsearches.com and sentrylink.com. Unlike official CORIs, which are only available to certain organizations or with the approval of the governing board, anyone with a credit card and a computer can hire one of these private companies to check out a job applicant, a potential babysitter, a new boyfriend.

But because these companies are unregulated, they present a host of problems, critics say. There’s no guarantee their information is correct or current, for instance; because they often gather their information from incomplete public records—a police log at the station house or a daily docket at a courthouse, for example—it may not include later information that shows a favorable outcome for the subject.

T he Boston Foundation took up the CORI issue several years ago, after holding a series of community meetings in response to a spike in violent crime. “This issue of CORI kept coming up over and over again, a steady drumbeat,” Richard Ward says.

“It was a difficult issue to talk about,” he says. On one side were employers and others who feel that public safety demands complete disclosure of criminal records; on the other side were people who’ve committed relatively minor offenses and believe their records create unwarranted roadblocks, or those who’ve changed their lives dramatically but fear they’ll never be granted a fresh start as long as their CORIs haunt them.

The foundation, Ward says, has worked to maintain a neutral position. Ultimately, the group decided to avoid the more controversial questions, like whether records should be automatically sealed after a period of time, or if more restrictions should be placed on who can access CORIs (“There are good arguments on both sides,” Ward says). Instead, the foundation has opted to focus on how employers use information from criminal records. “Our feeling is, if this is going to be used by employers, we need to know they’re using it [correctly],” Ward says.

The Boston Foundation has organized a task force of interested parties—business and non-profit representatives, ex-offenders, victims’ advocates—to come up with recommendations for making the CORI system more workable, both for people with records who want a fair shake in the job market and for employers who might want to help someone re-entering society but are concerned about liability, or lack the tools to assess who truly poses a risk and who doesn’t.

“Everybody’s looking at this as a public safety issue,” Ward says. “I think it’s more of a workforce issue”—particularly given Massachusetts’ dwindling workforce.

“We have a lot of empty seats,” adds David Trueblood, public relations director at The Boston Foundation. “We can’t afford to lose people who could be important contributors. … We can’t say, ‘If you’ve ever offended, you’re just out of the game.’”

Don Petigny-Perry knows firsthand the challenge of getting back into the workforce after prison. His criminal record resurfaces every time he applies for a job, and different employers have had different responses. When he applied for his job at HCAC, he says, it was a pretty straightforward procedure: Management reviewed his CORI, then a hearing was held where he addressed his record and explained how he’d changed. After he was hired, the agency held annual reviews to make sure no problems had cropped up. He went through a similar process when he was hired at the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department—where, he says, he was a sort of poster child for the sheriff’s celebrated reintegration programs.

Things were more complicated when Petigny-Perry applied for his job at the Grove Street Inn. After several interviews—at which, he says, he was upfront about his record—he was hired. But on his first day on the job, he says, he was told by a manager he’d have to leave, after someone in Human Resources spotted his felony conviction.

“I was so humiliated,” Petigny-Perry says. He decided to fight the decision.

Because ServiceNet receives state money, it’s bound to follow the strict CORI guidelines set by the Department of Health & Human Services. In 1996, H&HS issued a directive to private agencies with which it contracted: Before the agency could hire any employee who would interact with clients, it must do a CORI check. Applicants who’d been convicted of any of several dozen crimes—the list ranges from murder, rape and kidnapping to perjury, marijuana trafficking and mayhem—could not be hired. In some cases, depending on the crime, the ban would be lifted after a determined waiting period; in other cases, the ban was permanent.

That directive was challenged in court. A Superior Court justice found the lifetime ban unconstitutional and ordered H&HS to provide a means for a job applicant whose record put him on the lifetime ban list to challenge that decision.

The challenge process is long and complex—unduly so, say critics. The applicant must provide a letter from a criminal justice official saying he would not pose “an unacceptable risk” if he were hired. If he can’t obtain that letter (and it’s likely he won’t, according to the CORI Reader, “since these officials are generally trained not to make such certifications”) he needs to get a similar letter from a mental health professional with a relevant background. Next, the hiring agency must conduct an evaluation to determine whether the applicant poses a threat to clients, based on things like his age when he committed the crime, the seriousness of the crime, its relevance to the work he’d be doing and evidence of rehabilitation.

Petigny-Perry says it took him eight months to complete the appeals process, collecting letters of recommendation, undergoing a psychiatric exam and writing a narrative about his rehabilitation process. Then he had to sit down with a ServiceNet staff member and explain his CORI, item by item. “It was really invasive,” he says.

In the end, Petigny-Perry was rehired, to the same job he’d been sent home from all those months before. Going through the process was a worthwhile experience, he says, because now he at least has all the paperwork ready the next time he applies for a job. “Now that I’ve gone through the process it at least eliminates the glass ceiling. As tedious as it was,” he says.

Petigny-Perry says he doesn’t think CORI checks are unfair or unwarranted when the circumstances call for one. But he would prefer to leave it to the state Criminal History System Board to handle appeals and determine whether an ex-offender is ready to work in sensitive positions. That would put the power in the hands of experts trained in issues of crime and recidivism, and take it out of the hands of employers and human resources staff who don’t necessarily have the training to make those kinds of decisions, and who may bring their own biases and prejudices into the process, he says. “It’s a power dynamic. If people know you have a record, it’s like a scarlet letter.”

I n the Legislature, state Rep. Mike Festa, a Democrat from Middlesex County, has filed the Public Safety Act of 2007-2008, which would make significant changes to the CORI system. The bill would shorten the time period before a conviction record could be sealed. Right now, an offender can petition to have a felony conviction sealed after 15 years and a misdemeanor after 10; under the bill, they could be sealed after seven and three years, respectively. The bill would also make it easier for a subject’s record to be sealed if the charges did not result in a conviction.

In addition, the proposed law would create two versions of CORI reports: Law enforcement officials and employers who work with vulnerable populations would be given the subject’s complete record; other entities would receive CORIs that show convictions and open cases only. The bill would also toughen up anti-discrimination protections for ex-offenders, making it illegal to refuse a person a job simply because he or she has a CORI (exceptions would be made if the record shows a recent conviction for a crime related to the work he or she would be doing).

Locally, Festa’s bill is co-sponsored by state Rep. Ben Swan (D-Springfield). There are more than 30 other pieces of CORI reform legislation kicking around the State House, including several filed by Rep. Cheryl Coakley-Rivera, another Springfield Democrat, although Festa’s is the most comprehensive.

Similar legislation was considered last year. Because it was developed too late in the 2005-06 session to be filed as a bill, advocates instead tried to get it passed by attaching it to the state budget. While the Senate approved the amendment, the House—where Speaker Sal DiMasi is generally cool to attempts to make law by attachments to the budget—did not. In the end, legislators created a commission to study CORI reform—a move that, to many, felt like a stalling tactic.

Indeed, nothing ever came of the commission. But reformers hope to build on the momentum of last year’s effort to get the new bill passed. The key, says Brandyn Keating, executive director of the Boston-based Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, is educating legislators and the public about what the proposal would and would not do. For instance, activists aren’t looking to limit in any way the information available to law enforcement officials. The reforms, would, however, limit the information some reviewers would receive if it’s deemed irrelevant—“keeping misdemeanors out of the hands of the shift manager at Subway,” Keating explains. None of the proposed changes would affect the state’s sex offender registry, which is managed under a separate system—a point CORI reformers are especially anxious to make.

“We’ve had a very reactionary way of doing public policy relating to criminal justice over the last 16 years or so,” says Keating, who, like many, points to the Weld administration as a turning point in the state’s approach to dealing with offenders. The “lock them up and throw away the key” approach might appeal to voters, but, over the long term, it’s done little to improve public safety, critics say.

“That’s why we call it the Public Safety Act. We think it enhances public safety to get people back in the mainstream,” says Tony Winsor, an MLRI staff attorney and author of the CORI Report. “The Bill Weld, ‘the more we punish people, the more we enhance public safety’ [approach]—that’s bullshit.”

Research shows that an ex-offender is less likely to end up behind bars again if he or she is able to find housing and a job. “To construct unnatural barriers for those needs to be met is very illogical and counterproductive,” Keating says.

Lois Ahrens of Northampton, founder and director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, thinks CORI reform has become inevitable. “It’s one of those tipping point things,” she says. “There’s so many people with CORIs right now, and it’s affecting so many people”—the people with the records, their families, employers.

The Boston City Council and Mayor Tom Menino have both called on the Legislature to reform CORI laws, and Gov. Deval Patrick has spoken about the need to reform the system. Those positions are not without political implications, though: Menino took heat for his policy of not checking new hires’ CORIs after a public works employee with a history of drug and traffic violations ran down an elderly woman with a snow plow last winter. And Patrick backed away at least temporarily from his support for CORI reform during last fall’s gubernatorial campaign after opponent Kerry Healey began attacking him as weak on public safety.

Meanwhile, in some communities, parents and politicians continue to push for more background checks on employees and volunteers, especially in schools. In Boxborough, for instance, school officials have adopted a policy to check all volunteers, regardless of whether they have unsupervised contact with kids. “We decided to CORI everyone, and that way we don’t have to worry about it,” the superintendent explained to the Boston Globe .

Perhaps the most significant resistance to CORI reform comes from the state’s district attorneys, who have taken an official position against changing the system. Plymouth DA Timothy Cruz, president of the Mass. District Attorney’s Association, has been quoted saying all criminal records should be available to the public; to bolster his case, Cruz points to widely reported violent crimes, such as the 2002 rest-stop murder of a woman by a convicted rapist who was working at a Burger King there.

“The DAs have enormous influence in the Legislature,” notes Tony Winsor. “The general sense of the average legislator is: ‘If the DAs don’t like something, then I don’t dare like it, because then I’ll be labeled as soft on crime and won’t be re-elected.’”

“A lot of the knee-jerk reaction we get from DAs and law enforcement is because of misunderstanding,” Keating says. “It’s actually in the best interest of law enforcement that people be able to get appropriate employment. … It’s in everybody’s best interest.”

Indeed, Keating believes reformers have support within law enforcement circles, from prosecutors to cops on the street. County sheriffs, who deal directly with ex-prisoners’ reintegration into society, are considered a particularly sympathetic group.

“You can put us in the category of those who feel CORI needs reform,” says Rich McCarthy, spokesman for Hampden County Sheriff Mike Ashe. Ex-offenders trying to re-enter society often already face numerous challenges: substance abuse, a lack of marketable skills, an inadequate education. Unnecessary barriers created by CORIs make it that much harder.

“We have 2,600 sentenced people we release each year into the community,” McCarthy says. “Either they bridge back into the community, or they’re going to fall off the cliff. … This is the kind of thing that hopefully we can coalesce around, because it’s smart public safety policy.”

A t its root, the movement to change the CORI system comes down to matter of faith: Do we believe that someone can do something wrong—sometimes gravely, horrendously wrong—but still, ultimately, be a worthwhile person, someone of value to the larger society?

“Hopefully people can make mistakes and change,” Ahrens says. “Not because of [prison-based] rehabilitation, because there isn’t rehabilitation. But because they’re young. Because they stop being addicted to drugs. Because they’re no longer drinking.”

And just below the surface of the CORI reform question are other, stickier issues, from the racism many consider inherent in our law enforcement system (“Policing is targeted in neighborhoods of color,” Ahrens says. “If you’re African-American, or you’re Hispanic, you don’t start out with a level playing field.”) to our decision to treat drug addiction as a crime, not a health problem.

“It’s about deep-rooted ‘isms’—racism, classism,” Petigny-Perry says. He’s not convinced there’s enough momentum to fix what’s wrong with the CORI system, he adds. “But the more conversations that peel back these layers, the better.”

That includes a conversation about society’s responsibility to ex-offenders once their sentences are over. “We lock [people] up to hold them accountable for their actions. But we don’t hold society accountable for what happens to them,” Petigny-Perry says. “Is there a need for prisons and jails? Yeah. But what happens afterward? … I think we’re failing people as far as preparing them to reintegrate back into the community.” •

mturner@valleyadvocate.com
http://www.ctnow.com/custom/nmm/valleyadvocate/hce-vla-0531-va23cover23.artmay31,0,5932787.story?coll=hce-headlines-va-advocate
Copyright © 2007, Valley Advocate

Posted by lois at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

AL: Land sold to fund state's prisons

AL: Land sold to fund state's prisons
Montgomery Advertiser
May 29, 2007

The Alabama Department of Corrections has a $30 million hole in its operating budget for next year -- a hole the agency plans to fill by selling unused state land. While that might address the problem next year, there is a good chance the hole still will be there year after year. And the land will be gone.

The fact that the department is resorting to using one-time revenues from the sale of public property to pay for recurring operating costs underscores the long-term underfunding of the Alabama prison system by the Legislature.

Corrections Commissioner Richard Allen recognizes that he is addressing a continuing funding problem with a one-time solution, but he said he has no other realistic option to meet his budget for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

"We don't know where the money will come from after next year," he admits.

The state prison system has thousands of acres of land scattered around Alabama, and Allen said there is no foreseeable use for much of it. The agency is conducting a study to determine what land it can sell and what revenue it can expect from that sale, and will make recommendations to Gov. Bob Riley this week.

Allen said he hopes the agency can realize enough revenue from the sale of land to fund such continuing operations as the department's housing of prisoners out-of-state and its drug rehabilitation programs.

Allen said the department plans to maintain necessary buffer areas around existing facilities where possible.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any state agency looking at its property holdings to determine whether there is excess land for which there is no realistic foreseeable use, and selling what is not needed now or expected to be needed in the future. But it is unsound fiscal management to use the one-time revenues from such land sales for operating expenses that will continue in subsequent years.

Allen makes a persuasive argument that he has no choice, even though all the agency will be doing is delaying its budget crisis for a year.

But delaying the Corrections Department's fiscal crisis for a year won't accomplish much if the Legislature doesn't use that time to come up with long-range funding options for the agency.

The state's prison system funding problems are well known. The system houses roughly twice the number of inmates that its facilities were designed to hold, creating dangerous situations in some prisons. The system also has a high number of prisoners per corrections officer, which only adds to the problems. It's per-prisoner costs are always among the lowest in the nation.

The Corrections Department is funded out of the state General Fund budget. Despite a booming economy which has spurred record high revenues in the state's education budget, revenues in the General Fund have failed to keep up with the growth in costs for those programs which it funds, including Medicaid and state troopers.

The state attempted to address chronic overcrowding problems in a variety of ways in recent years: It is paying to house inmates out of state, it reduced a backlog in the paroles processby creating a second parole board, and it changed sentencing laws to allow more alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent criminals. Those changes did reduce the number of inmates somewhat, and new sentencing guidelines could further help to slow the growth of the inmate population.

But despite those changes, the number of inmates has again reached an all-time high, according to a department spokesman. In April the department had 28,775 inmates, about 300 more than the previous all-time high in April 2003.

If Alabama policymakers are going to continue to have a tough-on-crime stance that locks up lots of people for long sentences, then they need to find the funding to pay for the necessary prison system to house them. Otherwise the system eventually will implode. After all, the Corrections Department only has so much land it can sell.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070529/OPINION01/705290307/1006

Posted by lois at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

IA: New director focuses on future of state’s prisons

Wednesday, May 30, 2007
New director focuses on future of state’s prisons

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DES MOINES — Iowa’s new director of corrections says he will use his skills as a consensus builder in the debate over the future of the state’s prisons.

John Baldwin, 57, was named the state’s top prison official in April, succeeding Gary Maynard who left to take a job in Maryland.

Baldwin, a Fort Dodge native, said he will try to help the state’s political leaders find common ground on the issues, which include a growing population of women inmates and outdated prisons.

‘‘I think I have a very open style. I try for consensus where at all possible,’’ Baldwin said in an interview with The Des Moines Register.

He said one of his priorities will be to emphasize fundamental skills for correctional workers to ensure their safety and to help inmates be successful once they are released.

Baldwin, who has served as interim director on three different occasions, said he will be seeking input from the state’s wardens, directors of community corrections and the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees, the union that represents correctional officers.

‘‘Within the next year and a half, we are going to craft programs that are tailored for each one of those’’ prisons and community corrections districts, Baldwin said.

‘‘They are going to be different in Fort Madison than Rockwell City, and they are going to be different in the 5th District than they are in the 3rd District.’’

A report submitted to the Legislature by the Durrant Group, an Iowa-based consultant, called for a $200 million program to upgrade the state’s prisons.

Baldwin said he agrees that the antiquated maximum-security prison at Fort Madison must be replaced and that programs for female inmates should be consolidated at the Mitchellville prison — a project that would require more construction.

He also wants to build more community corrections centers because nearly 400 inmates are on waiting lists to enter the residential centers.

‘‘If we concentrate on those two prisons — at Fort Madison and Mitchellville — and on the community corrections side, we would go a long way toward solving some of those overcrowding issues,’’ he said.

He said the state also must address the growing number of women in prison — a group that is growing at a faster than men.

Baldwin wants to develop a gender-specific system to classify inmates, updating a system developed 25 years ago.

He also wants to focus on a treatment program for women that deals with substance abuse and family issues.

‘‘Women have different needs, and I think we can address some of them in the community,’’ he said. ‘‘Women, on average, come into prison with less violent crimes than men, and they stay fewer months in prison, and they recidivate at a lower rate. We should be able to craft some programs to expand upon that and keep the women in the community.’’

http://www.timesrepublican.com/Central%20Iowa/articles.asp?articleID=9924

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

May 29, 2007

Myths have a way of hiding what we don't want to see

"Isn't it time that we stop worrying about the behavior of faraway dictators and start downsizing prisons here at home?"

Originally published May 29, 2007

Florida's incarceration rate is booming
By Ronald Fraser

Myths have a way of hiding what we don't want to see.

Americans, for example, are quick to charge Third World dictators with abusive prison policies. But prison incarceration rates tell a different story.

Recent reports show that 45 of the 50 democratically elected state governments in the U.S., including Florida, imprison their citizens at a faster pace than any of the foreign governments headed by dictators.

Rulers in Libya, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, China and Pakistan made Parade magazine's 2005 world's worst dictators list. And the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, located in Oakland, Calif., has issued a report titled, "U.S. Rates of Incarceration: A Global Perspective," showing the incarceration rates for these five dictatorships - the number of persons in prison for every 100,000 population - ranging from a low of 57 in Pakistan to a high of 207 in Libya.

By comparison, prison policies made in Tallahassee locked up 499 state citizens for every 100,000 population in 2005. In other words, Florida imprisons its people at a rate more than two times faster than Muammar al-Qaddafi's Libya and eight times faster than Pakistan under Gen. Pervez Musharraf. If inmates held in local jails in Florida were added, the spread would be even wider.

Only five states - Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Minnesota and North Dakota - have prison incarceration rates less harsh than Libya's. All other states enforce prison policies that put dictators around the world to shame, including more than 600 inmates per 100,000 population in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

The NCCD study went on to compare prison rates in U.S. states to foreign countries with a similar population. While New York state and Australia have about the same size populations, New York prisons hold 92,000 inmates to Australia's 25,000. California's 246,000 prisoners compare to Poland's 86,000, even though each has similar populations.

Why are prisons in America filling at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world? Some say our crime rate is the cause.But the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., reported: ³Criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck examined the near-tripling of the prison population (in the U.S.) during the period 1980-1996 and concluded that changes in crime explained only 12% of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing policy accounted for 88% of the increase.²

Legislatively dictated sentences for even minor offenses tie the hands of judges and juries. These mandatory minimum punishments continue to keep hundreds of thousands behind bars for just using or selling tiny amounts of ³illicit² substances.

In addition, about one-half of all inmates in the U.S. are serving time for nonviolent offenses. If prisons were only used to separate dangerous people from the rest of society, the 89,766 state prisoners in Florida in 2005 could be drastically cut overnight.

This uniquely American belief in prisons as the all-purpose punishment for offenses great and small has resulted in one in every 136 U.S. residents living behind bars.

Rather than reforming inmates, U.S. prisons have become a merry-go-round. More than one-half of all inmates leaving prison find their way back - often due to minor violations of parole or probation rules.

The NCCD study ends on this note: ³The rate of imprisonment in the United States is considerably higher than any other industrialized nation. To ignore it is to condone the flagrant waste of money and lives and the crime-producing effects of needless imprisonment and to perpetuate the myth that more imprisonment means better protection of the public.²

With only 5 percent of the world's people, the United States is home to 23 percent of the world's prisoners. If the rest of the world followed America's prison policies, the worldwide incarcerated population would grow from 9 to 47 million.

Isn't it time that we stop worrying about the behavior of faraway dictators and start downsizing prisons here at home? ______________________

Ronald Fraser writes about public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization. Contact him at fraserr@erols.com.
http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070529/OPINION05/705
290311/-1

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

May 28, 2007

CA: Our prison mess: Politicians just make them worse

CATHERINE CAMPBELL:
Our prison mess: Politicians just make them worse
By Catherine Campbell
05/26/07
Fresno Bee
For the past 30 years, the California Legislature has passed laws lengthening prison sentences, built prison gulags all over the state, emptied the taxpayers' treasury to the prison guards union and its candidates, used crime to frighten and manipulate the voting public and refused to acknowledge the catastrophic prison system they created -- all out of self-interest.

Assembly Minority Leader Mike Villines' self-congratulatory, chest-thumping commentary in The Bee May 3, titled "California's Prison System in Crisis," would have us believe that he and the rest of the Legislature stood tall in the face of a possible "takeover" of California prisons by a federal judge.

Politicians love crime. Give a politician a good crime, preferably a sex crime against a child, and he will pop up on the front page with a new piece of sentencing legislation, named after the victim, of course, having consulted his advisers on the political up-tick such a photo op will give to his political fortunes.

Before 1977, politicians did not set prison sentences, the state's Adult Authority set sentences. Most convicted criminals went into prison not knowing how long they would spend there, and their release date was determined by a rather harsh board of former cops and parole agents who periodically reviewed their crimes, history and prison behavior in determining their sentence lengths.

The Adult Authority was arbitrary; it tended to be racist, and it punished prisoners who spoke out. But it was, in the end, more humane than what we've got now.

Prisoners had a motive to behave well in prison and to rehabilitate, because that was the key to freedom. True fiscal conservatives, Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown, were running our state then.

Prison sentences were relatively short, and our prisons were dungeons where corruption, brutality and neglect were rampant. Given what has happened since, perhaps this was a good thing. Perhaps we should have left well enough alone.

Instead, in 1977, with the passage of the Indeterminate Sentencing Law, we gave the issue over to politicians, who love defining whole new crimes and increasing sentences, and have gone at it with an enthusiasm that would make one think they actually believe in what they are doing.

But their enterprise is cynical. Every study done, whether by law enforcement or pin-headed intellectuals at the University of California at Berkeley, establishes that longer sentences do not make us safer in the long run; they just make more prisoners and more prisons.

In the 1980s, politicians were faced with the mounting prison population.. They started spending tons of money on new prisons. After the ribbon-cutting ceremonies were over, these behemoths emerged as unwieldy, out-of-control, brutal and mismanaged human warehouses.

They built them in remote corners of the state to please their urban constituents, and where doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, social workers and other essential professionals would refuse to work.

The inevitable outcome of these purely political choices was unconstitutionally inadequate medical, dental and mental-health care; violations of the federal rights of the disabled; the repeated unlawful use of force against prisoners; the warehousing and abuse of imprisoned youths; and a parole system in shambles.

It should be noted the hijacking of crime for political ends is not a phenomenon unique to California.

In the early 1970s, President Nixon made a point of politicizing crime, and many other states did what California did, with equally disastrous results: increased prison population, longer sentences and escalating spending on incarceration. This is not a California problem; it is an American problem.

No federal judge has "threatened" a takeover of California prisons, contrary to Mr. Villines' dramatic pronouncement. Three federal judges have put court monitors in place to supervise the reform of systems of care in California prisons, and all three judges have said that if the Legislature does not ante up to its responsibility to undo the damage it has done, the federal judiciary will have to put the prison system in receivership.

These judges do not thump their chests and make claims to courage. They respond to the evidence presented in a court of law.

So what does our brave Legislature, including Mr. Villines, a Republican from Clovis, do in the face of imminent court action? It votes to build more prisons, and to pay for them with lease revenue bonds, better known as credit.

Unlike other bonds, a lease revenue bond does not require voter approval.. Legislators know polls have shown that taxpayers would not vote to pay for new prisons, so they delayed payment and gave corporate investment houses huge windfall profits from the interest on these bonds. That's what Mr. Villines calls "courage."

Mr. Villines rejected a "sentencing commission" -- a substantive reform recommended in every recent study of the problem, and by some of the same people responsible for creating our prison problem, including former Gov. George Deukmejian -- because, says Mr. Villines, that would undermine public safety.

Truth be told, Mr. Villines and his Republican colleagues fought a sentencing commission because it would limit their power to exploit crime as a political issue. It would take sentencing out of their control and put it under the supervision of a representative group of professionals from academia, law enforcement, and the public.

Some sentences would be shortened because they are disproportionate to the harm done, and some might be lengthened, like the penalty for driving while using a cell phone -- very dangerous behavior indeed.

Some people would be released, like the very elderly, and the very ill. The parole system would be revamped to focus on dangerous offenders. A sentencing commission would, in fact, make us safer, and it would be a step toward compliance with constitutional standards.

The Legislature has been failing the people of California for 30 years, and as one who has worked on behalf of men and women in prison, I can attest to the immeasurable human toll in compromised health and wasted life that exists behind those walls as a consequence of political manipulation and our collective indifference.

I can only be grateful there are federal judges willing to hold the Constitution in one hand, and the evidence of neglect in the other, and then promise all Californians, free or imprisoned, that the law will be obeyed.

Catherine Campbell is a Fresno appellate and civil rights attorney. She can be reached at cathsoup@comcast.net.

http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/valley_voices/story/50121.html

Posted by lois at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)

Alone in a City’s AIDS Battle, Hoping for Backup

May 28, 2007
Alone in a City’s AIDS Battle, Hoping for Backup
NY Times
By IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON, May 28 — The nation’s capital is the only city in the country barred by federal law from using local tax money to finance needle exchange programs. It is also the city with the fastest-growing number of new AIDS cases.

These two facts keep Ron Daniels on the move, tirelessly driving his rickety Winnebago from drug corner to drug corner across the rougher parts of this city, counseling the addicted and swapping clean needles for dirty ones.

Faced with an AIDS problem growing here at a rate 10 times the national average, Mr. Daniels, the director of Prevention Works, the city’s only needle exchange program, is armed with a shoestring budget of $385,000 in private donations, a small fraction of what programs in other major cities receive in state and local money.

Since Washington is not part of a state, Congress controls the city’s local system of government, and for nearly a decade members of the House, citing concerns about worsening drug abuse, have inserted language into the bill approving the city’s budget to prohibit financing such programs.

That may soon change.

“This city’s situation is totally improper,” said Representative José E. Serrano, Democrat of New York and chairman of the subcommittee responsible for the District of Columbia appropriations bill. “It’s politically obscene to have Congress tell the District of Columbia that it can’t use local funds for something like needle exchange programs, which have been proven to have a major effect on fighting a deadly disease.”

Calling the matter both a public health concern and a basic political right of home rule, Mr. Serrano said he planned to make it a priority to remove the language that prevents the city from financing such programs. The city’s mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, has said he will provide city money as soon as Congress takes such action.

Washington was among the first cities nationally to create an AIDS monitoring office after the virus first appeared in the United States more than 20 years ago. But it has slid backward in its fight against the disease, which is commonly spread by intravenous drug users sharing needles.

“For every person I help, there’re seven more I can’t reach,” said Mr. Daniels, 49, who describes his program as providing a thin wall between the city’s drug and AIDS epidemics. “But I’d be reaching a lot more if my hands weren’t tied.”

Critics of needle exchange programs argue that rather than reducing the suffering of drug users and preventing them from spreading diseases, the programs foster further drug use.

“We need to fight drugs, not show people that they can be used in a safe manner,” Representative Sam Graves, Republican of Missouri, said last year during House floor debate about drug policy.

Mr. Daniels said fighting drugs was exactly what his program did.

“The needle is just an enticement, really,” he said, looking through the screen door of his van at a line of about 10 people who gathered within minutes of his arrival at a corner on the city’s grittier Northeast side.

He said his program, which reaches about one third of Washington’s estimated 9,700 intravenous drug users, relied on clean syringes to attract users so he and his staff of four could counsel them about drug rehabilitation and testing for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

“Want ointment? Alcohol pads?” asks Mr. Daniels, running down his checklist as he prepares supplies for a heroin addict who counts a week’s worth of used needles, dropping them in a plastic bucket. “Need food? Condoms?” Mr. Daniels asks.

One by one, they file in: a security guard sick of hiding his addiction from his wife, a carpenter looking for methadone, a prostitute with a bad case of the shakes. Many are rail thin. Most have sores.

Teefari Mallory sits at the laptop entering data on each user. Three other staff members go into the neighborhood to talk about safe sex and AIDS prevention.

“Give me 5 apples, 10 blues and 2 groins,” says a man named Bernard after dropping 17 used syringes, a week’s supply, into the bucket.

“Apples” and “blues” are syringes used by addicts who have been taking drugs for shorter periods. “Groins are what you use when all your other veins collapse,” said Mr. Daniels, who used to be known on the streets as Boo when he sold drugs and needed four hits of heroin a day to get by.

In Washington, with just over half a million residents, one in 20 are H.I.V. positive.

And the number of people with AIDS is growing. The city’s rate of new AIDS cases was 128.4 per 100,000 people in 2005, compared with a national average of 13.7 per 100,000, according to the most recent data available from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which compares the district with states rather than other cities.

Intravenous drug use is the second-most-common way H.I.V. is spread among men in Washington, with unprotected sex being first, according to city health officials. For women in the city, sharing needles is the most common mode of H.I.V. transmission, city officials say.

There are more than 200 needle exchange programs in at least 36 states, about half financed by city or state money, according to the North American Syringe Exchange Network. Needle exchange programs and support services in New York City, for example, receive more than $3 million in state and local money, according to the Harm Reduction Coalition, which works with 12 programs in the city.

Back at the Winnebago, Yvonne Zywusko, a 39-year-old prostitute, climbed on board, shaking in withdrawal from not having used heroin in over a day.

“Look at me,” she said as she dropped two used needles in the bucket. “I wasn’t raised this way. I went to Catholic school. My family had a lot to offer me, and I missed out.”

Reaching out to prostitutes is an especially high priority of Mr. Daniels’s program, since they have great potential to spread H.I.V.

Seeming disgusted with herself, Ms. Zywusko described how she sold her body and slept in stairwells, but she began shaking her head as she added that she was still not ready or able to kick her addiction.

She added that the one line she was trying not to cross is sharing needles. “I got checked in January. It was negative,” she said about her last H.I.V. test. “I’m lucky.”

Financing for needle exchange programs is hardly Washington’s only problem in its fights against AIDS.

“D.C. is a city where a progressive local government wants to do the right thing, but a lot of factors work against it,” said A. Cornelius Baker, a policy adviser in Washington and the former executive director of the Whitman Walker Clinic, which ran its own needle exchange program in the city until 1998, when Congress first blocked local money from going toward such programs.

The city’s AIDS prevention office is currently on its 12th director in just over two decades, a turnover rate that has hampered its focus, Mr. Baker said. The city is also predominantly black, and it has a large gay population, and the infection rates for both communities have historically been high, he said. Shame and stigma have also hindered a willingness among blacks to confront the problem, he added.

There are also broader prohibitions.

In 1988, Congress banned federal money from being used on needle exchange programs, though it included an exception allowing the president to waive the federal ban if review by the surgeon general or secretary of Health and Human Services determined that syringe exchange programs were proven effective and did not increase drug use.

A number of federal studies found that such programs did not increase drug use, and in 1998 Donna Shalala, then the secretary of Health and Human Services, concluded, “A meticulous scientific review has now proven that needle exchange programs can reduce the transmission of H.I.V. and save lives without losing ground in the battle against illegal drugs.”

However, President Bill Clinton did not remove the ban on syringe exchange financing, and in 1998 Congress reinforced the ban by removing the executive waiver.

The attention paid to the issue helped embolden critics in Congress, who decided not only to tighten the federal ban but also to block Washington’s own financing of such programs. In recent years, Mr. Clinton has said he regrets not having done more to lift the ban.

Across the Anacostia River and worlds away from the wealth and power of Capitol Hill, Curtis Toney, 40, groans as he gently lowers himself into the Winnebago’s overstuffed chair. Mr. Toney unwraps a bandage on his leg. The smell makes Mr. Daniels step back.

“We have got to do something about that,” Mr. Daniels said, reaching for gauze pads.

Mr. Daniels was infected with H.I.V. over 17 years ago after sharing a needle. He said he began using hard drugs when he was a teenager and became an addict in his early 20s while in the military. A Washington native, he now parks his Winnebago near many of the abandoned buildings and corners where he once bought and used his drugs.

A man arrives neatly dressed but with no needles to swap. He asks for a referral to an outpatient drug rehabilitation program. “I got a problem,” he says, explaining that the city’s in-patient drug programs last too long and his employer will not give him that much time off for “personal reasons” without asking questions. “I’d be fired if I tried to explain.”

Mr. Daniels estimates that he makes 50 referrals to drug treatment programs per month.

“I got the guy you need to call,” Mr. Daniels told the man. “But, look,” he added, looking him squarely in the eyes, “I will see you next week, and I’m going to check up on what you’re doing.”

Barclay Walsh contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/washington/29cnd-district.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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

May 27, 2007

A scale for the price of life. In Iraq, a human life is worth $2,500; in Manhattan, $1.8 million

A scale for the price of life
In Iraq, a human life is worth $2,500; in Manhattan, $1.8 million
Tom Engelhardt
Sunday, May 20, 2007

What is the value of a human life?

We usually think of this in terms of sentiment -- of memories, grief, love , longing, of everything, in short, that is too deep and valuable to put a price upon. Then again, is anything in our world truly priceless?

As anyone who has ever taken out a life insurance policy knows, we humans are quite capable of putting a price on life -- and death. In her book "Pricing the Priceless Child," Viviana Zelizer reminds us that, starting in the 1870s in the United States, in that era before child labor laws, the business of insuring working-class children, who were then valuable to poor families, achieved enormous success. For a few pennies a week, $10 in all, you could, for instance, insure your 1-year-old against the future loss to the family of his or her earning power.

The courts weighed in, assessing the literal value of an earning child to a family. In those days, poor urban children died regularly in staggering numbers under horse's hooves, the wheels of street cars, and trains. In an 1893 editorial, the New York Times referred to this as "child slaughter," and juries reacted accordingly. When Ettie Pressman, just 7 years old, died under a team of horses in 1893 while crossing New York's Ludlow Street with her 9-year-old sister, a court granted her father $1,000 to compensate him for "his daughter's services and earnings." ("Yes," her father testified, with "what I earn and what the children earn used together we have enough. They earn $3 each week.")

This came to mind recently, thanks to another kind of "child slaughter" -- in this case by U.S. Marines, who, in early March, went on a killing rampage near Jalalabad in Afghanistan. Sorry, in Pentagon parlance, this is referred to as "using excessive force." A platoon of elite Marine Special Operations troops in a convoy of humvees was ambushed by a suicide bomber in a minivan and one was wounded. Initially, it was reported that as many as 10 Afghans were killed and 34 wounded as the platoon fled the site.

Later, it was admitted that the Marines had wielded that "excessive force" excessively and long after the ambush had ended, laying down a deadly field of fire at six spots, at least, along a 10-mile stretch of road. Their targets, according to a draft report of the U.S. military investigation of the incident (which the Washington Post got its hands on) were Afghans, on foot and in vehicles who were "exclusively civilian in nature" and had engaged in "no kind of provocative or threatening behavior."

In the process, the Marines were reported to have murdered "12 people -- including a 4-year-old girl, a 1-year-old boy and three elderly villagers.'' According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, a "16-year-old newly married girl was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her family's farmhouse. (U.S. troops at the time took the camera of an Afghan Associated Press photographer who happened to come upon the scene and "deleted" photographs from it, including ones "of a four-wheel drive vehicle where three Afghans had been shot to death inside.")

After much protest in Afghanistan, Col. John Nicholson met with the families of the (now) 19 Afghans who had been killed and the 50 who had been wounded by the Marines. He offered this official apology: "I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people." And then he paid about $2,000 per death to family members. The military calls these "condolence payments" and makes similar ones for deaths judged wrongful, in Iraq.

Recently, through a Freedom of Information Act request, the American Civil Liberties Union pried loose some of the requests for compensation payments submitted by Iraqis and Afghans (and the military's decisions on them, including denials of payment). They make grim reading. Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher offered this description: "What price (when we do pay) do we place on the life of a 9-year-old boy, shot by one of our soldiers who mistook his book bag for a bomb satchel? Would you believe $500? And when we shoot an Iraqi journalist on a bridge we shell out $2,500 to his widow -- but why not the measly $5,000 she had requested?"

In 2005, Iraqi payments already seemed to average about $2,500 for a wrongful death. That, for instance, is what the families of two-dozen unarmed Iraqis slaughtered in another Marines-run-amok moment at Haditha, also after an attack on a convoy of humvees that wounded a Marine, received. ("They ranged from babies to adult males and females," said Ryan Briones, a Marine witness to the event. "I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood.")

This practice is not new to President Bush's wars. During the Vietnam War, as part of the American pacification program, U.S. officials made what were called solatium payments for wrongful deaths caused by American forces. Back then, the United States valued Vietnamese adults at about $35, while children's lives were worth about $15.

We don't know who exactly decided on the value in U.S. dollars of the life of a 16 year-old Afghan girl, slaughtered while carrying a bundle of grass to her family farmhouse, or on the basis of what formula for pricing life the decision was made.

Despite the relatively small amounts paid out in Iraq, we do know that total official payments for wrongful deaths, as well as for injury and collateral property damage, caused by American troops, total at least $32 million, according to Editor & Publisher's Mitchell -- and that figure is considered low because similar payments are made unofficially "at a unit commander's discretion."

We also know something about how the U.S. government evaluated the wroth of the lives of slaughtered American innocents after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The family or spouse of a loved one murdered that day was also given a monetary value -- $1.8 million, on average from the September 11th Compensation fund, created by an act of Congress and signed into law by the president 13 days after the attacks.

So there we have it. In the modern version of "child slaughter," the U.S. government has indeed offered the world an evaluation of what price slaughter should exact in the deaths of innocents everywhere:

The value of a civilian slaughtered by al Qaeda terrorists on Sept. 11: $1.8 million.

The value of a civilian slaughtered at Haditha, Iraq, by U.S. Marines: $2,500.

The value of a civilian slaughtered by U.S. Marines near Jalalabad, Afghanistan: $2,000.

Never say that the U.S. government is incapable of putting a price on the deaths of innocents.

Tom Engelhardt is the founder of www.tomdispatch.com. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/20/INGOMPSTQT1.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Posted by lois at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

CA: The Orange Grove: Prison deal froze out voters

Sunday, May 20, 2007
The Orange Grove: Prison deal froze out voters

New facilities financed with bonds that public was denied a chance to OK.

This month's prison deal brought cheers and plaudits from virtually all political corners in California. The Legislature, threatened by a federal court takeover of the state's prison system, averted the crisis - it is hoped - by enacting a comprehensive bill to deal with prison overcrowding and other corrections issues. Gov. Schwarzenegger hailed the agreement as another example of how California can work in a post-partisan world.

But, like most political decisions made under duress, there are legitimate questions as to whether the deal reflects good public policy - or whether it was even legal.

To recap: California has a huge and growing prison population. Those who are politically conservative were not about to let convicted felons out early. Those on the left - who would prefer more leniency for the incarcerated - were pushing for programs dealing with rehabilitation as well as a new sentencing commission.

But political compromise in California is difficult, and often the only way to reach that compromise is with lots of taxpayer dollars to appease both sides. It is amazing what a soothing effect buckets of taxpayer cash can have on the adversaries in a political dispute.

That is what happened here. The tough-on-crime Republicans got their extra prison beds - 53,000 - and the Democrats got their rehabilitation programs designed to reduce recidivism.

The centerpiece of the agreement was a $6.1 billion bond proposal. That is a huge amount of indebtedness, especially considering that voters just approved $42 billion in infrastructure bonds last November.

Which brings us to the No. 1 question posed by taxpayers: Why were these prison bonds not put to voters for approval?

The short answer - really no answer at all - is that, as "lease revenue" bonds, they are exempt from voter approval.

There is no debate that lease revenue bonds, and their questionable cousins, "certificates of participation," are instruments of indebtedness. However, because their repayment is - in theory - not guaranteed by the state's general fund, they are not considered "general obligation bonds" which, if over $300,000, require voter approval.

Last time we checked, $6.1 billion is a bigger number than $300,000.

In any event, there are instances at both the state and local level where lease revenue bonds make sense. Specifically, if the improvement being financed generates revenue, you can argue that voter approval should not be required because the source of the repayment does not put taxpayers at risk.

The clearest example of this is a public parking garage. Garages generate money, which can be used to repay the bondholders. Some publicly financed sports facilities, and their attendant retail and other business properties, might also be candidates for lease-revenue financing.

Which brings us to prisons. What revenue do prison facilities produce? Well, none. Lease revenue bonds in this context are based on a fiction. Rather than face voters who might reject long-term financing for prison construction, our political leaders have signed off on a system whereby the debt will be "repaid" by future revenue appropriated to the Department of Corrections. In other words, general fund money will simply be transferred from the right pocket (Corrections) to the left pocket (bond payments).

How did this come about? Without going into all the gory details, simply understand that a lot of special interests make a lot of money on the public debt "industry." Bond underwriters, bond lawyers and the bond buyer community love public debt, and they are not going to let a little thing like a constitutional provision mandating voter approval stand in their way.

Over the past several decades, the law has been carefully crafted by law firms specializing in public debt to create fictions like lease- revenue bonds and certificates of participation. Indeed, in their marketing literature they openly brag about being able to "circumvent voter approval."

But what is good for the public debt industry and politicians looking for a quick fix to a thorny problem is not necessarily good for taxpayers. In addition to ducking voter approval, lease-revenue bonds are more expensive for the very reason that they are not backed by the full faith and credit of the state. Indeed, the true cost of this "bond" proposal could be as high as $15 billion - well over twice the amount being used for the construction itself. This is truly adding insult to injury.

What is needed to rein in politicians from both parties is a constitutional amendment requiring a public vote for all long-term indebtedness. That was the original intent of the California Constitution in 1849. Thus, in addition to general obligation bonds, voters should be able to approve lease-revenue bonds, certificates of participation, long-term pension obligations and other post-retirement benefits promised by politicians and bureaucrats who will be long gone when our children are still paying off this debt.

It is time to stop the fiction and have our leaders face reality.

the Orange County Register..
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/opinion/abox/article_1700144.php

Posted by lois at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

Boston Herald- Op-Ed: Give taxpayers a prison break

Give taxpayers a prison break
By Carl Sciortino
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Boston Herald

Massachusetts taxpayers are paying $43,000 per year to incarcerate people, and now we are facing a proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new and expanded facilities. I believe we can better direct our money and resources if we address our excessive incarceration rate at the root: mental illness, substance abuse and mandatory minimum sentencing.

It is estimated that nearly one in six inmates committed their crimes to support a drug addiction. More than 16 percent of jail inmates suffer from some sort of mental illness, 70 percent of whom were arrested for nonviolent offenses. When someone is picked up on the streets intoxicated, why are we paying $43,000 a year to lock them up rather than providing them with treatment services?
At a recent forum I attended, then-Corrections Commissioner Kathleen Dennehy reported that there are approximately 250 people civilly committed every day, with no criminal charge whatsoever, who are there for one reason only: because there aren’t enough detox and treatment beds.
Sheriff Andrea Cabral touched upon this issue in a recent Boston Herald article.
Leslie Walker, executive director of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, and Sheriff Michael Bellotti have echoed Sheriff Cabral’s concerns that we need to be looking into alternatives to incarceration, such as examining our state’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws and providing treatment on demand for substance abuse.
It’s too easy to simply lock these individuals in our jails.
We need to ask ourselves whether building more jails and prisons is the answer. I believe it is not. The more we build, the easier it is to simply lock people up without ever asking whether that is the best use of our resources or the best way to make our communities safer.
H.1723 - An Act Relative to Incarceration and Its Impact on Public Safety - calls for a five-year moratorium on the construction or expansion of jails and prisons while creating a special commission to make recommendations related to overcrowding, the effectiveness of incarceration on issues such as mental illness and substance abuse, and alternatives to sentencing for more cost-effective means to reduce overcrowding and ensure public safety.
It is clear that our current strategies for reducing overcrowding are not working. New jails and new prisons will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars without addressing how we can actually improve public safety.
More money for the Department of Correction is not the answer. Incarcerating more of our citizens who are in need of forms of treatment is not the answer. We need to understand that overcrowding cannot be solved by building more correctional facilities; it requires a fundamental re-examination of why our facilities are overcrowded to begin with.

Carl Sciortino is state representative from the 34th Middlesex District, including neighborhoods in Somerville and Medford.
http://news.bostonherald.com/editorial/view.bg?articleid=1003317&format=text

Posted by lois at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

Wall Street Journal: Profits for Private Jailers

SMART MONEY
The Wall Street Journal Sunday
Profits for Private Jailers
By DAN BURROWS
May 27, 2007

The prison business looks ready to stage a breakout.

Tougher mandatory sentences were already straining the nation's jails. Now, the Department of Homeland Security's Border Initiative and its detention of undocumented immigrants has further burdened the system. Federal prisons already have 33% more inmates than they were designed to house and state prisons are similarly overcrowded.

The upshot? A severe shortage of prison space -- and a robust outlook for the three biggest private jailers.

A Need to Outsource

The vast majority of prisons are still owned and operated by federal or state governments; less than 8% of prisons are outsourced to private operators. But the private market -- dominated by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group and Cornell -- is expected to grow substantially over the next five years.

A February report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit research foundation, forecasts a 13% increase in the inmate population by 2011 -- in line with past growth rates, but further compounding the overcapacity problem. That amounts to as much as $27.5 billion in new prison construction and operation.

That kind of burden leaves states and the federal government with little choice but to outsource incarceration to private companies.

Corrections, Geo and Cornell are "far and away the biggest beneficiaries of that trend," says Patrick Swindle, an analyst with boutique investment bank Avondale Partners in Nashville, Tenn.

Higher Profit Margins

Take Corrections, the biggest of the bunch with about a 50% market share and expected earnings growth of some 22% a year over the next five years. The company recently amended a contract with California to house an additional 4,700 inmates, with more expected to come from the state's desperately overcrowded system. Occupancy rates of 90%-plus and better contract terms are boosting profit margins.

Geo, with 30% of the market, is enjoying new contracts, better terms and sky-high occupancy rates as well. As a result, analysts, on average, expect earnings growth of 16% a year for the next five years.

Another plus is the company's emerging Geo Care business, which takes over crumbling state mental institutions. "These are very old state facilities, many of which need to be replaced," Mr. Swindle says. "Geo Care is a first mover in the space, and that business is really beginning to get its legs." Geo Care contributed $70 million to Geo's 2006 revenue of $861 million, almost double its contribution the year earlier.

Small but Growing

With just 8% of the private prison market, Cornell is the smallest player. But the company is expanding its Folkston, Ga., prison in response to demand from the U.S. Marshals Service. And in January, it renewed a long-term contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to add housing at its facility in Big Spring, Texas.

Cornell's long-term earnings-growth rate is projected at 11% a year for the next five years.

There's another bright side to this somewhat dark industry: These stocks have a defensive aspect. Jamie Cuellar, portfolio manager at Brazos Capital Management, which owns shares in all three companies, says the sector is almost countercyclical.

"When times are bad, more people tend to go to jail," Mr. Cuellar says. "It's awful, but it's true."

Write to Dan Burrows at dan.burrows@dowjones.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118022826756215918.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Posted by lois at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2007

CA: Gov. wants to track gang parolees. The $48-million proposal calls for electronic monitoring

Yet another...predictable outcome of the sex offender stupidity...

From the Los Angeles Times
Gov. wants to track gang parolees
The $48-million proposal calls for electronic monitoring, but Democrats opponents cite the high cost and unproven results.
By Evan Halper
Times Staff Writer

May 26, 2007

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants the state to track scores of violent gang parolees the way it does sex offenders, monitoring them with ankle devices and maintaining a statewide database that records their movements.

On Friday, the governor proposed extending a pilot program - used to monitor 20 gang members in San Bernardino - to Los Angeles, Sacramento and Fresno as part of what he called a comprehensive strategy to combat gang violence.

"We are targeting gangs inside and outside the prisons," Schwarzenegger said at an Oakland news conference.

"We will also treat convicted gang members like sex offenders," he said.

"The worst of the worst will get" global positioning system "bracelets so we know exactly where they are and what they are doing. If they try to recruit new members or terrorize people in the community, we will know where they are and we will be able to bust them."

The plan, while applauded by some law enforcement and community groups, received faint praise from the Democrat-dominated Legislature, where members advocate a more preventive approach to gang violence.

Some Democrats suggested that the governor's $48-million proposal, which also modestly increases spending on job training, witness protection and activities for at-risk youths, lacks substance.

They question whether spending scarce resources on ankle bracelets, in particular, is the most effective way to fight crime.

"These little shots here and there don't seem to make a difference," said Assemblywoman Anna Caballero (D-Salinas), head of the Select Committee on Youth Violence Prevention.

"You need a coordinated plan with an overall strategy," she said.

Caballero said the ankle bracelet technology "is untested and very expensive."

The bracelets are so costly, in fact, that the state can afford to contribute only 20 to gang prevention efforts in each of the three new cities targeted for the program. Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary James Tilton said the expense comes mainly from two areas. Each black anklet is equipped with an antenna and costs more than $3,000 per year. The state also spends thousands of dollars more paying parole agents to monitor the movements that the bracelets record.

The state is already preoccupied with getting 3,000 of the bracelets on high-risk sex offenders, the result of an initiative approved by voters in November.

"What we're trying to do is move this program forward, to show it can be successful with gang members," Tilton said. He said that if the state succeeds, the program would be expanded.

Department officials say that in San Bernardino, the bracelets have helped police locate gang members at the scenes of several crimes, including a carjacking, drug trafficking and shots fired at police officers.

The tracking device also helped police locate the suspect in the murder of a gang member who was wearing a bracelet by tracing where the victim had been before he was killed.

Since March 2006, the 20 devices have been used to monitor a total of 50 gang members in San Bernardino. Department officials say that more than half have been returned to custody for parole violations or other crimes.

The issue of gang violence has been prominent in the Capitol this year as the governor and legislators struggle to find solutions to what statistics show is a rapidly growing problem. Figures released by the administration show that gang-related crimes in Los Angeles were up 14% last year, even as overall crime declined. In Compton and Santa Ana, more than two of every three homicides recorded in 2005 were gang-related.

The state Department of Justice estimates that California has more than 420,000 gang members.

"The state must coordinate the fight against gangs," Schwarzenegger said.

"When we crack down in one area they pop up somewhere elseŠ. We are telling the criminals the crackdown on them will not stop anymore at the city limits or the county line," Schwarzenegger said.

His plan includes the creation of a state anti-gang coordinator who would work with local agencies, as well as the creation of regional task forces and a centralized criminal intelligence and analysis unit that would track gang activity in the state's 22 prisons.

Caballero says some of the ideas merit consideration, but criticizes the overall plan as being light on prevention strategies such as job training and other social service programs.

She notes that in Los Angeles, city and county officials estimate that they use more than $900 million in local, state and federal money each year combating gang violence.

The governor's proposal to add $48 million in spending statewide, she said, "stops short of proposing significant new investment in anti-gang programs."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gangs26may26,0,4548423.story?coll=la-home-center
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)

WI: Prison mental health unit for women backed

The Capital Times

Prison mental health unit for women backed
Judith Davidoff ‹ 5/24/2007 10:52 am

In its scathing report on conditions at Wisconsin's Taycheedah Correctional Institution, the U.S. Justice Department noted that there were many instances when inmates at the women's prison required inpatient psychiatric care but did not receive it.

"Staff also stated that some inmates are housed in administrative segregation solely because their psychiatric symptoms are so severe that there is simply no other place to put them," investigators wrote in their May 2006 report. "This often leads to ... further dangerous behavior."

While the state does operate an inpatient treatment center for men inmates with severe mental illness, there is no equivalent facility for women inmates. But as the defendant in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union -- and with the threat of another lawsuit coming from the U.S. Justice Department -- the state is taking steps to change that situation.

The state Building Commission in April recommended building a free-standing $11 million, 45-bed female treatment center at the Winnebago Mental Health Institution. The Joint Finance Committee is expected to vote today on whether to support this project in the 2007-09 capital budget.

In its request for funding, the department of Health and Family Services said the state would likely be sued if it did not build a facility equivalent to the Wisconsin Resource Center for male inmates.

"Should the state fail to voluntarily correct these shortcomings, the U.S. DOJ has indicated it will initiate legal action to force compliance," the department said.

It also noted that the state's current practice of using the Winnebago Mental Health Institution for inpatient services was not adequate for several reasons, including insufficient space and appropriate security.

Todd Winstrom, attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, which has kept close tabs on health care issues at Taycheedah, agrees.

Winnebago is "not equipped to take female inmates for the long term," he said. "It hasn't really been effective from anyone's perspective."

In a memo to the Joint Finance Committee, Winstrom said the Department of Corrections estimates that 50 percent of women in Wisconsin's prisons have a diagnosed mental illness; 18 percent in this group have the "most serious and persistent" forms of mental illness.

The prevalence of mental illness among female inmates is twice that of male prisoners, Winstrom also said.

"The single most glaring need to get to the point where we're starting to provide minimally adequate treatment to the women with the most serious mental health needs in our prisons is the ability to offer intensive, inpatient treatment," Winstrom said in an interview. "The U.S. Department of Justice and ACLU both identified this as just a gaping hole in the range of services we're offering to these women."

Winstrom said putting mentally ill inmates in isolation only exacerbates an individual's symptoms and dangerous behavior and has, as noted in the U.S. Justice Department report, resulted in at least one inmate killing herself.

It behooves the state to address the mental health needs of women prisoners, Winstrom added.

"Women coming out of prison who've been able to get the kind of treatment they need because this facility exists will return to the community much more stable, less likely to get into trouble again and much less likely to pose a public safety threat," he said. "Everyone benefits from this."

Efforts to reach Joint Finance Committee co-chairmen Sen. Russ Decker, D-Weston, and Rep. Kitty Rhoades, R-Hudson, were unsuccessful.
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/136184

Posted by lois at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

WI: Her first vote put her in prison

Here's an example of the so-called "voter fraud" Monica Goodling & Co were so intent in prosecuting. Lois

Her first vote put her in prison
Woman is one of five from city convicted of voter fraud
By BILL GLAUBER
Posted: May 21, 2007

Union Grove - Kimberly Prude is 43, a grandmother of three and the face of voter fraud in Wisconsin.

The first vote she cast in her life, in the 2004 presidential election, landed her in the middle of a political storm and put her on a road to a two-year sentence inside the Robert E. Ellsworth Correctional Center.

"At this point, I'm not interested in voting," Prude said last week in a measured voice as she sat in a spare meeting room at the minimum security prison.

It was her first interview since her conviction in September 2005. She wore a gray T-shirt, blue jeans and white tennis shoes. She smiled and appeared comfortable discussing her life in prison, where she earns 26 cents an hour as a cleaner in the kitchen and is studying to complete a high school equivalency diploma.

On advice of her attorney, she declined to discuss the case, which is on appeal.

How Prude got from the streets of Milwaukee to a prison in Racine County is now the stuff of American political history.

Prude cast an illegal vote in 2004. As a felon on probation and under state supervision, she was ineligible to vote.

A woman who dropped out of high school in 10th grade, struggled with substance abuse and compiled a criminal record, Prude found herself up against the might of the federal system.

"I tried to get help in the beginning," she said. "I wrote Oprah (Winfrey's) O Magazine. I got my daughter to call certain talk show hosts, Montel Williams, Maury Povich. There was no interest."

In almost any other election year in perhaps any other state, such a vote might have gone unnoticed and unpunished.

But in Wisconsin - a key battleground state - the closely contested 2004 presidential election between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry
(D-Mass.) was placed under a microscope, especially in Milwaukee. GOP warned of fraud

In the days leading to the election, Republicans leveled accusations that the vote was subject to fraud and challenged 5,600 addresses of voters on Milwaukee's rolls, while Democrats warned of intimidation and potential suppression of minority voters including African-Americans, such as Prude.

The election was held. The votes were counted. The debate died down.

But the issue did not go away.

In early 2005, Republican officials in Wisconsin complained to senior White House political adviser Karl Rove that Milwaukee U.S. Attorney Steven M. Biskupic was not being aggressive enough in pursuing voter fraud cases.

Biskupic has said he was unaware of those complaints and has repeatedly denied that his office prosecuted any voter fraud case because of White House pressure. As early as 2005, Biskupic was on an "evolving list" of 26 U.S. attorneys to be fired by the Bush administration, according to The Washington Post.

After all the allegations of voter fraud made during the 2004 presidential campaign, federal attorneys in Milwaukee brought 14 cases. Six of those were dismissed before trial, and only five convictions were secured, all Milwaukee residents. Prosecutors had to prove that the voters intended to defraud the system. 10% of all U.S. cases

Although 14 cases may not sound like a lot, they made up more than 10% of all the federal voter fraud cases brought in the United States from 2002 to 2006, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

Four of the cases here involved allegations of double voting, and 10 others involved felons accused of voting.

As in a majority of states, Wisconsin prohibits felony offenders from voting until they have completed probation and parole. Only two states deny the right to vote for all ex-offenders, and nine other states restrict certain ex-offenders or impose a waiting period to vote, according to The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group.

One of those charged by prosecutors here was Derek Little, a felon from Milwaukee, who registered to vote and then cast a ballot on the same day. The only identification he had was a parolee card.

"In big bold letters, it says OFFENDER, and they still let me vote," Little said. "I thought it was their job to know the rules."

Federal attorneys dropped the case. But the experience left Little shaken.

"The Department of Corrections should take the time out and make sure a person understands each and every one of the rules 100 percent," he said. "I don't want anyone else to go through this situation. It will turn you into a nervous wreck."

Prude's case was different.

She worked as a local volunteer for the John Kerry-John Edwards campaign, even calling people to inform them how they could vote.

Went to Sharpton rally

On Oct. 22, 2004, she volunteered for a rally that featured the Rev. Al Sharpton. As the rally ended, Sharpton encouraged the crowd to follow him to City Hall, where people could register to vote. Prude joined the crowd, registered to vote and then submitted an absentee ballot. While waiting in line, she said, she heard someone asking for people to work the election-day polls. Prude signed up.

Later, Prude said she notified her parole agent that she had a job as a poll worker and the agent told her she couldn't vote. Prude claimed she called the election commission to attempt to withdraw her ballot but that a person she spoke with told her not to worry about the vote.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling said Prude's story "changed repeatedly."

"You didn't get the sense (from Prude), 'I made a mistake, I forgot.' This was, 'I did it, now I'm trying to cover.' "

During the three-day trial, Prude testified she made a "terrible mistake" by voting and tried to correct it.

The government said Prude was amply warned that felons under supervision could not vote. Prude's parole officer testified that on Sept. 27, 2004, he warned her not to vote.

The government said that at the polls on election day, "Prude improperly vouched for individuals she had never met. She also signed as the corroborating witness on two on-site registration cards for the same voter."

A jury convicted Prude of voter fraud.

She was sentenced to serve two years concurrent with a state sentence for forgery. She pleaded guilty to the state charge in 2000; her six-year prison term was stayed and she was placed on supervision.

The voting fraud conviction contributed to her probation being revoked.

Due for release in fall

Prude is expected to be released from prison in the autumn. She plans to return home and pursue a job lead.

For now, she said, the things she misses most are holidays. Asked what gift she wants for her first Christmas at home, she thought for a moment and said, "You know what, I want no surprises this year."

Original Story URL: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=608187

Posted by lois at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

N.M. pays more for private prisons, report says

N.M. pays more for private prisons, report says
Associated Press- Thursday, May 24, 2007

SANTA FE - The amount the state pays to house inmates at private prisons soared 57 percent over the past six years, a period in which the number of prisoners rose by 21 percent, a new audit shows.

In general, the report said, the state Corrections Department "lacks active long-term planning to accommodate inmate growth, leading to a disjointed approach to acquiring bed space that proves costly."

The 100-page audit by a Legislative Finance Committee review team said New Mexico pays significantly more than nearby states do for private-prison housing.

"Business decisions across two administrations may result in New Mexico paying an estimated $34 million more than it should pay for private-prison construction costs," the review said.

Corrections Secretary Joe Williams said higher operating costs are justified. He said New Mexico's costs cannot be compared to those for other states because prisoners here have more space, more programs and more security. Williams also said New Mexico's labor costs are higher, which increases the cost of building prisons.

The Corrections Department's official response said that "instead of looking at the use of privatization in such a negative manner, New Mexico should be proud that we are leading the nation and that it is working so well."

More than 40 percent of New Mexico's inmates are in private prisons. The total inmate population was 6,544 as of Wednesday.

The state pays nearly $69 a day per inmate at the private Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs and more than $70 at the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility in Santa Rosa.

The report said Texas pays $34.66 a day per inmate for private prisons, Colorado pays $50.28 a day, Oklahoma's rate is $41.23, Idaho pays $42.30 and Montana $54.58.

The LFC recommends New Mexico restructure contracts with the GEO Group, the state's major private-prison operator, for existing facilities. GEO also will operate a private prison being built at Clayton.

The state's contract for the Clayton prison will have a more equitable fee structure, and if the Hobbs and Santa Rosa contracts were renegotiated to conform with that, New Mexico could save nearly $5 million a year, the report said.

The report also said the state has paid for services it hasn't received. For example, the state in 2004 required GEO, formerly Wackenhut, to provide four mental health staffers for a sex-offender unit. The company billed the state more than $300,000 but did not hire new staff until 2005, the report said.

GEO was brought in to manage private prisons by former Gov. Gary Johnson, a trend continued by Gov. Bill Richardson.

The Institute on Money in State Politics said Richardson received more than $42,000 from GEO - more than it gave to any other candidate for a state office last year in the nation. The company gave other New Mexico politicians about $80,000 in the last election, it said.

GEO has contributed the maximum allowed to Richardson's presidential campaign, and individual GEO executives gave $9,000 to the campaign.

Williams, who worked for Wackenhut before becoming secretary, disputed any link between GEO's political contributions and higher private prison costs. A spokesman for Richardson said last year it was outrageous to imply any connection.

The LFC report also said the Corrections Department needs better oversight of health care for inmates, both to contain costs and to ensure adequate care.

The state is negotiating with Correctional Medical Systems of St. Louis to take over an inmate health care contract recently terminated with Wexford Health Services.

Pittsburgh-based Wexford was criticized for the quality of care. Williams said the state has recovered about $160,000 from Wexford for staffing shortages and improper billings.

He said his department will try to incorporate audit recommendations into the new contract being negotiated.

Under that contract, CMS cannot save money by leaving positions open and must have 268 full-time employees, compared to the 208 who worked for Wexford, said Tia Bland, a spokeswoman for the Corrections Department.

It's been estimated prison health care will cost New Mexico $34 million this year and $39 million in the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Two prison health experts who visited five New Mexico prisons in February and March said several lack enough doctors, dentists and optometrists.

Their report said some diabetics at the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility in Grants weren't getting medication to fight infections as required by national standards; no medical staff was at the Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe during a March 9 visit; and nurses often spend time doing clerical duties because there are so few clerical workers. E.W. Scripps Co. C 2006 The Albuquerque Tribune
http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/may/24/nm-pays-more-private-prisons-report-
says/

Posted by lois at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

CCA Expands Oklahoma Prisons

Associated Press
Corrections Corp. Expands Okla. Prisons
Associated Press 05.24.07, 11:05 AM ET

Private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America said Thursday it will expanding two Oklahoma prisons to accommodate increased demand from several state customers.

CCA plans to add 660 beds to its 1,032-bed Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing, Okla., and another 660 to its 1,010-bed Davis Correctional Facility in Holdenville, Okla. The company expects to complete the expansions by the end of the third quarter at a cost of $90 million.

The state of Oklahoma handles inmates at both prisons, which are running at or near full capacity.

Corrections Corporation of America (nyse: CXW - news - people ) shares hit a new 52-week high of $63.25 in morning trading before sliding back to $62.79, up 38 cents.

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/05/24/ap3754928.html

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

May 25, 2007

NY: State senator proposes registry for drug dealers

State senator proposes registry for drug dealers
By YANCEY ROY
ALBANY BUREAU
(Original publication: May 25, 2007)

ALBANY - First a sex-offender registry. Now one for drug dealers?

A Southern Tier senator said yesterday that he would introduce a bill to create a statewide roll call for convicted felony drug dealers. Similar to the one for sex offenders, convicts would have to registe with the state for up to 10 years, notifying the Department of Criminal Justice Services of any address changes, and the list would be available on the Internet.

"I think it would be one of those extra deterrents and I think it would clearly be effective," said Sen. George Winner, R-Elmira. "Drug dealers are not out there wanting to advertise their location. And it would make neighbors and others aware and very vigilant of their activities."

The Republican said that similar legislation has been proposed in Maine and New Mexico. Also, he noted that the federal Drug Enforcement Agency recently launched a "Meth Site Registry" that posts locations in each state where methamphetamine clandestine labs or dumpsites have been found.

Winner got the idea from Police Chief David Rouse of Bath, in Steuben County.

"Absent of a drug-dealer registry, drug dealers can conceal their identities and criminal pasts, moving undetected from one jurisdiction to another while continuing their illicit trade," Rouse said in a statement. "When encountered by law enforcement they provide bogus identification and their true identifies are not known until they are subsequently arrested and fingerprinted."

The bill does not yet have a sponsor in the Democrat-led Assembly. Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, D-Brooklyn, who heads the Codes Committee that weighs all criminal-justice legislation, said the proposal is laudable and he is willing to take a look at it but has some concerns.
"My initial reaction is that it may take away from the importance and efficacy of the sex-offender registry," he said.

The state has devoted a lot of resources to that registry because of the pernicious nature of sex crimes, he said.

"I'm just a little afraid of doing it because, why not all crimes? Why just drug crimes?" he asked.

Cara Matthews contributed to this report.

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070525/NEWS05/705250363/1021

Posted by lois at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2007

Maine Voices: Building More Prisons Isn't the Answer

MAINE VOICES Building more prisons isn't the answer
Our state has failed to meet its obligation to deal with the mentally ill and substance abusers.

Lani Graham, M.D. May 23, 2007

— We read with interest the May 7 editorial entitled "Prison overcrowding can't be ignored."

The last paragraph began, "Long-term solutions need to be considered as well " and suggested that these should include building new prisons. Disappointing, but not surprising.

In his 2001 book, "Going Up The River: Travels in a Prison Nation," Joseph T. Hallinan outlines in vivid detail the reasons for the growing number of inmates and the solution on the top of everyone's list -- more prisons.

Rural states are considered perfect sites for new prisons, not only to house inmates, but as money-making operations that take overflows from other states and employ poor people.

Hallinan's book describes this as the "largest silent migration in American history of young urban men to prisons in white rural America."

No doubt we will soon hear that building yet another prison, perhaps the one now being spoken of for Washington County, is a "win/win" solution

Before Maine gets sweet-talked into going into the prison business, it might be worth considering other "long-term solutions."

We believe the current crisis in Maine's prison system relates as much to failures in the health care system, in public health and in the community as it does to sentencing options.

It seems likely that ignoring these failures and the knee-jerk "building prisons" will, at best, be a temporary fix, and at worse exacerbate the situation.

Health care is in crisis in Maine. Everyone knows it from the rural mill worker to the CEO of any Maine business. Current Maine health care spending is $8.3 billion and rising.

This is a public health crisis of the first magnitude. Everyone is looking for ways to cut costs in health care and two favorite areas are substance abuse and mental health -- in the community and in the jails and prisons.

Mental health treatment in prison is not a current priority, even for those inmates who will shortly return to their communities.

Jails and prisons are filled with people who have mental health and substance abuse problems.

A 2006 report from the Bureau of Justice shows that not only is there a high prevalence of mental health problems among prison and jail inmates, these inmates are more likely to have been homeless in the year before arrest, experienced physical or sexual abuse, and are more likely to be recidivists.

Nearly a quarter of prison and jail inmates who had a mental health problem, compared to a fifth of those without, had served 3 or more prior incarcerations.

The simple truth is that people who are mentally ill or substance-abusing are being incarcerated because we as a society are choosing this solution instead of addressing the root problems in the community or treating the patients.

Fifteen percent of state prisoners and 24 percent of jail inmates meet the criteria for a psychotic disorder, as compared to 3 percent in the general population.

It used to be that we as a society were horrified by tales from old mental hospitals, where the mentally ill were kept in large open wards and never allowed outside. What about now, when we keep the mentally ill in shackles in tiny prison cells, deprived of all personal contact, and explain our conduct by calling them "criminals"?

Also troubling is the influx of thousands of returning veterans who may have traumatic brain injuries and/or depression, PTSD, substance abuse and other common psychological responses to combat.

Will they too, become fodder for the new social services safety net -- the nation's prison industry?

We can and should lead the nation by strengthening our health care system, making sure that private and public insurance covers mental illness and substance abuse, and removing the multiple...legal and policy barriers that keep people from getting the help they need before they fall into the criminal justice system.

Shame on all of us if we simply push more of our citizens into prisons.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lani Graham, M.D., is a family practice physician who serves on the Governor's AdvisoryCouncil for Health Systems Development. Carol Carothers directs the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Maine.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=107404&ac=Phedi

Posted by lois at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

Maine is a state addicted to prisons

Erik Steele: Maine - a state addicted to prisons
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 - Bangor Daily News

Maine, like the rest of America, is addicted to prisons. The only way we are going to beat this addiction is if we stop using our drug of choice - more prisons - for our current problem of prison overcrowding. The answer to prison overcrowding is fewer prisoners, not more prisons.

The principle reason our prisons are overcrowded is that jail time is our society's preferred method of treating people who commit crimes primarily because they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or are mentally ill. Half of all prisoners in America have these conditions as the primary problems that led to their crimes. If, as part of their sentences, we aggressively treated those prisoners for the illnesses they have instead of simply incarcerating them, and devoted more resources to treating these problems before they resulted in crimes, we would need fewer prisons, not more.

In recent discussions about running out of jail cells in Maine we have been doing just what addicts usually do when they run out of their drug - scramble desperately for more drugs. Recent proposals put forward as the answer to Maine's prison overcrowding have primarily been ways of housing more prisoners, including sending state prisoners to county jails, outsourcing Maine's prison overcrowding problem to other states by sending prisoners to a for-profit prison in Oklahoma, building a new prison in Cutler, and expanding the Charleston Correctional Facility.

But Maine has more than enough prisons; what is has is too many prisoners. There are currently more than 2,100 in Maine's state prisons alone, a number projected to grow more than 20 percent in the next four years. In this regard Maine is like the rest of America which is why, by some estimates, Americans are the most imprisoned people in the world. According to California Prison Focus, America has 25 percent of the world's prisoners but only 5 percent of its population. A record 7 million Americans, or one in 32 adults, was either in jail, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005. More than 2.2 million Americans were in prison in 2005, up from 1 million in 1990. Drug charges account for 46 percent of total prison population growth since 1995, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

There are many reasons we are addicted to prisons. These institutions are an apparently simple solution to the complex problem of crime, and it is certainly gratifying to just lock criminals up, out of sight and mind, and throw away keys. We are tired of being crime victims, and prison is a partial solution to our crime problems (despite growing evidence that education, jobs, drug treatment, and mental health treatment are more effective at reducing crime than prison time). We have used the courts and prisons as our main attack in the "war on drugs."

The American private prison industry, which actively lobbies for laws that increase prison sentences and supports political candidates who are supposedly "tough on crime," is increasingly influential in this country, and in Maine. It has a vested interest in using prisons as the only hammer to hit the nail of crime.

The same private prison company that owns the prison in Oklahoma to which Maine proposes sending some of its prisoners has contributed thousands of dollars to the political campaigns of Maine Gov. John Baldacci, 2006 Republican candidate for governor Chandler Woodcock, and the Maine State Legislature's Criminal Justice Committee Chairman William Diamond, according to recent news stories. That company, Corrections Corp. of America, is the country's largest private prison company, and it did not make political donations in Maine because it loves Mainers. It did so to buy access to Maine's debate about its prison overcrowding problem, and you can bet it will not be lobbying for funding for programs such as drug courts and other alternatives to our prison overcrowding problem.

Withdrawal from addiction, as Merriam-Webster's definition points out above, causes predictable withdrawal symptoms. In this case, withdrawal will result in claims that our crime rates will increase if we stop incarcerating so many people, that our leaders are going soft on crime and drugs, and that those of us who want this addict off this drug are addicted ourselves to smarmy liberal instincts to save souls. There will be accusations we want to empty our prisons, etc.

Rubbish. Finding alternatives to prison is a good, solid Maine type of idea, like selling bronzed moose poop to New Yorkers. It is common sense, and good economic sense, because we can no longer afford the expensive prison solution that does not work well as treatment programs for the mentally ill and drug addicted. In addition, we keep running out of prison space no matter how many costly prisons we build. Maine spent more than $140 million on prison construction in the late 1990s, and here we are again needing millions more for the same idea. We need a better idea this time.

Several other states, including our neighbors in Connecticut and Vermont, are well on their way to finding jail time alternatives to solve prison overcrowding because they, too, can no longer afford this prison addiction. A commission has been set up in Maine to look at prison overcrowding and is due to report back to the Maine Legislature in December; It will suggest many of the same solutions recommended by previous commissions that looked at the same problem (most recently in 2004). It should not recommend more prisons.

Unless we deny ourselves the easy, hugely expensive solutions of more prisons or exporting our prisoners, we are just going to keep snorting this drug of incarceration. Instead, we should put our money into innovative programs that keep the drug addicted and mentally ill out of jail unless there is no alternative, and save jails for those who truly need to be there. If we need more prison capacity in the short term it should be approved only until that time when we have kicked our addiction and found other solutions.

It's time for us to get tough on this drug, and "Just say No!"

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.

http://bangordailynews.com/news/t/viewpoints.aspx?articleid=150109&zoneid=35

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

OK: House passes faith-based prisoner re-entry program

May 23, 2007
House passes faith-based prisoner re-entry program
TIM TALLEY
Associated Press Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY ‹ Legislation that encourages churches and other faith-based groups to prepare state inmates for life after prison and reduce the number of repeat offenders was overwhelmingly approved by the Oklahoma House Tuesday.

Lawmakers voted 93-4 for the legislation in spite of concern that it may violate the constitutional separation between church and state and would give faith-based groups some of lawmakers' oversight authority over the state Department of Corrections.

Rep. Richard Morrissette, D-Oklahoma City, said he agreed with the goals of the legislation. "They are extremely meritable and worthy. But you are crossing the line," Morrissette said.

He complained that the bill would grow government by creating a new Office of Faith Based Initiatives and that there would be little accountability for how tax dollars allocated to the office would be spent.

Rep. Al Lindley, D-Oklahoma City, said it is appropriate for church groups to work with state prisoners but they should pay for the services with money the groups raise on their own, not state tax dollars.

"State government has no business paying for programs run by a church," Lindley said.

The Department of Corrections already sponsors faith- and character-based programs at two state prisons, the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center for women in McCloud and the medium-security Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, said DOC spokesman Jerry Massie.

The programs are patterned after similar programs in Texas, Kansas and Florida and are designed to provide opportunities for offenders "to make positive, lasting life changes," Massie said. The programs are voluntary and anyone can apply to participate.

"Institutions that have implemented these programs in other states have reported less violence among inmates, fewer inmate misconducts and a decrease in recidivism," Massie said.

Character training curriculum was developed with the help of the Character Training Institute of Oklahoma City, a nonprofit group that provides seminars and consulting services to encourage success in business, schools and other organizations by developing good character, he said.

Massie said character training is performed by prison staff and volunteers and religious training is performed exclusively by volunteers. A total of 200 inmates are enrolled in the yearlong program at Mabel Bassett, he said.

In Arkansas, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative has a capacity for 50 female prisoners at the state's Wrightsville Unit. The state's Tucker Unit can take 120 men.

In the Bible-based Arkansas program, inmates live in a separate unit and attend classes on skills including computer skills and anger management. They also participate in religious devotionals. After being released from prison, participants receive guidance from a mentor and a local religious group for at least six months.

Rep. John Wright, R-Broken Arrow, said Oklahoma's faith-based legislation offers "a glimmer of hope" to state inmates who need help as they prepare to leave their prison cells and re-enter society.

"Send a ray of hope that you think their lives can be productive. And give them some help," Wright said.

The measure's author, House Speaker Lance Cargill, R-Harrah, said government should not discriminate against faith-based and volunteer groups that want more input in counseling and rehabilitation of state inmates.

"If it's a good program, demonstrated results, it's worthy of support," Cargill said.

He said the faith-based program will initially be funded with $100,000 in state funds. A policy council composed of lawmakers, prosecutors, crime victims and former inmates will review prison re-entry policies and suggest improvements.

Cargill has said statistics point out that two-thirds of all prison inmates commit new offenses and wind up back behind bars within three to five years.

The measure would establish incentives for partnerships between prison officials and faith-based and community groups. It would also encourage private and public groups to help inmates find jobs and services before they are released.

"I think faith plays an important role in a person's life," Cargill said. "A government program doesn't love anybody. People love people."

The measure, House Bill 2101, now goes to the Senate for final action.
http://ap.ardmoreite.com/pstories/state/ok/20070522/171975133.shtml

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

May 22, 2007

CA: Prisoners Compete for Work

BIZ CEK PRISON LABOR JOBS
Inmate laborers compete for work
State labor group's food-packaging move worries small business. By E.J. Schultz and Robert Rodriguez / The Fresno Bee 05/22/07

A state prisoner labor program best known for making furniture and license plates is ramping up its food-packaging business -- a move that some small-business owners fear could lead to job losses for private suppliers, including one Fresno company.

The issue highlights the complexities the Prison Industry Authority faces as it tries to fulfill its mission of helping to rehabilitate inmates -- without stealing work from California businesses.

The current controversy involves tubes of peanut butter and jelly "squeezers," a key ingredient in inmate lunches. Fresno's Adolph Foods Inc. has been distributing the product to the state's prisons for the past year under a $3.2 million contract that expires June 30.

But the Prison Industry Authority, a semi-autonomous state agency, has launched its own peanut butter and jelly business that operates out of a prison in Corcoran. As a result, Adolph's contract with the state won't be renewed -- a potentially lethal blow to a company that reaped 40% of its revenue from the deal, said owner Chris Adolph.

"The more of these contracts they take on, the more jobs that are lost in the private sector," he said.

Other prison suppliers fear they might soon face the same fate as the authority prepares to quadruple its food packaging enterprise to a $20 million-a-year business.

The proposal will be taken up by the authority's 11-member board at a hearing today at Corcoran State Prison. Several small-business owners, including Adolph, are expected to attend to protest.

It's the latest move by private suppliers to ratchet up the pressure on the Prison Industry Authority. The companies have hired lobbyists, contacted lawmakers and made allegations that the authority launched the new product line without holding the necessary public hearings.

Authority officials deny the charges. And they say small businesses have nothing to worry about because the authority will not go into an industry where suppliers already exist.

"We don't get into it when there is another company [involved]," said Chuck Pattillo, the authority's general manager.

But in the case of peanut butter and jelly, the authority got involved even though there were existing suppliers.

Pattillo said the authority made the move at the request of prison managers who worried that contract squabbles among private firms would delay shipments.

Industries at 22 prisons

Established in 1982, the Prison Industry Authority's mission is to rehabilitate inmates by putting them to work, and also to reduce the operating costs of prisons. But the authority -- which operates with little legislative oversight -- only employs a small fraction of the state's 172,000-plus inmates.

At present, the authority provides work for about 5,900 inmates and operates more than 60 service, manufacturing and agricultural operations at 22 prisons. Inmates earn from 30 cents to near $1 an hour to make flags, shoes, printing services, eye wear, gloves, office furniture, license plates, clothing and more. The authority can sells its products to federal, state and local government agencies. The state has been the biggest customer.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation views the authority as a key part of a renewed effort to boost rehabilitation programs. But some lawmakers say the added responsibility might have to be accompanied by greater legislative oversight.

"There clearly is some benefit to the PIA, but at the same time I am concerned when the PIA is misusing its authority and unfairly competing with small businesses," said Assembly Member Juan Arambula, D-Fresno, who leads a budget subcommittee that oversees prisons.

By law, state agencies, with some exceptions, are required to purchase products from the authority, even if private businesses sell the items for less.

Businesses complain

The state auditor in a 2004 report found the authority's pricing to be fairly competitive, but said its cost savings claims were "questionable."

Last year, the authority posted a $4.7 million operating loss on $179 million in revenue, though the authority says it would have posted a small profit if it weren't for significant one-time costs associated with a streamlining effort.

The food packaging business was launched in 2003-04 and today includes cookies, bread and, most recently, peanut butter and jelly. But the move into the new enterprise has been plagued by delays and has generated plenty of complaints from small-business owners.

American Copak in Southern California, an Adolph supplier, says it faces the possibility of worker layoffs.

"We may be talking about 50 to 100 people, between our company, Adolph and the vendors who supply us," said American Copak president Steven A. Brooker. "This will cause a ripple effect."

Brooker's firm produces millions of peanut butter and jelly squeeze packets each year. The prison contract produces 25% to 30% of his overall revenue, he said.

"As a company, we knew we were going to compete against other small businesses," Brooker said. "But I never would have imagined that we would have to fight against the government for our business."

Other prison suppliers also are concerned. Christian Bartels, owner of CB Enterprises in Ceres, said 90% of his produce and other grocery items goes to the state prisons.

"What they are trying to do is do their own packaging and be their own manufacturer," Bartels said. "And once that happens, they won't need people in the private sector like me -- people whose employees are paying taxes, buying things and stimulating the economy."

Tight profit margins

Pattillo said the authority began eyeing the peanut and butter jelly business three years ago at the request of the state Department of Corrections. He said prisons were worried that shipments would be delayed as the state's Department of General Services dealt with in-fighting among suppliers who intensely compete for contracts.

"They were tired of going through hoops with [contractors] who constantly appeal and are constantly protesting bids on an annual basis," he said.

Department of General Services officials said food contracts can be especially contentious because there are tight profit margins and companies often make similar bids. Rita Hamilton, deputy director of the department's procurement division, said she was not aware of any shipment delays as a result of protests, though "that doesn't mean it hasn't happened."

To prepare for the new business, the PIA bought $1 million in packaging equipment. But the project stalled.

The authority's production finally came on line in March, Pattillo said. About 15 inmates are now employed by the venture, which is run out of the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran.

Domino effect feared

Small-business owners fear that it's just the beginning, and that the prison authority will continue to take contracts away from the Department of General Services. They are concerned because the authority does not operate under the same strict purchasing rules as the state general services department.

For instance, the authority does not have to give preferences to small businesses or businesses owned by disabled veterans, according to a recent opinion by the state's Legislative Counsel. General Services, on the other hand, must comply with those rules.

"The reason a lot of small businesses like ours sell to the state is because we can't compete with some of the big players, like Sysco and U.S. Foodservice," said Stephen Simpson, owner of San Joaquin Valley Distributors in Fresno.

"This is an area where small business can really thrive. And that is what is being threatened."

When lawmakers formed the authority, they gave it freedom from such rules because "the constraints of state government severely impede the ability" to operate as a self-supporting agency, according to the Legislative Counsel.

The authority does not get money from the state budget and, for the most part, covers its expenses with sales revenue, officials say.

Though it operates freely, the PIA still must hold a public hearing before going into a new business. It also must "take into consideration the effect of a proposed enterprise on California industry."

Small businesses say the authority failed to do either in the case of peanut butter and jelly. PIA rejects the claim, saying they fulfilled the mandate when they first approved the overall food packaging enterprise at a board meeting in October 2002.

But, at the urging of private suppliers and lawmakers, Corrections Secretary James Tilton has agreed to accept testimony on the matter at today's PIA board hearing in Corcoran, according to a letter he sent to Arambula. Tilton sits on the PIA board.

The main agenda item, however, is a proposal to grow the food packaging business from $5 million in annual revenue to $20 million, Pattillo said.

He said most of the growth will come from the PIA's entry into the "retort packaged food" business. This refers to the special process of packaging food, such as meat, for extremely long shelf life.

Prisons want to stock up on such food items in the event that a catastrophe -- like a pandemic flu outbreak -- cuts off their food supply, Pattillo said. In such a case, he said, "the last people people are going to want to feed are prisoners."

http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/49145.html
The reporters can be reached at eschultz@fresnobee.com or (916) 326-5541, or

Posted by lois at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)

Judge rules California can resume inmate transfers

Judge rules California can resume inmate transfers
By AARON C. DAVIS - Associated Press Writer
Published 6:38 pm PDT Monday, May 21, 2007
California will resume sending an estimated 8,000 prisoners to other states next month after an appeals court ruled that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger can do so while he challenges a prior ruling that halted the transfers.

Schwarzenegger praised the decision by the Third District Appellate Court, which was filed late last week and announced Monday, saying it would let the state take a critical step toward reducing prison overcrowding. Critics, however, warned that shipping inmates against their will could be dangerous for guards, prisoners and the public.

For the governor, the decision couldn't have come soon enough. Three judges have scheduled separate hearings next month to consider appointing a panel that could cap the state's inmate population - which could potentially order the release of thousands of prisoners. The state now has 172,000 prisoners living in space designed for fewer than 100,000.

Schwarzenegger issued a statement saying the transfers will help California avoid the court-ordered release of dangerous felons and even increase safety for overburdened guards.

"Out of state transfers will improve the safety of California's institutions for our correctional officers and staff as well as the inmates, and will provide much needed space for rehabilitation programs," Schwarzenegger said. "Transferring of inmates out of state is a critical component of the state's overall plan to relieve overcrowding."

The decision follows the Legislature's approval in April of a $7.8 billion plan also designed to help stave off a federal takeover. The plan calls for heavy state borrowing to pay for adding 53,000 new beds, as well as boosting education, job training and other rehabilitation programs. The plan also authorizes the governor to continue transferring inmates out of state until 2011 to relieve overcrowding.

Lance Corcoran, spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which sued the state over the transfers and prevailed in a Sacramento County Superior Court in February, said the transfers will expose guards to serious dangers.

He pointed to a riot in an Indiana prison last month as evidence. That riot, involving about 500 inmates, apparently began after prisoners recently transferred from Arizona refused to return to their living quarters.

"Inmates who are forced to leave the jurisdictions in which their families have the opportunity to visit them creates a very volatile situation that's unsafe for the inmates, unsafe for the guards, and unsafe for the public," Corcoran said.

California transferred 353 inmates out of state before Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Gail Ohanesian ruled in February that the transfers appeared to violate the state's emergency act and a provision in the state constitution.

Those inmates are in Tennessee and Arizona.

According to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, inmates sent in June could go to facilities in Tallahatchie, Mississippi or near Oklahoma City.

Corrections plans to send 300 in June and ramp up shipments of 400 to 500 inmates a month by the fall.

Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, chairman of the Assembly Select Committee on Prison Construction and Operations, said he plans to hold hearings next month on the safety of the transfers.

"I have some concerns about Corrections being able to do this without officer injuries."

But Spitzer said Monday's ruling was great news because out-of-state transfers are the only way to prevent early releases.

Posted by lois at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2007

NJ company buys out MA-based CiviGenics

May 21, 2007
Buyout to Form Big Company to Train and Treat Prisoners
By KEN BELSON

A company based in New Jersey that provides training and treatment programs to prison inmates is announcing today that it has bought a similar Massachusetts company, creating one of the largest correctional services companies in the country.

The two companies — Community Education Centers of Roseland, N.J., and CiviGenics of Marlborough, Mass. — are trying to capitalize on the growing number of inmates and tight financing for new prisons that have led federal, state and local governments to contract out more of their operations to private businesses.

States have also addressed the shortage of prison space by trying to reduce recidivism with more training and treatment programs for inmates. About 70 percent of those released from prison return within three years, according to some studies.

“There’s a tremendous focus on the re-entry of inmates,” said John J. Clancy, chief executive of Community Education Centers. “If people are going to continue to get out of prison, the question is how they get out.”

The two privately held companies, which together are expected to employ about 3,500 people in 22 states and have close to $240 million in revenue next year, did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement. However, people with knowledge of the transaction said Community Education Centers paid more than $100 million for CiviGenics.

Currently, Community Education specializes in operating halfway houses for prisoners awaiting release, whether it is in helping them find jobs or overcoming substance abuse and other hurdles. CiviGenics focuses on providing substance abuse treatment to inmates and managing prisons on behalf of county governments, one of the most profitable segments of the industry.

In announcing the sale, Mr. Clancy said that by combining their two specialties, the companies would be better positioned to win contracts and expand operations. The combined companies will, however, remain far smaller than the industry’s three largest companies, which are publicly held — Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group and Cornell Companies.

Community Education Centers has six assessment and treatment centers in New Jersey, including three in Newark, which house up to 2,700 residents, or about half of its capacity nationally.

New Jersey does more than most states to train inmates before their release. The state spent $61.5 million last year on residential community release programs, for which Community Education Centers is the largest contractor.

Inmates leave with a “discharge plan” that includes the addresses of doctors and clinics near their homes, information on where to get Social Security cards and social services, as well as other necessary information, according to Deirdre Fedkenheuer, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Corrections. Inmates also go through a 12-week re-entry program before they are released.

While the amount spent on these programs in New Jersey is only about 6 percent of the budget of its Department of Corrections, there is still plenty of business for private operators, industry analysts said.

Federal, state and local governments spent $62 billion on corrections in the fiscal year 2004, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, 18 percent more than in 2000 and 77 percent more than in 1994.

“The states are trying to hold off building new facilities, yet demand continues to grow at 35,000 to 40,000 new prisoners a year,” said Kevin Campbell, who covers the prison industry for Avondale Partners, a securities research firm.

Posted by lois at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

METHADONE IN JAILS AND PRISONS, JAILS, PRISONS, BUPRENORPHINE, SUBOXONX, SUBUTEX

METHADONE IN JAILS AND PRISONS, JAILS, PRISONS, BUPRENORPHINE, SUBOXONX, SUBUTEX
Purpose of this blog:
This is a gathering location for any and all material on the advancement of Methadone maintenance in jails and prisons.
Including, but not limited to:
Personal histories and stories, links to news articles, deaths, suicides, state information, tapering, maintenance, police departments,
clinic support, Buprenorphine treatment, inmates coming in with opiate addiction offered methadone, other forms of medically assisted treatment. FOR INFORMATION ON MMF METHADONE MAINTENANCE FRIENDLY, Please send me your articles or other information for this blog at: Varnua@aol.com.
http://methadoneprisons.blogspot.com/

Posted by lois at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Prisons' budget to trump colleges'

San Francisco Chronicle
Prisons' budget to trump colleges'
No other big state spends as much to incarcerate compared with higher education funding

James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2007

As the costs for fixing the state's troubled corrections system rocket higher, California is headed for a dubious milestone -- for the first time the state will spend more on incarcerating inmates than on educating students in its public universities.

Based on current spending trends, California's prison budget will overtake spending on the state's universities in five years. No other big state in the country spends close to as much on its prisons compared with universities.

But California has all but guaranteed that prisons will eat up an increasingly large share of taxpayer money because of chronic failures in a system that the state is now planning to expand.

Under a new state law, California will spend $7.4 billion to build 40,000 new prison beds, and that is over and above the current annual operating budget of more than $10 billion. Interest payments alone on the billions of dollars of bonds that will be sold to finance the new construction will amount to $330 million a year by 2011 -- all money that will not be available for higher education or other state priorities.

"California is just off the charts compared with other states in corrections spending," said Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, a leading research organization. "Budgets are a zero-sum game, essentially. The money for corrections comes from other places. The shame of it is that California could have improved crime rates and a better funded higher education system if they ran things better."

In fact, even some supporters of the recent prison reform legislation, AB900, say they harbor deep doubts about the corrections department's ability to improve things, no matter how much is spent. But they say there is no choice, and that the result is that Californians are going to have to accept throwing billions of dollars more at the problem, while trusting a corrections department that has a history of failure.

"I'm not defending the damn department," said Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, the chairman of a state Assembly committee overseeing the state's prison construction efforts. "The department is a shambles. They couldn't build their way out of a paper bag. Everyone has a reason to be skeptical. Everyone is holding their breath, hoping that this time they're successful."

Asked if the prison spending accurately reflected the state's values and priorities, several politicians insisted it did not, and some suggested it was something of an embarrassment for a state that in other areas, such as environmental programs, likes to think of itself as a pioneer in smart policymaking.

"I'll tell you what, it's clearly not a statement of our priorities," said Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles. "Our policies are hurting the economy of California. This is a disservice to our economy."

Núñez blamed the prison spending on a get-tough-on-crime mentality among politicians that equates more prison spending with safer streets, when that is hardly the case.

"A budget is a statement of priorities," said Bill Shiebler, president of the University of California Student Association, which has been fighting sharp increases in state university tuition fees for several years. "I do think our state's got its priorities wrong. The governor is burdening people who work the hardest with what are tax increases. It seems they're more interested in locking people up than giving people an opportunity in life."

Michael Genest, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's finance director, said that he, too, was uncomfortable with the state committing such a large sum to prisons, but that mismanagement and failed rehabilitation programs in the past made it unavoidable.

"I don't think it's a good thing," said Genest. "It's unfortunate."

He said that one of the key drivers was the fact that the state pays the guards and other prison employees far more than any other state, a policy choice the state had made in past years. In addition, he said, the porous border allowed too many lawbreakers from Mexico to enter the state, where they eventually ended up in prison.

But Genest defended the increases in spending as needed to institute better rehabilitation programs, which would eventually save money, although he said it was uncertain when or if they would show results.

"It's not going to happen overnight, and no one can say how much it's going to save," said Genest. "But it should eventually save money."

According to the May revisions of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget, the state will spend $10 billion on prisons in fiscal 2007-08, a 9 percent increase from last year.

Higher education spending will come to $12 billion, a nearly 6 percent increase. Moving forward, the legislative analyst says, spending on higher education probably will grow around 5 percent a year, while prisons spending will grow by at least 9 percent annually.

Steve Boilard, a legislative analyst, said that actual spending on the state university systems is already at about parity with prisons spending. The budgets, he said, for the University of California, the California State University and the community colleges come to $10.5 billion in fiscal 2007-2008. The rest of the higher education budget includes financial aid for student and other noninstructional programs.

Following the historic growth rates, in fiscal 2012-2013, prisons spending will come to about $15.4 billion a year while overall higher education spending will come to $15.3 billion.

Some politicians are calling the new construction spending and new rehabilitation programs an investment that eventually will pay off in the form of reduced recidivism. California has among the highest recidivism rates in the country, with 70 percent of released inmates ending up back in prison within three years. But even advocates of reform say that payoff will be long in coming.

"We all have a wish that prison spending would take a smaller percentage of our budget," said Spitzer. "However, that's a decade away, in my opinion. For another decade we're going to need large infusions of money to deal with this and our off-the-chart recidivism rates."

California is alone among big states in spending so much on prisons. Texas, for instance, will spend $4.5 billion on higher education in 2007 and $2 billion on prisons, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Florida will spend $3.9 billion on its universities and $2.1 billion on prisons, while New York has budgeted $3.5 billion on its universities and $2.2 billion on prisons.

According to the conference of legislatures, seven small states, such as Massachusetts, Connecticut and Delaware, spend nearly as much on prisons as higher education, but most states budget two or even three times as much for universities.

The new reform program, AB900, includes about 40,000 new prison beds, about 8,000 of those for medical and mental health care. Currently, there are about 173,000 inmates in the state prisons, which is about double the design capacity. The legislative analyst projects that the population will grow by another 17,000 over the next five years.

Jacobson of the Vera Institute said one of the greatest problems in California is not just that it spends so much on prisons but that it gets such poor results. New York state, for instance, is enjoying both a declining inmate population and declining crime rates.

"When you think about some of the alternatives for spending that kind of money, there are much better things you can do for public safety that would be a lot more effective," he said.

E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/21/MNG4KPUKV51.DTL

Posted by lois at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2007

TX: A new voice for the children in TYC. Will Harrell shares his views on prisons and whether some kids are just plain "bad"

May 19, 2007
A new voice for the children in TYC
iWill Harrell shares his views on prisons and whether some kids are just plain "bad"

By LISA SANDBERG
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

In the wake of the abuse scandals that have rocked the Texas Youth Commission, prisoner-rights advocate Will Harrell helped draft the TYC reform bills that are making their way through the Legislature. Last week, he left his post as executive director of the Texas ACLU to become the ombudsman for the state's juvenile correctional system. In an interview with Austin Bureau reporter Lisa Sandberg, he talks about his new mission, his views on prisons and whether he thinks some kids are just plain "bad."

Q: Tell us about your new assignment.

A: It's sort of wild. I wrote a bill to include the strongest possible model ombudsman's office, never thinking that I was describing my own job down the line. Now I wonder if I put too much responsibility on the position now that I'm in it. (Laughter)

Essentially, ... the ombudsman position is an independent watchdog and voice for kids in the TYC system, as well as their parents and the community from which they come. I will dedicate a lot of my time informing the kids what their rights are and making sure they know they can contact me. The law is very clear: They can contact me freely. They cannot be interfered with. And there shall be no retaliation. ... And that goes for the guards, too. I'm of the belief that a happy staff makes for happy kids.

Q: You said earlier that you would work for the interests of the kids, their parents and the state of Texas, but not TYC. Explain.

A: This is intended to be an independent ombudsman. I will be connected to the Texas Youth Commission, but my budget will be independent. They can't hire or fire me.

The way the legislation is unraveling, it's not set in stone, but my prediction is (the ombudsman's office) will be a stand-alone state agency and ultimately I will report to the Legislature, the people of Texas.

Whether you like ACLU policies or not, the fact that they have selected the director of the ACLU of Texas sends a strong message. They're not trying to cover up anything because they know the ACLU. I'm not ACLU anymore, but I've been an advocate invested in the civil rights and human rights of these kids.

Q: You've worked on prison issues for how long?

A: Twenty years. In college and particularly in law school, I've been drawn to issues of incarceration. I'm fascinated by the philosophy and theories of incarceration and confinement. I'm fascinated by the anthropology of it, the subculture that is the prison population, prisoners and those who guard them.

Q: Do you think prisons are appropriate for kids?

A: There are certain kids, and I think mostly related to mental illness, that need to be confined only for the safety of those they may inadvertently cause harm to. There are some bad kids out there. I'm not naive. But I do not think that prison is appropriate for many of them, probably the large percentage of the kids who are currently incarcerated. A kid who is guilty of a misdemeanor for committing graffiti should not be shipped from Houston, Texas, all the way out to the deserts of Pyote to serve what should have been six months and ultimately ends up being three, four or five years.

I don't think there's such a thing as an incorrigible kid. Kids who need support and treatment and some guidance, yes, but I don't think there's such a thing as an incorrigible kid.

Q: Will you have to cut your ponytail?

A: You show me the policy. There ain't no policy. I ain't cutting my hair.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4818005.html

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

Inland getting into prison development

Inland getting into prison development
May 19, 2007
By Alby Gallun
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=25056

Inland Group Inc. wants to spend some time behind bars.

Known mainly for its far-flung shopping center empire, the Oak Brook-based company is getting into the prison development business. After falling short in a bid to acquire Florida-based prison owner CentraCore Properties Trust last year, an Inland Group affiliate recently hired three CentraCore executives, including its president and CEO, to start up its own prison development business.

The appeal: With overcrowding at many state prisons, it’s a growing industry, not to mention recession-proof.

“There is a tremendous need for correctional facilities in Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, Idaho and California,” says Chuck Jones, president and CEO of Inland Public Properties Development Inc., a unit of Inland American Real Estate Trust Inc.

Mr. Jones, CentraCore’s former president and CEO, joined Inland American earlier this year after selling his company for $356 million to Florida-based Geo Group Inc., a prison owner and operator. Inland American had bid for CentraCore last year, but walked away empty-handed.

The new Inland unit will build and own prisons and other government buildings, mainly at the state and local level. It will lease the properties, not run them.

“We’re doing exactly the same thing that we were doing before. It’s just a different platform,” says Mr. Jones, 58, who is based in Austin, Texas. “I would be disappointed if by the end of ’08 we haven’t done somewhere between $300 million to $400 million in new projects.”

Launched in 2005, Inland American is Inland Group’s fourth and largest real estate investment trust (REIT), with a goal of raising more than $10 billion in equity from investors.

Though Inland Group has focused chiefly on shopping centers over the years, Inland American has been buying a wide range of property types, including industrial, office and apartments. In March, it agreed to acquire Winston Hotels Inc., a Raleigh, N.C.-based hotel REIT, for about $440 million.

Posted by lois at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Slammers slammed: Officials: Millions needed to fix dangerously

Slammers slammed: Officials: Millions needed to fix dangerously crowded lockups
By Laura Crimaldi
Sunday, May 20, 2007, Boston Herald

Worried state and county correctional officials will plead for hundreds of millions of dollars in bond money next month to relieve a statewide inmate overcrowding crisis that threatens to unleash serious public health and safety hazards from behind locked doors.
“It’s a tinder box waiting to explode,” said Worcester Sheriff Guy W. Glodis, who is cramming 1,480 people into a West Boylston jail built for 820 detainees.

State reports show prisons and jails in every Bay State county are filled beyond capacity. Suffolk has been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to ferry inmates to other counties, while other sheriffs say they must resort to housing inmates in mattress-strewn chapels, libraries, gymnasiums and receiving rooms.
In interviews with the Herald, county sheriffs, state officials and inmate advocates warned that overcrowding can lead to:
Skyrocketing daily operational costs
Increased chance for the spread of highly contagious diseases including tuberculosis and methicillin-resistant staphyloccus aureus (MRSA)

Risks of inmate escapes or violent eruptions
Heftier taxpayer bills to fund necessary and inevitable capital improvement projects. “The state and county correctional facilities are overcrowded and have significant capital investment needs,” said a statement issued by spokesman Charles McDonald on behalf of the Executive Office of Public Safety and the Executive Office for Administration and Finance.
Glodis and other sheriffs are hoping for relief from a pending state bond bill that will come before the Legislature next month. The bill may include funding for jails and prisons - including a possible $50 million for a new 260-cell facility or $100 million for a new 100-cell jail in Worcester County. “We are desperately seeking help,” he said.

The implications are serious, for both prisoners and jail officers.
“An officer at the jail can now expect to oversee a single unit. That is not safe for detainees and officers alike,” Stan Andruszkiewicz, president of the Jail Officers and Employees Association of Suffolk County, told the Herald.
“In some units, there are as many as 65 detainees. Forcing two detainees into a space designed for one is only asking for trouble. There is bound to be a violent release and those violent altercations have a dangerous impact on officer safety.”

A solution is in the works, the Patrick administration insists.
“The administration is consequently considering developing a master plan for correctional facilities,” said McDonald of the Executive Office of Public Safety. “With the benefit of a master plan, the adminstration would be able to better target limited state resources to capital investments that serve the programmatic needs of the Department of Correction and the sheriffs.”

But while jail officials wait for funding, costs are soaring.

Norfolk Sheriff Michael G. Bellotti said that in 1996 lawmakers approved $10 million to build a parking lot, a warehouse and a modular unit for 98 inmates. More than a decade later, Bellotti is still waiting for the cash and now can’t even build the modular unit for under $11 million.
“We can no longer take a Band-Aid approach to this issue,” said Bellotti, who has an average of 702 people in a jail built for 302 inmates.
The overcrowding has been costly for Nashua Street Jail in Boston, said Superintendent Eugene S. Sumpter. He said he has been forced to reassign hundreds of detainees to correctional facilities as far away as Shirley and Dartmouth. Suffolk spends more than $205,000 annually to transport prisoners.
“The job itself of transporting detainees across state is risky enough and the combination of less staff and more detainees only increases the risks,” said Andruszkiewicz of the jail officers association. “It really isn’t very complicated. Overcrowding can only be solved with more funding, more space and more staffing.”

But prisoner advocates are skeptical that the overcrowding crisis can be solved by a state-funded construction spree.
“We don’t need to build our way out of this problem,” said Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services. “If you build it, it will get filled.”
Walker believes the problem should be addressed by eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and providing treatment on demand for substance abuse.

Suffolk Sheriff Andrea J. Cabral said the overcapacity figures are in part the result of the jail’s successes, especially in treating substance abuse. However, Cabral notes, “You shouldn’t have to come to jail to go to a suitable detox. This shouldn’t be the place of first resort. We are so much the catch-basin for cracks that are widening in society every day.”
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=1002188&format=text

Posted by lois at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2007

ME: New Prison & Jail as an Organic Farm Proposed

"We envision [an] organic farm with spin-off skills and small businesses emerging," Oden wrote in her grant proposal. "Where inmate residents will work to grow their own food organically and will supply the needy as well as help Washington County communities, and possibly beyond, build their survival skills, too." Oden recommended the facility be under county management. "We can use the inmate residents to help prepare this region for upcoming problems associated with climate changes ‹ shortages of food, oil, clean water, wildlife, fish and so on ‹ by teaching them important skills of growing their own food without chemicals, living comfortably without wasting our natural resources, recycling and composting formerly wasted materials and generally living lightly on the Earth," she said. It is anticipated that the young people ‹ former drug addicts and alcoholics ‹ would then go back into their communities and live the life they¹d learned in prison, Oden said."

Prison proposal taking shape
By Diana Graettinger
Saturday, May 19, 2007 - Bangor Daily News

BUCKS HARBOR ‹ It¹s all about bricks and mortar and the need to replace an aging prison facility.

Members of Washington County¹s legislative delegation have one proposal; Jonesboro political activist Nancy Oden has another. And the governor is on board with looking into cost-effective ways to alleviate prison overcrowding.

The medium- and minimum-security Down East Correctional Facility houses everyone from murderers at the ends of their prison terms to men who broke windows in a building. It was built to hold 96 men; its current population is nearly double that. Sixty-nine employees staff the prison.

On Thursday, the legislative delegation and county officials met with Gov. John Baldacci and Department of Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson to discuss building a new facility that would replace the prison located at the former Bucks Harbor Air Force Station. No new site has been selected.

The meeting followed one held in April in Machias between the legislative delegation and the Washington County Development Authority that explored the possibility of WCDA building a new correctional facility, then leasing it to the state.

The WCDA is a state entity modeled on the Loring Development Authority in Limestone, state Sen. Kevin Raye, R-Perry, said Friday in a prepared release. Its board members are nominated by the governor and confirmed by the Maine Senate.

Raye told the governor and Magnusson Thursday that the WCDA would borrow the money to build a prison if the state would commit to a long-term lease.

Magnusson assured the governor that more space is needed. He said Maine¹s state inmate population of 2,100 was growing by 11 percent a year, or 220 inmates. Female inmates make up the fastest growing population.

Baldacci supported a thorough exploration of the proposal, and asked Magnusson and Department of Corrections Associate Commissioner Denise Lord to form a group to study the idea.

"This would work for Washington County and for the state," Baldacci said in the release. The governor has said he would prefer to keep inmates in Maine rather than ship them to other states, which has been proposed to alleviate the overcrowding problems.

"This is an excellent opportunity for Washington County, and one which holds promise for both the future of our economy and the pressing needs facing our state¹s correctional system," Raye said in the release. "I am pleased that the governor is receptive to our suggestion, and that a process of due diligence to determine the feasibility of the proposal will now get under way."

A plan is to be presented to the Legislature in January.

"This would be a strong economic shot in the arm for the county," Rep. Ian Emery, R-Cutler, who helped to organize the meeting, added in a separate release.

Emery has suggested letting private contractors run the prison, an option he said could save money.

During the meeting, Chris Gardner, chairman of the Washington County Commissioners, talked about exploring the idea of collaborating with the state to include a new county jail as part of the plan.

When first built, the Downeast Correctional Facility was not intended to be a prison. The buildings that sit on a small hill once belonged to the U.S. Air Force 907th Radar Squadron. The old buildings, which, according to BDN files, were used at one time for the chow hall and barracks, are still there.

But instead of military men in uniform who could go into Machias after work for a brew, today¹s occupants are dressed in street clothes and are locked in. The prison opened in 1985. The state has spent more than $1 million in repairs, and more are needed.

The legislative delegation¹s proposal is not the only one on the table. Nancy Oden of Jonesboro said Friday she has a separate proposal on a facility she calls "New Start Farm."

Oden is requesting a $15,000 grant from the WCDA for a feasibility study on building a facility based on the number of inmate residents estimated by local, county and state officials, that would include activities for which the program could secure teachers and resources, she said in her written proposal.

The study would be completed in 2008, and if funds were available, work could begin on the new facility in the spring of that year.

"We envision [an] organic farm with spin-off skills and small businesses emerging," Oden wrote in her grant proposal. "Where inmate residents will work to grow their own food organically and will supply the needy as well as help Washington County communities, and possibly beyond, build their survival skills, too."

Oden recommended the facility be under county management.

"We can use the inmate residents to help prepare this region for upcoming problems associated with climate changes ‹ shortages of food, oil, clean water, wildlife, fish and so on ‹ by teaching them important skills of growing their own food without chemicals, living comfortably without wasting our natural resources, recycling and composting formerly wasted materials and generally living lightly on the Earth," she said.

It is anticipated that the young people ‹ former drug addicts and alcoholics ‹ would then go back into their communities and live the life they¹d learned in prison, Oden said.

More meetings are expected.

While the eastern Maine prison plans take form, a legislative subcommittee is looking at a variety of other options to ease prison crowding.

Among them are using a vacant dorm at the minimum-security Charleston Correctional Facility, transferring inmates to county jails and putting more women offenders in transitional housing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://bangordailynews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=150054&zoneid=500

Posted by lois at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)

Secular Humanists Sue Over Faith Groups' Contract with Prisons Agency

Secular Humanists Sue Over Faith Groups' Contract with Prisons Agency
By David Royse
Associated Press Writer
The Christian Post
Sat, May. 19 2007 03:42 PM ET

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - State prison officials Friday denied an allegation contained in a lawsuit that agreements with two faith-based contractors to provide transitional housing for released prisoners are unconstitutional.

The Council for Secular Humanism and two private citizens filed the lawsuit Thursday in circuit court in Leon County, alleging that the Department of Corrections' contract with the two faith-based groups violates the state constitution's prohibition on state revenue going to aid "any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."

The lawsuit called for DOC contracts with Prisoners of Christ Inc. and Lamb of God Ministries to be ruled unconstitutional and be discontinued.

DOC pays Jacksonville-based Prisoners of Christ and Okeechobee-based Lamb of God to provide "faith-based substance abuse post-release transitional housing."

The prisons agency responded that the contracts weren't unconstitutional because they specifically called for the state money to be used only for secular purposes.

DOC spokesman Robby Cunningham pointed out that among the language in the contracts is a provision that the vendors must "ensure that state funds are used for the sole purpose of furthering the secular goals of criminal rehabilitation, the successful reintegration of offenders into the community, and the reduction of recidivism."

The contracts include provisions that require the organizations to not consider participants' religious beliefs or lack of them when determining admission to the program. The contracts also stipulate "the program shall not attempt to convert an offender toward a particular faith or religious practice."

But officials with the Council for Secular Humanism said Florida's constitution bars state money from going to benefit sectarian institutions, and that the organizations are clearly that. Robert Rivas, the attorney for the council, said the case could be an important test on the constitutionality of other state contracts with faith-based groups.

Officials with Prisoners of Christ and Lamb of God didn't respond to calls seeking comment.

Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press.
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070519/27516_Secular_Humanists_Sue_Over_Faith_Groups'_Contract_with_Prisons_Agency.htm

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

May 17, 2007

New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges

May 17, 2007
New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges
By SAM ROBERTS

With the number of nonwhite Americans above 100 million for the first time, demographers are identifying an emerging racial generation gap.

That development may portend a nation split between an older, whiter electorate and a younger overall population that is more Hispanic, black and Asian and that presses sometimes competing agendas and priorities.

“The new demographic divide has broader implications for social programs and education spending for youth,” said Mark Mather, deputy director of domestic programs for the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group.

“There’s a fairly large homogenous population 60 and older that may not be sympathetic to the needs of a diverse youthful population,” Dr. Mather said.

The Census Bureau estimated yesterday that from July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, the nation’s minority population grew to 100.7 million from 98.3 million; that is about one in three of all Americans. The new figures also suggest that many states are growing more diverse as minorities disperse.

As a result of immigration and higher birthrates among many newcomers, the number of Hispanics grew by 3.4 percent nationwide and Asians by 3.2 percent. Meanwhile, the black population rose by 1.3 percent, and that of non-Hispanic whites by 0.3 percent. (The number of American Indians and Alaska Natives increased by 1 percent, and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders by 1.7 percent.)

More than 20 percent of children in the United States either are foreign-born or have a parent who was born abroad. Nearly half the children under age 5 are Hispanic, black or Asian.

Over all, the median age of Americans reached 36.6 years, another record high. It ranged from 27.4 among Hispanics to 40.5 among non-Hispanic whites.

The census counted more than 73,000 centenarians (about 14,000 men and 59,000 women) and also 78 million baby boomers (those born from 1946 to 1964), who, as they turn 60, are helping to drive the racial generation gap.

While growth rates fluctuated, many states are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse.

“Hispanics are dispersing, especially from California,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. “Texas is gaining from all racial groups, a true multicultural magnet.”

The changes have potential implications for national politics. In Nevada, where the share of whites has declined to 59 percent from 66 percent since 2000, the voting-age population has soared 25 percent, with minorities accounting for 63 percent of that increase. Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee have recorded the greatest percentage gains in their Hispanic population since 2000, with the biggest numerical gains, predictably, registered by California, Texas and Florida.

The biggest percentage increases in black residents were registered by Maine, South Dakota, New Hampshire and Idaho, and in Asian residents by Nevada, Arizona and New Hampshire.

In New York and Maryland, the departure of non-Hispanic whites has accelerated since 2005. (California has lost nearly 100,000, more than any other state). In the same period, New York and Michigan have recorded a loss in black residents. (Louisiana, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, recorded losses across the board.)

The racial generation gap, Dr. Mather said, emerged relatively recently and may turn out to be temporary as the growing proportion of Hispanics, blacks and Asians gets older.

As recently as 1980, he said, the share of minorities in each generation varied by only five percentage points or less.

According to the latest figures, 80 percent of Americans over age 60 are non-Hispanic whites, compared with only 60 percent among those in their 20s and 30s, and 58 percent among people younger than 20.

Dr. Mather said the widest racial generation gaps were found in California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. In Arizona, minorities account for more than half the people under the age of 20, but only one in six who are 60 and older.

The smallest gaps were found in Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia.

Dr. Mather said the three most homogeneous states — Maine, Vermont and West Virginia — spent the highest proportion of their gross state product on public education.

“There does seem to be a correlation,” he said.

John B. Diamond, a professor of education at Harvard, said that “there are patterns of school funding that suggest that may be a problem down the line.” But he also said the impact might be mitigated by two factors. Because of persistent residential segregation, he said, elderly white voters do not necessarily live in the same school districts as young members of minorities. And, altruism aside, older voters may be persuaded that their pensions and other benefits depend on the income and taxes generated by a better-educated work force.

The census found that fully 21 percent of the nation’s minority population lives in California, and 12 percent in Texas.

Hispanic Americans, the largest minority, accounted for nearly half the nation’s population growth in the year ended last July 1.

The nation’s black population surpassed 40 million for the first time, the Census Bureau said, and the number of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders topped one million.

Minorities constitute a majority in four states: Hawaii (75 percent), New Mexico (57 percent), California (57 percent) and Texas (52 percent).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/us/17census.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

MD: Lawmakers, judges, and advocates rebuke Gov. O’Malley’s veto of sentencing reform bill.

May 17, 2007
Justice Policy Institute

Lawmakers, judges, and advocates rebuke Gov. O’Malley’s veto of sentencing reform bill. O’Malley “clinging to the failed policies of the past” in a “lapse of leadership”

Coalition vows to continue educating O’Malley, promoting treatment instead of prisons

Annapolis—A coalition of advocates, law enforcement officials, drug treatment providers and policy experts today denounced Governor O’Malley’s veto of a bill that would have provided the possibility of parole for non-violent drug offenders. The sentencing reform bill, HB 992, was one of the only bills vetoed by O’Malley, despite its support from the legislature, the coalition, and the editorial pages of the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun.

“The veto is a disappointing mistake,” said Justice Policy Institute executive director Jason Ziedenberg. “Instead of taking a baby step in the right direction towards treatment instead of prison, O’Malley is stubbornly clinging to the failed tough on crime policies of the past. The governor failed to show leadership and vision in this decision.”

States across the country have taken steps to reform ineffective mandatory sentencing laws that remove discretion to consider the individual facts of the case. Newly-elected Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (D) recently called for wide ranging mandatory minimum sentencing reform. Newly-elected New York Governor Elliot Spitzer added language in his budget for a prison closure commission, and is considering a bill to further reform the state’s Rockefeller Drug Laws. Under the comparatively modest Maryland reform, individuals convicted of a 10-year sentence for a nonviolent drug reform would have been eligible for, but not guaranteed, parole. Individuals convicted of violent crimes would serve the full 10-year sentences.

“Governor O’Malley has put Maryland out of step with other states that are moving in the direction of smarter, more effective sentencing policies,” said Naomi Long, Director of the Drug Policy Alliance District of Columbia Metropolitan Area project. “This veto was a lapse of leadership, and hurts Maryland’s efforts to implement the kinds of real reforms that would actually make a difference.”

The state of Maryland spends millions of dollars each year incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders, the vast majority of whom would be better served by drug treatment options. A recent report by the Justice Policy Institute found that Maryland's sentencing laws disproportionately affect communities of color and may be the least effective, most expensive way to promote public safety.

“The fight for more effective and fair sentencing policies isn’t over,” said Delegate Curtis Anderson (D-Baltimore), a sponsor of the legislation. “Maryland voters want more fair and effective sentencing policies. We will keep working with the Governor to implement those reforms.”

The Partnership for Treatment, Not Incarceration supported HB 992, and is a consortium of organizations and individuals including members of faith communities, public health and drug treatment professionals, public defenders, judges, police and other law enforcement.

###

To learn more about sentencing reform work in Maryland, visit: www.justicepolicy.org and www.drugpolicy.org.

Posted by lois at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

Sltate: "Why GPS tracking is good news for inmates"

human nature
Call My Cell
Why GPS tracking is good news for inmates
By William Saletan
Posted Saturday, May 7, 2005, at 2:42 AM ET

Four days ago, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed a law slapping child molesters with a minimum prison sentence of 25 years "followed by probation or community control for the remainder of the person's natural life." During such probation, the offender must "be electronically monitored." Grope a 15-year-old, and you'll be wearing a satellite-linked ankle bracelet that tells the cops where you are every minute until the day you die.

These Global Positioning System (or GPS) monitors are the latest rage in crime-fighting. Jurisdictions in half the states are reportedly using them. The Journal of Offender Monitoring (yes, that's its name) estimates the monitored population at 120,000. Lawmakers promote GPS as high-tech medievalism, a way to get tough on perverts who can't be kept in jail. But the economics of the "offender-monitoring industry" tell a different story. Most jurisdictions are buying GPS not to confine criminals, but to release them.

Politicians make a big show of imposing GPS on predators after a child has been killed and the community is up in arms. That's what happened in Massachusetts a few months ago, when a sex offender murdered a 12-year-old and her mother. The slaying of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford prompted passage of the bill in Florida. But GPS tracking costs money: usually $8 to $12 per person per day, according to figures quoted to county and state governments. That's three or four grand a year. Still, it's many times less than the cost of incarceration. So, while there may be an occasional public-outrage incentive to impose GPS on offenders who will be out of jail anyway, there's a constant financial incentive to impose it on those who are in jail—and let them out.

Visit the home pages of the major GPS firms and you'll see what's up. "For just a fraction of the cost of incarceration, you can reach your ultimate goal of public safety," says Pro Tech Monitoring. On iSECUREtrac's list of "Applications/Solutions," sex offenders rank third. The top two advertised applications are "Budget Concerns" and "Prison Overcrowding." The same two items head the list at BI Incorporated. "The average cost of keeping an inmate in jail is approximately $100 per day," observes iSECUREtrac. "Solving a situation like this normally requires increased funding, but increased funding usually means raising taxes, and raising taxes is rarely a popular political response." BI adds, "By sentencing 100 offenders to alternative sanctions rather than jail or prison, agencies can significantly decrease their spending."

This is the pitch law-enforcement officials are getting all over the country. Run a newspaper search and you'll find scores of back-page articles about this or that county looking at GPS to solve a budget or jail-crowding problem. In these articles—as opposed to front-page stories about hunting down child rapists—politicians hem and haw to avoid looking soft on crime. My favorite is a report in the Albuquerque Tribune two months ago. In the third paragraph, the chairman of the county commission insists GPS is "not a substitute for incarceration. It's an extension." Ten paragraphs later, he points out that GPS saves money on juvenile lockups.

By and large, it isn't the most dangerous inmates who are getting GPS anklets. It's the least dangerous ones. They're the first to be let out of jail when money and space run low. One hundred state and local jurisdictions are reportedly using GPS to track nonviolent juvenile offenders. You think that's hard on the kids? Think again. It lets them go to school. And consider the alternatives. Some kids in the California youth system have been put in cages. People living near a juvenile delinquent "ranch" in Santa Clara County want a fence to keep kids inside. Officials there hope GPS can solve the problem less drastically.

Last month in Ohio, a Hamilton County commissioner told the Cincinnati Enquirer that GPS was an "electronic jail." "You just plug in the coordinates of the places they're allowed to go" and "the hours they're supposed to be at work and the hours they're supposed to be at home," he said. But any system that lets you go home or to a regular workplace is a better deal than jail. Johnson County, Iowa, offers GPS to inmates applying for work release so that more applications can be granted. When the Associated Press asked a paroled burglar in Georgia about the GPS device he wears to work, he pointed out that it's an improvement on the nine years he spent behind bars.

What worries some civil libertarians about Florida's GPS tracking is that it's permanent. But for sex offenders, permanent constraints are nothing new. They're required to register everywhere they go. Cities commonly set up zoning restrictions to limit their movement. Miami Beach is trying to make it impossible for them to live there. Eight states allow chemical "castration," though courts require the convict's consent. One of every three states allows "civil commitment," which keeps sexually violent predators in jail even after they've finished their sentences, to protect the public. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld this practice.

Look at the historical trend. We used to kill child molesters. Then we decided we didn't have to kill them, since we could imprison them for life. Then it turned out we didn't have to imprison them for life, since we could put them on radio-frequency monitors that kept them home. Now we don't have to keep them home, since GPS lets us track them wherever they go. The longer the leash, the greater their freedom.

This is why the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida supported that state's GPS bill. As the organization's director explained, "Electronic monitoring can be an effective tool much preferable for many offenders than just needless incarceration." Remember when George H.W. Bush joked that ACLU stood for "Allowing Criminals to Leave Unsupervised"? Now the joke's on him. Under the law his son just signed, sex offenders can leave prison without constant in-person supervision, because GPS is on the job.

The joke could well turn again. As GPS gets cheaper, politicians will be tempted to order it not just for people who would otherwise be jailed, but for those who wouldn't. Some jurisdictions authorize it for all sex offenders, including teenage boys with underage girlfriends. Others are extending it to abusive husbands, stalkers, and gang members who might intimidate witnesses. Others are using it to enforce curfews on wayward juveniles. In Britain, some auto insurers use it to monitor drivers. And just this morning, police in Florida had to hunt down a sexual predator the old-fashioned way after he cut off his ankle bracelet. If anklets can't track sex offenders reliably, the next step may be GPS implants. Just you watch.
William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2118117/

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

May 16, 2007

KANSAS PRISONS OUTPACING LIBYA'S

KANSAS PRISONS OUTPACING LIBYA'S
BY RONALD FRASER
Posted on Wed, May. 16, 2007, Wichita Eagle

Myths have a way of hiding what we don't want to see.

Americans, for example, are quick to charge Third World dictators with abusive prison policies. But prison incarceration rates tell a different story.

Recent reports show that 45 of the 50 state governments in the United States, including Kansas, imprison their citizens at a faster pace than any of the foreign governments headed by dictators.

Rulers in Libya, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, China and Pakistan made Parade Magazine's 2005 world's worst dictators list. And the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, Calif., has issued a report titled "U.S. Rates of Incarceration: A Global Perspective," showing the incarceration rates for these five dictatorships -- the number of people in prison for every 100,000 of population -- ranging from a low of 57 in Pakistan to a high of 207 in Libya.

By comparison, Kansas locked up 330 state citizens for every 100,000 of its population in 2005. In other words, Kansas imprisons its people at a rate nearly 1 ½ times faster than Moammar Gadhafi's Libya and almost six times faster than Pakistan under Gen. Pervez Musharraf. If inmates held in local jails in Kansas were added in, the spread would be even wider.

Why are prisons in America filling at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world? Some say our crime rate is the cause.

But the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., reports that "criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck examined the near-tripling of the prison population during the period 1980-96 and concluded that changes in crime explained only 12 percent of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing policy accounted for 88 percent of the increase."

Legislatively dictated sentences for even minor offenses tie the hands of judges and juries. These mandatory minimum punishments continue to keep hundreds of thousands behind bars for just using or selling tiny amounts of "illicit" substances.

In addition, about one-half of all inmates in the United States are serving time for nonviolent offenses. If prisons were only used to separate dangerous people from the rest of society, the 9,000 state prisoners in Kansas in 2005 could have been drastically cut overnight.

With only 5 percent of the world's people, the United States is home to 23 percent of the world's prisoners. If the rest of the world followed America's prison policies, the worldwide incarcerated population would grow from 9 million to 47 million.

Isn't it time that we stop worrying about the behavior of faraway dictators and start downsizing prisons here at home?

Ronald Fraser writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a civil liberties organization in Washington, D.C.
http://www.kansas.com/205/story/70895.html

Posted by lois at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)

"Impacts of Jail Expansion in New York State: A Hidden Burden"

"Impacts of Jail Expansion in New York State: A Hidden Burden" by Dana Kaplan, Center for Constitutional Rights. May 2007
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/docs/CCR_NYS_Jail_Report.pdf
An excellent, comprehensive report with includes important race-based analysis and recommendations to alternatives to jail building includes findings that that:

Between 1999 and 2006, the New York state prison population had dropped from 71,000 to 62,928 people, a decrease of 8 percent in less than a decade. Despite the decrease in the prison population, the combined capacity of jails in upstate and suburban New York increased by 20.
Jail construction has cost counties an estimated $1 billion, raising local property taxes in some instances as much as 40 percent and diverting money away from social services.
The growth in the number of people incarcerated in jails has not been caused by an increase in crime or by an increase in population-rather, it has been caused by the expansion mandates issued by the SCOC and new arrest and detention policies, including arrest policies for low-level offenses and misdemeanors; a rising number of mentally ill people in jail; system inefficiencies; and the use of local jails to hold those detained by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Posted by lois at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2007

MO: Legislature passes legislation of life sentence for selling drugs near a park

News Tribune
Posted: Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Tougher penalties for selling drugs near parks pass

By The Associated Press

People who sell drugs near a park could face a life prison sentence under legislation sent Monday to Gov. Matt Blunt.

The legislation makes it a Class A felony, punishable by 10 to 30 years or life in prison, to sell heroin, cocaine, LSD, amphetamine or methamphetamine within 1,000 feet of city, county, state or private parks.

State law already allows for up to life sentences for manufacturing and selling drugs within 2,000 feet of schools, colleges and school buses. Selling drugs anywhere is a Class B felony with a prison sentence of five to 15 years.

Critics said the state is moving in the wrong direction to lengthen sentences for drug dealers.

³With our prisons being overcrowded, with the numerous people in prison for nonviolent crimes, there's a real concern on my part that someone could go to prison for life for selling drugs,² said Sen. Maida Coleman, D-St. Louis.

But supporters said it's necessary to keep parks safe for families and protect vulnerable children from being lured into using drugs.

³We are creating more problems by allowing this kind of activity in the parks with our children,² said Sen. Yvonne Wilson, D-Kansas City. ³We are enhancing the expectancy or opportunity for more to go to prison.²

The Senate passed the bill 29-4 on Monday. It passed the House in April by a 124-26 vote.

The drugs-in-parks language is part of a broader bill.

The measure also makes state property any historically valuable shipwrecks that are at least 50 years old on navigable or formerly navigable waters. Also, it would be a crime to hunt on private property without permission or enter private property without permission to retrieve an animal killed by a hunter. Along with criminal penalties, violators could lose their hunting and fishing privileges for a year.
---
Drug bill is SB198.
On the Net:
Legislature: http://www.moga.mo.gov

http://newstribune.com/articles/2007/05/15/news_state/230state34drugpark.txt

Posted by lois at 07:02 PM | Comments (0)

U.N. Official Says He’s Been Denied Access to U.S. Immigrant Jails

May 15, 2007
U.N. Official Says He’s Been Denied Access to U.S. Immigrant Jails
By JULIA PRESTON, NY Times

A United Nations human rights official said he was barred from visiting an immigration detention center in New Jersey yesterday. It was the second time he was denied access to an American immigration jail on a weeklong monitoring tour.

The official, Jorge Bustamante, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said he was informed over the weekend that his visit to detained immigrants in the Monmouth County Correctional Institution in Freehold, scheduled for yesterday, had been canceled. Mr. Bustamante said he had received no explanation.

Mr. Bustamante was barred from a May 7 visit to the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center in Taylor, Tex., where illegal immigrant families, including children, are held. Officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency in charge of that center, said they canceled the visit because of a pending lawsuit over conditions there by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a letter of protest yesterday to Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Bustamante said the State Department had approved his itinerary.

“My interpretation is that someone in the United States government is not proud of what is happening in those centers,” Mr. Bustamante said in an interview.

A department spokesman, Bill Strassberger, said he understood that the New Jersey visit was canceled by the Monmouth County sheriff, Joseph W. Oxley. Mr. Strassberger confirmed that the State Department had helped arrange Mr. Bustamante’s tour and was disappointed the two visits had not taken place. “We want to show we have nothing to hide,” Mr. Strassberger said.

Undersheriff Cynthia Scott, a spokeswoman for Sheriff Oxley, said Mr. Bustamante had canceled his visit, declining to accept “reasonable conditions” for access. “It was canceled by him, not us,” she said.

Mr. Bustamante was able to visit a federal immigration detention center in Florence, Ariz. He said it appeared clean and “well managed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/us/15deny.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

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

May 13, 2007

Sex Offenders, Civil Confinement and the Resurrection of Evil

CounterPunch Magazine
May 10, 2007

Sex Offenders, Civil Confinement and the Resurrection of Evil
The New Disappeared

By DAVID ROSEN

One of the first acts of New York's newly-elected "liberal" governor, Eliot Spitzer, was to secure passage of the nation's most far-reaching civil confinement law. With its passage, New York joined nineteen other states that permit the continued imprisonment of sex offenders after they have completed their prison sentence. These inmates are defined as suffering a mental disorder and, thus, posing the threat of committing new crimes upon release. Civil confinement permits the state to transform a criminal sentence with a specified duration into an indeterminate life sentence.

Convicted sex offenders are joining a growing list of what can only be called "the new disappeared." Latin American dictatorships (under CIA and U.S. military supervision) pioneered "disappearance" as a government practice to deal with radical opposition during the tumultuous '70s and '80s. Today, both U.S. federal and state governments are instituting a less barbaric, but no less effective, means to ensure the disappearance of a variety of unacceptable citizens. In effect, once a person is convicted, sentenced and imprisoned, he or she can be disappeared from civil society for life.

Today, the terrorist, particularly the Muslim jihadist, and the sex offender, especially the pedophile, are perceived as the gravest evils to civil society. But they are not alone.

The new disappeared also includes those swept up in the CIA practice of "extraordinary rendition" or identified as "enemy combatants" and imprisoned in the American gulag, Guantánamo; those, like Sami Al-Arian, the Palestinian educator, and Josh Wolf, the indie video journalist (recently released), being held for an indeterminate sentence for contempt of a grand jury subpoena to testify under a questionable (if illegal) order; those, like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, the former Black Panther journalist and American Indian Movement activist, respectively, serving a life sentence or are on death row with no likelihood of release; those given extraordinarily punitive prison sentences reaching to 100 and 200 and even 900 years; and the nearly 6 million ex-felons and those awaiting trial who have been disenfranchised from civil society. America is practicing disappearance with a bureaucrat's smirk.

Sometimes the "New York Times" gets is right. Following Spitzer's signing of the civil confinement law, the Times ran an in-depth, three-part exposé and a strongly-worded editorial seriously challenging the practice. In the editorial, it stated: the Times "found that civil confinement laws have led to post-prison warehouses, where offenders check in, but don't check out." [New York Times, March 4, 5 and 6, 2007; editorial March 13, 2007]

Gov. Spitzer insists that New York's confinement law has sufficient safeguards to protect the interests of the incarcerated. It calls for a panel of mental-health experts to assess sex offenders before they're release. Based on its recommendations, the state attorney general will then determine whether to go to court to seek further confinment. A jury must unanimously agree that confinement is necessary before, finally, a judge approves the confinement.

In keeping with current Supreme Court rulings, the New York law makes treatment mandatory both during incarceration and after release. Confined offenders are to be placed in secure psychiatric facilities and segregated from other patients. In addition (and reenforcing today's punitive climate), it imposes longer prison terms for sex crimes and requires longer periods of paroled supervision for those not confined. Most troubling, it establishes a new crime catagory (i.e., sexually motivated felony) that attempts to identify potential sex offenders prior to committing a crime - the Bush-Cheney war policy of preemptive strike applied to domestic life.

America has never known what to do with sex offenders. They have been part of the social landscape since the nation's earliest colonization. However, in the pre- and post-WWII era, about half of the states had sex offender laws targeted to those suffering mental disorders, be they ascribed to a disease or defect. These laws permitted states to confine those convicted of sex crimes to indeterminate sentences. In the '60s and '70s, these laws were challenged by calls for determinate sentencing.

Americans have never been comfortable with indeterminate sentencing, especially for non-criminal behavior. The one area long accepteble for civil confinment concerned a person who was assessed by medical experts as either suffering from a mental disorder or being dangerous to him/her-self or others.

In 1990, Washington enacted the first state law to formalize civil commitment. (In the intervening period, it has sought 208 confinements and secured 135 of them.) The policy was legitimized by the Supreme Court in 1992 in Foucha v. Louisiana. In this decision, the Court held that a person who had served his/her criminal sentence could not be further confined for merely being dangerousness without a proven mental disorder.

However, facing the growing politicalization of sex offenders in the '90s, especially what came to be called the "violent sexual predator," legislators throughout the country moved aggressively to maximize the term of their imprisonment and, if they do get out of jail, severely regulate their lives after prison. One method employed was to expand the definition of mental disorder to encompass the less precise condition of "mental abnormality."

In 1997, the Supreme Court upheld this new nomenclature in the Kansas v. Hendricks decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that mental abnormality covered under Kansas' Sexually Violent Predator Act was a constitutionally permissible basis for civil confinement of a dangerous sex offender. He insisted that such confinement was civil, not punitive, because it was to be accompanied by treatment for the offender.

Civil confinement has been a failure in terms of dealing with deeply troubling sex offenders. As practiced by states across the county, confinement is a punitive sentence, a form of double jeopardy. Other than postponing indefinitely the release of criminals who have completed their formal prison sentence, it hasn't work.

Sex offense is a serious issue. The (mostly) men arrested and convicted for such crimes often commit some of the most horrendous offenses imaginable, including the abuse, rape, torture and murder of children and women. These are often truly troubled - and socially troubling - men; no one seems to know how to effectively deal with them.

Unfortunately, an informed consideration of this issue seems nearly impossible. The growing politically-motivated social hysteria that drives most discussion of sex offenders provides little room for anything other than the most knee-jerk punitive response: Jail 'em and throw away the key!

Matters are made worse by TV shows like NBC Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" that reduce the men who pursue online contacts with apparent underage young people into a moralist's prurient spectacle: Viewers are sexually titillated by the apparently illicit if not illegal behavior of innumerable "predators," yet implicitly scolded for being seduced by the very titillation that drew them into watching the show in the first place. The show refuses to address more fundamental issues like why these men seek out juvenile girls and boys, nor how to deal with them other than through vindictive criminal prosecution and incarceration.

The "reported" incidents of sex offenses, like all other crimes, have been falling over the last decade. While the self-serving Police Executive Research Forum recently released a dubious study reporting an increase in certain violent crimes in a pre-selected sampling of cities, FBI and Department of Justice data tells a different story. [see Alexander Cockburn, "Here Comes Another Crime Wave," "The Nation," April 2, 2007; PERF report at www.policeforum.org]

The most recent data, the FBI's statistical summary, "Crime in the United States, 1986-2005," shows that sex crime has dropped significantly. Forcible rape, the only sex crime tracked, peaked in 1992 at 110,000 and, by 2005, was at 94,000, a 14 percent decline. The Justice Department found that, in 1979, the rate of rape per 1,000 people was 2.8 and by 2004 it had fallen to 0.4 per 1,000 people. In addition, FBI data reveals that between 2002 and 2004 other sex offenses (statutory rape, incest) were down 31 percent and prostitution and commercial vice was down 19 percent.

"USA Today" reported that sex assaults against those 12-17 years declined 79 percent during the 1993-2003 decade and sex abuse of all children under 17 dropped by 39 percent during the same period. While estimates by scholars vary, estimate suggest that overwhelming number of all child molestations, 80 percent of girls and 60 percent of boys, are committed by people who know the victim, including relatives, friends, baby-sitters, persons in positions of authority over the child, or persons who supervise children. The FBI reports that juveniles under 17 years commit 15 to 20 percent of all rapes of young people and 30 to 60 percent of all child sexual assaults. [USA Today, August 25, 2005]

The issue of "reported" sex crimes is most problematic; no one really knows the true level of sex offense taking place in America. The basic sources for "reported" crime are the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR), an annual compilation of national crime statistics, and it's more recently introduced (and more realistic) system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Both seem woefully inadequate in documenting "actual" as distinct from "reported" sex offenses.

The Department of Justice's Center for Sex Offender Management (CSOM), citing a 1992 study of women rape victims, found that 84 percent did not report the crime. The National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS) conducted in 1994, 1995 and 1998 reported that just about one-third (32%) of sexual assaults against persons 12 or older were reported. Other reports mirror these findings.

Sex offenders are grouped into three categories: Level I, low-level repeat offender; Level II, moderate-level repeat offender; and Level III, high-level repeat offender, with one or more conviction for what may have involved a violent sex crime.

These fluid categories contribute to one of the most punitive aspects of current confinement laws, they're very arbitrariness. Inherent inconsistencies among the twenty different state laws governing confinement is indicated in the range of sex offenders covered. Normally, confinement is limited to those considered Level III offender. These are, allegedly, the worst of the worst.

For example, in Tacoma and Pierce County, WA, Level III sex offenders
include: a 29-year-old male convicted in 1996 for second-degree child rape of a 12-year-old girl; a 25-year-old male convicted in 1999 of first-degree incest with a 12-year-old younger female family member; and a 23-year-old male convicted in 2002 for third-degree assault of a 10-year-old girl.

However, confinement also includes far less threatening offenders. According to the Times, an exhibitionist and a released sex offender picked up for a DUI incident were confined, while rapists were not. Offenders are confined on an ad hoc basis depending of the whims of individual states.

(One can wonder whether New York's newly proposed public lewdness statute, as advocated by City Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr., will become law. Offended by public flashers and subway gropers, Vallone requested state legislators add public lewdness to the list of crimes covered by the public registry of convicted sex offenders.

(In Texas, people arrested for streaking or public nudity are classified as sex offenders; in Illinois, convicted skinny-dippers (i.e., people engaging in "public indecency") must register as sex offenders. One-two-three: A flasher is confined for life.

(Similarly, one can only wonder as to the fate of Jeffrey Hayes of Battle Creek, MI. He was recently arrested for bestiality, sexually assaulting two sheep, Thelma and Louise. Under pressure from animal rights advocates, he was added to the state sex-offender registry and might well find his way into confinement.)

Although the current Christian conservative, get-tough climate can make the fixation on sex offenders appear as a joke, such offenders are really not a laughing matter. According to CSOM, sex offenders commit many crimes for 16 years prior to finally getting caught. At yearend 2005, approximately 2.3 million people were imprisoned by federal and state authorities throughout the country. At yearend 2003 (the last available data), sex offenders accounted for approximately 12 percent (61,300 rapists and 87,500 other sex
assaults) of the 1.3 million of those incarcerated in state prisons; the federal system does not separate out sex offenders. One scholar cited by CSOM estimates that the quarter-million sex offenders incarcerated in state and federal jails represent less than 10 percent of all sex offenders in the U.S. today. In addition, there are approximately 2,700 people serving civil confinements for sex offenses.

Recidivism among sex offenders is lower than many other criminal offenses. According to the Department of Justice, "Sex offenders were less likely than non-sex offenders to be rearrested for any offense." To be a recidivist, a released criminal must commit a new offense, whether sexual or other (e.g., DUI), or technically violate the conditions of parole.

An estimated 5.3 percent of sex offenders are rearrested within three years for a sex crime. However, recidivism differs markedly among sex offenders and over time. While this is a hotly debated issue with innumerable interpretations, recidivism rates are relatively as follows: Incest at 8.4 percent; rapists at 17.9 percent; and child molesters at 19.5 percent. Exhibitionists tend to have the highest rate of recidivism. [Dept. of Justice, "Criminal Offenders Statistics"; "Sex Offender Treatment," Pennsylvania Dept. of Correction, March 2004]

According to the Times and other sources, there appears to be no accepted longitudinal studies demonstrating that confinement works. As the Times
states: "Reliable studies on the treatment of civilly committed offenders do not exist, since so few have been set free." It is understood to be the final option to be imposed when all other treatment methods have failed. Current treatment options fall into two broad approaches, therapeutic and chemical/surgical. [New York Times, March 6, 2007]

Therapeutic approaches include: relapse prevention therapy, much like AA, focusing on specific activities that need to be avoided; cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), a short-tem method dealing with self-destructive habits; and a variety of other therapies, including cognitive distortion (i.e., encourages addressing deviant sexual behavior), victim empathy training (i.e., sensitizing offenders to the harm they are inflicting) and social functioning training (i.e., building self-confidence to overcome maladaptive beliefs and behavior).

Chemical/surgical interventions include: prescribing anti-aggressive drugs, like Lupron, to reduce aggressive impulses; chemical castration, the use of anti-androgen drugs like Depo-Provera to reduce testosterone levels and a treatment option in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Texas; and surgical castration, a limited practice, but, as in California, paid for by the offender. [New York Times, March 5, 2007]

Still other approaches have been part of the treatment arsenal. Electric aversion conditioning (i.e., shock therapy) was long popular, but fell into disrepute in the '70s. Olfactory aversion, the pairing of a noxious order with a deviant sexual fantasy, still finds some employment.

Civil confinement is further complicating by still other obstacles. First is the high cost involved. Estimates place the special confinement centers cost four times more than conventional imprisonment, running at $100,000 per year per convict compared to $26,000 annual for a regular prison; some estimates peg the New York State confinement plan at $185,000 per inmate annually. A second factor has to with the offenders themselves. It is estimated that 16 percent of all those imprisoned and 12 percent of sex offenders suffer from a serious mental disorder like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The costs associated for such specialized treatment are often prohibitive. Many offenders, due to advice of council, will not participate in therapy fearing that discussing their past activities could lead to new charges. And many of those who do participate in therapy intentionally falsify their admissions so as to increase their likelihood of probation.

Finally, civil confinement centers like the one run by Liberty Behavioral Heath Corp. in Arcadia, FL, and detailed by the Times, are failures. Poor or no oversight is in place; offenders have access to home-brewed alcohol, drugs are easily smuggled in, violence among inmates is common and sex among offenders and offenders and staff is a regular feature; and, worse still, little treatment takes place. [New York Times, March 5, 2007]

Even well-intentioned efforts are easily tripped up. For example, Texas appears to be the only state that runs an outpatient program that releases offenders into community-located halfway houses. Critics argue that it is a sham, doomed to failure because it is poorly funded and offers little public protection. They point to the experience of Mark Petersimes, who was in a Dallas facility and simply sliced the electronic monitor from his ankle and disappeared.

Critics insist that the Texas program has not successfully rehabilitated a single offender, that no one has been released from civil commitment since the program began in 2001 and that more than 40 percent of the offenders have been sent back to prison for mostly minor infractions. However, none of the inmates appears to have committed a new sex offense.

This situation has reached its most absurd level in Florida where the state authorized five recently released convicted sex offenders to live under Miami's Julia Tuttle Causeway. The offenders are required to stay at the bridge from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. and, because of the absence of electricity, they have a problem recharging their tracking devices.

Since the earliest European colonization, America has been besieged by the threat of evil. Historically, evil has taken innumerable forms. In Puritan New England, evil was embodied in witches, Native people and Quakers; even nature itself was experienced as a threat of the devil. Later, evil took the form of male African slaves and free black men, culminating in innumerable lynchings. Over time, evil assumed the continence of the sodomite, anarchist, communist and pornographer. Recently, it has included those early male gay AIDS sufferers and even Giuliani's homeless squeegee men.

Evil has always been an elastic category combining unacceptable behavior with unforgivable personality traits. Behavior included practices specified by those in power as illicit if not illegal, while personality (including physical and psychological characteristics) involved a self-hood that is irredeemable. Evil branded the perpetrator a menace to acceptable society, one who had to be expelled from the community in order to not simply punish his/her wrong-doing, but save all others from being tempted by the evil-doer's moral corruption.

Throughout the country's history, evil has been dealt with essentially the same way. To be resisted, suppressed, the evil-doer has had to be expelled, removed from acceptable society. Removal serves both symbolic and pragmatic ends, each embodying aspect of the other, whether taking the form of public humiliation, shunning and whipping or branding, imprisonment and even killing. It serves to disappear from public life those who have been stigmatized as "evil."

Since the nation's founding such disappearance has taken (for the most part) a particularly American form. Following British concepts of jurisprudence, the accused had to be tried before a judge and a jury of one's peers. The trial sanctified both legal and moral authority.

Thus, judgment and punishment are not the arbitrary actions of a despot but a community's collective decision. With rare exception, as with lynchings of African-American men and murder of labor organizes, all those deemed evil for challenging conventional morality and civil society were judged guilty by their peers.

Today's evil is symbolized by the terrorist and the sex offender. These "evil doers" have become highly politicized, each serving to instill fear whether of international or local threats. Under the Bush administration, evil has been secularized into a national obsession.

The policy implications were most acutely demonstrated in the days leading up to last November's election when Attorney General Gonzales held a press conference to announce the success of "Operation Falcon." He told the nation that three thousand law enforcement agents in twenty-four states had rounded up 10,700 fugitives, included 140 wanted on murder warrants, 232 on firearms warrants and 3,660 on drug charges.

However, in the Times and other media, the headline announced: "Over 1,600 Arrested in Sex Offender Roundup." More than half of these offenders were picked up for a federal crime of failing to properly register in their respective state. While perfectly timed, this much-ballyhooed roundup of fugitives did not turn the election for the Republicans. [New York Times, November 3, 2006]

A further example of the increasing politicizing of "evil" sex offenders is suggested by the lengthening of prison sentences. For example, Virginia has increased mandatory sentences for certain sex offences to 25 years, up from 10 years. In Pennsylvania, Gregory Benner, who had in 1994 pleaded guilty to sexually abusing an underage girl, was recently arrested for possessing more than 115,000 pornographic images of minors; he was charged for 2,237 of them and each image representing an individual criminal count; local officials believe he could be sentenced to more than 900 years. This trend is in line with last year's Supreme Court decision to decline to review the 200 year sentence that Arizona handed down to Morton Berger; the state imposed separate, consecutive 10 year sentences for each of the twenty pornographic images of minors in Berger's possession.

The politicizing of sex offenders at the local, state and federal levels makes it difficult to question the efficacy (let alone the ethicacy) of civil confinement. Worse still, this politicizing makes it very difficult to really consider how to deal with these seriously threatening men (and a few women). Public officials are hiding behind indeterminate life sentences masquerading as treatment so as not to admit this failure.

These officials fail to see that most exaggerated sex offenses like pedophilia, rape, sex slavery and lust murder are more than sex offenses or even mental disorders. Rather, they are existential crises of self and society, at once moral and criminal violation of the victim's, and the perpetrator's, humanity, requiring a new social policy and method of treatment to be successfully addressed.

Making matters worse, these offenders are being swept-up into the growing universe of the "new disappeared." It is a black hole for those deemed evil. While the concept of evil has all but disappeared from secular discourse, federal, state and local authorities (along with media pundits) rely on an unstated characterization of the unacceptable as evil to engender moral repugnance to legitimize civil disappearance.

The same unstated characterization marks those labeled "enemy combatants," those serving a life sentence or are on death row, those facing extraordinarily punitive prison sentences and the millions of disenfranchised ex-felons. It is a politically-dug black hole that more and more Americans are being disappeared into.

David Rosen can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.
http://www.counterpunch.org/rosen05102007.html>

Posted by lois at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Editorial: Better policies, not bigger prisons

Editorial: Better policies, not bigger prisons
Sun May 13, 2007, 12:46 AM EDT

Metro West Daily News (Framingham, MA—the city of Massachusetts’ only prison for women)

Massachusetts jails are bursting at the seams, county sheriffs say, and millions of dollars are needed to repair and expand them to house the thousands of men and women behind bars. Last Sunday, the Daily News reported that jails serving Middlesex, Worcester and Norfolk County are holding more than twice as many prisoners as they were built to handle.

"It's a life or death issue," according to Worcester County Sheriff Guy Glodis.

True enough, and no doubt there are immediate needs that must be addressed to ensure adequate conditions. The state's prisons are overcrowded as well. But the problems go beyond a lack of cells and bunks.

Our prisons are crowded, in part, because they are the place where thousands of the untreated mentally ill end up. They can't cope and they can't get help, but they can get arrested.

Prisons and jails are also crowded because we have criminalized addiction. A state task force found that 81 percent have substance abuse disorder. The crimes committed by thousands of inmates stem from drug abuse - and drug prohibition. It costs $45,000 a year to keep a drug addict in a state prison, yet few of them get the treatment they'll need to go straight after release.

Prison overcrowding is also the direct result of misguided policies. Mandatory minimum sentences and "truth in sentencing" laws enacted in the 1990s by legislators determined to appear tough on crime have backfired. Prisoners convicted under those laws serve their full sentences and are released without post-release supervision, and without the remainder of a sentence hanging over them should they get in trouble again. Without jobs, skills or housing, they find their way back to the old neighborhood, the old gang and the old bad habits.

Urban police chiefs can anticipate spikes in gang violence, Gov. Deval Patrick said during a visit to Framingham this week, "because they know when the bad guys are getting out."

Patrick, House Speaker Sal DiMasi and Senate President Therese Murray said this week they have agreed it's time to roll back mandatory minimum sentences and concentrate on post-release supervision and prisoner re-entry programs. They have an ally in Attorney General Martha Coakley.

"The biggest problem is that our approach to public safety has been to warehouse people," Patrick said. The answer is new policies, not bigger warehouses.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinion/x108487954

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

MD: Governor May Veto Bill Lessening Drug Penalties

Governor May Veto Bill Lessening Drug Penalties
Assembly Narrowly Approved Parole for Second-Time Dealers

By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 11, 2007; B02

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) said yesterday that he will probably veto a bill that would make twice-convicted drug dealers eligible for parole, calling drug dealing a "violent crime" that should be severely punished.

"I'm not sure that I can sign a bill that would do away with the penalties we have in Maryland -- or lessen the penalties -- for second-time drug dealers," the governor said on "The Bill Press Show" on Sirius satellite radio. "I think drug dealing is a violent crime."

House Bill 992, narrowly approved by the General Assembly last month, would put Maryland among two dozen states turning back a 25-year national trend toward mandatory minimum sentences for some drug crimes. Nonviolent offenders who now serve fixed 10-year sentences for drug distribution could be released after 2 1/2 years.

Advocates for repealing fixed prison terms say that locking up some of these defendants for 10 years with no chance of parole punishes many low-level dealers who get the same time as more serious dealers caught with larger quantities of drugs. Many of them are dealing to support their habit, and the bill's original language included money for drug treatment. But it passed with none in a tight budget year, prompting opponents to say they could not support it.

The bill is likely to be the only major bill that O'Malley vetoes out of this year's legislative session, which ended April 9. And a veto would put him at odds with some of the party's liberal activists.

The legislation is a top priority of the Legislative Black Caucus, whose members are concerned that African Americans make up the majority of defendants jailed in Maryland on drug charges. But O'Malley, who is popular among African Americans, said his two terms as mayor of Baltimore made him sensitive to drug-related violence.

"When I was elected mayor of Baltimore, it was a time when our city was the most violent in America," O'Malley he told Press, a liberal commentator. "We need to do more drug treatment. But I'm not inclined to sign the bill."

Black leaders, including the measure's sponsor, Del. Curtis S. Anderson (D-Baltimore), a defense attorney, are lobbying O'Malley heavily to sign the bill.

Public defenders, who support the bill, said they were disappointed.

"I don't think mandatory laws are serving any real purpose," said Janet Callous, who has represented numerous clients in Prince George's County serving 10-year terms. "If we are talking about people who are shown to be kingpins, it makes more sense. But a lot of people are selling small amounts of cocaine because they're users themselves."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/10/AR2007051002152_pf.html

Posted by lois at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)

Mentally ill inmates face a cruel system

Mentally ill inmates face a cruel system
Will the state end long solitary confinement and other prison abuses, or go on as usual?
BY MARY BETH PFEIFFER
Mary Beth Pfeiffer is author of "Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of Our Criminalized Mentally Ill," which includes a chapter on the New York State prison system.

May 6, 2007-Newsday

In 1998, 11 years after a federal judge ordered improved mental health care for prisoners at New York State's Attica Correctional Facility, a psychotic 28-year-old man identified as Inmate A hanged himself in an Attica solitary confinement unit.

The inmate had tried suicide several times before and was experiencing delusions and hallucinations - clear signs of mental illness - but this did not affect how his keepers viewed him: as a "malingerer," according to court documents, who deserved round-the-clock lockup in a veritable closet for his prison misdeeds. Nor did it matter that the prison was operating under the watchful eye of a federal court that had sought to avoid this kind of outcome.

Now, nine years later, such abusive long-term isolated confinement of mentally ill inmates is at the center of another, more far-reaching federal lawsuit recently settled by New York State, alleging dismal inmate mental health care across its 71 prisons. With the state's pledge to add 400 treatment beds and curbs on how mentally ill inmates are disciplined, the settlement has the potential to lift hundreds of prisoners out of miserably punitive conditions. Nonetheless, caution is advised.

One need only look at Inmate A and others who died long after the state had agreed to improve their lot - even as court monitors kept a regular vigil - to know the limits of judicial reach. The settlement is a good development, to be sure, but it fails to go far enough.

The court reports that tell the checkered history of settlements of class-action prison lawsuits - those, for example, that revealed the fate of Inmate A - will not, under this new settlement, be made public. So who will know if the state reneges?

It's an urgent question, as New York's prisons, like those in other states, have become de facto mental institutions in an era of shuttered mental hospitals and inadequate community care. While the prison population has expanded by about 9 percent since 1991, the number of inmates with mental illness - currently estimated at 8,400 - has nearly doubled. The system has its own 189-bed psychiatric hospital and specialized units for mentally ill inmates, but its resources are dwarfed by the need.

Unable to conform and offered few treatment alternatives, mentally ill inmates often are isolated in cells as small as 50 square feet for an average of three years. The most recalcitrant are fed cold loaves of flour, milk, potato and carrot - with a side of raw cabbage - a punitive practice frowned upon by the accrediting American Correctional Association.

The lawsuit settlement places limits on use of the "loaf" and on punishment of mentally ill inmates who hurt themselves in violation of prison rules. It also provides two hours of therapy a week for inmates in isolation. What it will not do, however, is exclude schizophrenic and other intensely ill inmates from the dehumanizing, psychologically battering rigors of isolated confinement.

Prisons in at least seven other states now ban isolated confinement for inmates with serious mental illness. Under a bill pending in the State Legislature - vetoed last August by then-Gov. George Pataki but reintroduced and now in committee - New York would follow suit. Crucially, the bill would let a state commission monitor mental health care behind prison walls, providing badly needed, and permanent, oversight.

Settlements in federal lawsuits undoubtedly have improved prison conditions. But the path to change has been tortuous and long. After a settlement involving the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County, a frustrated court monitor wrote 13 reports from 1992 to 2000 in which he described care as "wretched," "callous" and "dangerous." Five inmates died needlessly, including one from a staph infection that wasn't treated for six months; others were transferred under the monitor's nose to prisons not covered by the settlement.

In 1999, after the suicide of another Attica inmate under conditions almost identical to those involving Inmate A, a court expert reported that "no substantively meaningful improvement" had occurred. This was about 19 years after the filing of the suit pertaining to inmate care at Attica. By 2002, when advocates decided to take their case against corrections officials systemwide, half of prison suicides were occurring in isolated confinement - and Attica's count was among the highest.

Given a cooperative state bureaucracy with an enlightened view of mental health care, advocates believe that the outcome in the most recent case - Disability Advocates Inc. v. Office of Mental Health - will be different from the outcome in other cases. Maybe. Maybe not. The track record isn't good.

Without legislation, I fear that someone else may be writing this very article in a decade or two. Or - denied progress reports under a confidentiality clause that keeps them under wraps - maybe she won't.

Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-oppfe065201084may06,0,3547153,print.story

Posted by lois at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)

NJ: State panel says drug courts work

State panel says drug courts work
Sunday, May 6, 2007

By LAWRENCE AARON
RECORD COLUMNIST

NEW JERSEY'S prison population has declined by thousands in the past few years, a good sign that court-managed drug diversion programs are paying off. They have been so effective that the state's Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing wants to see them expanded.

The drug court's diversion programs has kept 6,700 non-violent offenders from having to serve time behind bars since the mid-Nineties. Were it not for the hands-on approach of teams of probation officers, counselors and judges, most of them would be added to the present population of 23,000 inmates being held in the Department of Corrections prison facilities. The strict court-managed monitoring regulates every aspect of the participant's daily life -- down to his curfew. Only 14 percent get rearrested for new offenses, recent drug court figures show.

In a report issued Friday, the New Jersey Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing recommends reshaping the statutory foundation so that more defendants get access to drug courts. The recommendation would allow defendants with two or more prior third-degree convictions to be eligible for the special probation status that determines who can join the diversion program.

Most often prison-reform advocates push cost savings as a rationale for diversion programs like drug courts. But you can't ignore the blossoming of human potential: That's priceless. Chronic alcohol and drug abusers get sober, begin working steadily and connect with society. Lives are salvaged and the cost of running state prisons is reduced.

The Department of Corrections' new budget estimates spending $34,600 per inmate. The savings potential could be significant: Theoretically every 50 inmates kept out of jail for the next year would represent a savings of about $1.7 million.

State court administrators say more than 6,700 non-violent drug-addicted adult offenders were sentenced to drug court rather than being incarcerated since 1996, when New Jersey started its pilot program. Passaic was among the first. Bergen's started in 2002. Now all counties have access to drug courts.

"Right now it is a very restrictive statute," said Ben Barlyn, the sentencing review commission's executive director. "One of our proposals is to expand eligibility for certain defendants whose backgrounds would make them [suitable] for treatment."

By proposing to expand eligibility, the commission fulfills its mission to examine the fairness of sentencing guidelines that contribute to runaway prison population growth.

In spite of the best efforts of many states to reduce inmate populations through more enlightened sentencing, reentry and diversion programs, the criminal justice system has been unable to stem the tide of incarceration.

In a review of programs nationwide, the prison reform advocacy group, The Sentencing Project, reported that in spite of diversion programs being adopted in 22 states the nation's prison population overall continued growing by 7 percent from 2000 to 2005. The group recommends a multifaceted approach that includes sentencing alternatives to incarceration -- alternatives like New Jersey drug courts -- and expanded drug and alcohol treatment programs.

The organization also recommends better funding for social services to help ex-offenders with day-to-day living and mental health issues that trap them in prison's revolving door.

The drug court diversions seem to be paying off in New Jersey, where the population of men and women behind bars dropped by 4,000 inmates in DOC institutions since 2004. So far so good, but many other sentencing issues must be reformed.

For New Jersey to stay on course, the Commission to Review Criminal Sentencing needs more staff and increased funding so that whatever legislation is needed to implement reforms gets in the legislative pipeline quickly.

The commission's only other recommendation in its three-and-a-half-year existence was a proposal to reduce the size of school drug zones because in urbanized New Jersey they are overly punitive. The commission's good intentions lose value if reforms come at the present snail's pace of only once a year. Instead the staff should be equipped to hand over a packet of reforms for the Legislature to work on in every legislative session.

That's the only way to make a permanent difference in the epidemic rate of incarceration.
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk5JmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3MTI3OTE4

Posted by lois at 12:19 AM | Comments (0)

Delaware: Lawmakers may block group home near Del. City

Lawmakers may block group home near Del. City

By PATRICK JACKSON, The News Journal
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007

DOVER (Delaware)-- Lawmakers say there's a good chance they will step in to block the establishment of a group home at the Governor Bacon Health Center near Delaware City for developmentally disabled people who exhibit sexually offensive behavior before the facility's scheduled June 1 opening.

How the General Assembly would do that is uncertain, but House Majority Leader Richard Cathcart said lawmakers will act next week before going on a two-week break to let the Joint Finance Committee start its rewrite of Gov. Ruth Ann Minner's $3.24 billion operating budget for fiscal 2008.

"I think Sen. [James] Vaughn and I are both upset that this is going forward and that the administration isn't listening to the concerns of the citizens in Delaware City," said Cathcart, R-Middletown, whose district includes Delaware City. "We need to act quickly because it's supposed to open June 1, but we'll see."

Secretary of Health and Social Services Vincent Meconi said lawmakers should move carefully when it comes to taking action on the department's plan because it might open the state up for a lawsuit.

"We have to defend a lot of lawsuits in this department," he said. "But I think we'd have a hard time defending a suit saying that we discriminated against these people by saying they couldn't have a group home there. ... That's why I urged the [Joint Bond Bill] committee to move very carefully with this."

Meconi said the pilot program would provide services for people who have demonstrated the offensive behaviors, which can include masturbating in public and offensive touching. The individuals have not faced criminal charges because they lack the mental capacity to realize their actions are wrong.

Meconi told the committee that none of the initial five people in the pilot program are on criminal sex offender lists.

"When I was a legislator, I was in their place," he said. "I understand their concerns. But if we move it, there will be another upset state senator and representative. ... If they give this a chance, I think they'll find that a lot of these objections go away after this has been open for a year and nothing bad has happened."

But that didn't satisfy citizens from Delaware City who showed up at the Bond Bill Committee's Thursday meeting to put their objections on the record.

Nor did it assuage Vaughn, D-Clayton, who weighed in through a letter read by Richard Carter, the Senate Democrats' chief of staff. Vaughn said he supports the need for providing services to the developmentally disabled, but he said the state should explore using different locations.

Vaughn said Governor Bacon Health Center is a bad location because of its proximity to Fort DuPont State Park and to Delaware City.

"If there were no other locations in the state where this type of facility could be located so as to greatly minimize any risks to the surrounding area, the department could make a good case that locating it at Governor Bacon Health Center is necessary," Vaughn wrote. "This is not the case. It could be located at Stockley Center or at the Delaware Psychiatric Center on the grounds of the department's Herman M. Holloway Sr. Campus in New Castle."

Rita Marocco, a Delaware City resident and executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness-Delaware, said her group, which operates 57 group homes around the state, objects to the plan because placing people who exhibit sexually offensive behaviors in proximity to the town and park runs counter to one of the group's placement rules.

"We ask if we would want to live in the same neighborhood as the home," she said.

Meconi said he was stung by the opposition of an advocacy group, and lawmakers said those objections scored points with them.

"When they're saying they have a problem, it bothers me," said Sen. Robert Venables, D-Laurel. "I think a lot of members on the committee have problems with this. I wouldn't be surprised to see [lawmakers] do something about this."

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070511/NEWS/70511
0358/1006/NEWS

Posted by lois at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)

CA: Health czar files motion to curb those who helped create his job.

Inmate rights lawyers are a burden, Sillen says

Health czar files motion to curb those who helped create his job.

By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau

Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, May 11, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A4

The state prison medical care czar filed a legal motion Thursday that seeks to curtail the activities of the inmate rights lawyers who brought the class-action lawsuit that created his office in the first place.
Federal medical care receiver Robert Sillen said the power of the plaintiffs' lawyers to monitor the ongoing case has imposed a burden on his ability to do his job.

"They go around with all those inspections and they create a tremendous amount of work for my staff," Sillen said about the attorneys from the Prison Law Office in San Rafael. "And the results of that work are questionable, both in terms of accuracy and validity, and in terms of any kind of new information."
Don Specter, the directing attorney of the state's most prominent inmate rights law firm, shot back that his office will contest Sillen's effort to cut back the monitoring power it got from federal Judge Thelton Henderson in the case it filed in 2001 and won in a negotiated settlement with the state in 2002. Sillen's complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
"We have an obligation to protect and defend the rights of our clients," Specter said. "He is now running the show. It's our obligation to make sure he is acting in the best interests of our clients. We can't do that if we don't have access to information about how the prisoners are being treated."
Also Thursday, Sillen filed a "plan of action" that he said will provide the road map to bringing prison medical care up to constitutional standards.
In listing "barriers" to carrying out the plan successfully, Sillen identified Assembly Bill 900 -- the $7.9 billion prison construction and rehabilitation plan approved by the Legislature and signed last week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sillen declined in an interview to elaborate, saying that he would provide details next week in another filing with the court.
Specter characterized the plan as "a failure," largely because it contained no benchmarks by which the receiver's progress could be measured. Specter also suggested that the modification order sought by Sillen to change details of the 2002 settlement represented a rollback from the gains his office attained for inmates.
"He wants to be completely free to modify policies and procedures any way he wants to, without consulting with the court or the parties," Specter said. "It's another way of eliminating accountability and transparency, and it's antithetical to the goals Judge Henderson expressed."
"It's the same thing with his suggestion that our activities be curtailed," Specter added.
In biting the legal hands that led to the creation of the receivership, Sillen added to the battles he has waged since Henderson appointed him a little more than a year ago. He also has scrapped with state agencies over hiring and drug testing, over contracting and appointments, and with private firms over pharmacy and medical services contracts for inmates.
Sillen's outside counsel, Martin H. Dodd of San Francisco, said in Thursday's filing that Prison Law Office lawyers -- empowered by Henderson -- spend days at a time on their visits to correctional facilities to monitor medical care and that they request "hundreds of pages of documents" per trip. He said their requests for medical information on individual inmates "have grown ever more numerous," eating up prison staff time.
The inmate rights lawyers "have undoubtedly made important contributions to the case," the motion said. But they "have not been empowered to monitor the Receivership." Moreover, the motion said, the plaintiffs' monitoring efforts "are now substantially less important with the Receivership in place."
In place of the Prison Law Office, the receiver is asking the court to install the Office of the Inspector General as the new monitor over the case.
Sillen said, "My hat is off to the PLO. They're good people. They have good hearts. They clearly initiated these lawsuits. But we're just in a different phase. Their role, as far as I'm concerned, needs to change."
Specter said the charge that his office is a burden "is the same response we've received from the beginning of time from every prison official we've brought suit against." He said he was "very surprised to hear that from the receiver."
As for the "plan of action," Sillen's 50-page report to the court laid out what he viewed as a road map to upgrade prison medical care by hiring more clinicians, organizing them into "crisis response teams" working under regional managers, building a computerized medical record tracking system, overhauling spending and accounting practices, and continuing to establish new pilot programs.
"The plan is to recruit and hire a sufficient number and types of qualified individuals that will enable us to provide constitutional access and quality of care," Sillen said.
In ruling prison medical care unconstitutional in 2005, Henderson found about one inmate a week dying due to medical neglect. Sillen said he believes the system has since stabilized. "I think we have a finger in the dike at this point in time," he said. "It hasn't gotten any worse."
Specter, the inmate rights lawyer, said there's really no way to know for sure. "There's nothing to measure him by," he said.

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/175588.html

Posted by lois at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)

Maine: New Prison financed by a county and leased to the state

"Emery, a Republican, said building a new prison in Washington County "makes perfect sense" and said financing could be done in various ways. The state could build and own the prison, he said. "But we believe it would be better to have the Washington County Development Authority raise the money to build the facility, and the state could lease it back," Emery said. He also said the prison could be staffed by state-employed prison guards or by a private company."

http://bangordailynews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=149702&zoneid=500

Cutler lawmaker proposes new prison in eastern Maine
By The Associated Press
Friday, May 11, 2007 - Bangor Daily News

AUGUSTA ‹ Gov. John Baldacci will meet with a state legislator from Cutler and corrections officials to discuss the lawmaker¹s proposal to build a new prison in Washington County, a spokesman for the governor said Thursday.

"At this point, the governor is looking at every option to ease the crowding," Baldacci spokesman David Farmer said. No date for the meeting between Baldacci and Rep. Ian Emery had been set as of Thursday afternoon. State Sen. Kevin Raye, R-Perry, also is invited.

Maine¹s prisons and correctional facilities were 245 inmates over capacity Thursday, according to corrections officials. Interim steps are being taken to defuse what Commissioner Martin Magnusson has called a dangerous situation for inmates as well as corrections officers.

Some inmates have been sleeping on floors, and guards have been working double shifts as a result of the crowding.

Some inmates are being housed in county jails. A six-member committee created by the Legislature is meeting until mid-May with corrections officials to discuss other temporary solutions.

Emery, a Republican, said building a new prison in Washington County "makes perfect sense" and said financing could be done in various ways. The state could build and own the prison, he said.

"But we believe it would be better to have the Washington County Development Authority raise the money to build the facility, and the state could lease it back," Emery said. He also said the prison could be staffed by state-employed prison guards or by a private company.

"Other states are using private prison companies to handle their overloads with good success," he said.

Maine has another prison in Washington County. The medium-minimum security Downeast Correctional Facility, located at the former Bucks Harbor Air Force Station in Machiasport, was established by the Legislature in September 1984.

In a report to a legislative committee last month, Magnusson listed several options to ease crowding, including using a vacant dorm at the minimum-security Charleston Correctional Facility and putting more women offenders in transitional housing to provide additional space.

Baldacci was not taking a position on Emery¹s idea before hearing more details, said Farmer.

"The question is whether it¹s something doable, reasonable, and is there money to do it," Farmer said. "But we do have a serious situation with crowding and we¹ll have to see exactly what he¹s proposing."

Posted by lois at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2007

CCR RELEASES REPORT DOCUMENTING UNNECESSARY JAIL EXPANSION IN UPSTATE AND SUBURBAN NEW YORK

This posting contains an Newday article, the URL for the report and the CCR Press Release

Jail construction getting more costly

BY MICHAEL AMON
michael.amon@newsday.com

May 8, 2007, 9:27 PM EDT

Costly jail construction has spiked 20 percent on Long Island and upstate in the last decade, a trend fueled in part by a state agency that has forced communities to build detention centers against local opposition, according to a report released Tuesday.

By the end of 2007, more than 6,000 jail beds will have been added in 30 counties at a cost of more than $1 billion, including the controversial $230-million expansion of the Suffolk jail in Yaphank, according to the report by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in New York City.

Almost all of the new construction, the report said, has been mandated by the state Commission of Correction, which has oversight of jail construction and has used its power to force counties to expand local jails more frequently in the past decade.

The burst in construction comes as the crime rate has decreased by more than 30 percent and the prison population has dropped by 13 percent on Long Island and upstate during the same period, the report said. The report did not examine New York City, where incarceration trends differ from the rest of the state.

"Building jail beds is the most costly thing that a county can do ... ," said Dana Kaplan, the author of the report and a fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It should be the last possible solution."

John Caher, a spokesman for the commission, said it mandates construction to protect inmate safety and to reduce chronic overcrowding -- a politically unpopular but necessary function that counties often won't do on their own.

"We don't require people to build new jails just for fun," Caher said.

The report noted, however, that the jail population has increased by less than 2 percent since 1997, even as thousands of new jail beds were being added.

The Yaphank jail expansion will add nearly 700 jail beds to Suffolk's inmate capacity and will be one of the most expensive capital projects in county history. It was opposed by some lawmakers and community groups.

But the county budgeted most of the money after the commission exercised its main source of power -- denying the "variances" giving jails the right to ease crowding by putting two prisoners in the same cell. Without variances, Suffolk was forced to send some inmates to jails in other jurisdictions, costing millions of dollars.

Construction on the jail is scheduled to begin April 17, 2008.

"The Commission of Corrections holds all the cards," Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said. "We really do feel like we have a gun to our head."

The report called on the commission and Suffolk to reduce the inmate population by putting the mentally ill -- who make up as much as 16 percent of the county's prisoners -- in treatment centers or safe houses, while also decreasing the number of inmates jailed on minor offenses.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
Read the report: http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/docs/CCR_NYS_Jail_Report.pdf
CCR RELEASES REPORT DOCUMENTING UNNECESSARY JAIL EXPANSION IN UPSTATE AND SUBURBAN NEW YORK

JAIL EXPANSION HAS SEVERE ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS FOR LOCAL MUNICIPALITIES

Synopsis

A report released on May 8, 2007 by the Center for Constitutional Rights
(CCR) on the expansion of jails in upstate and suburban New York finds that the recent increase in jail expansion is most often driven by the wishes of a little-known state agency the State Commission of Corrections (SCOC) rather than the needs and wishes of local municipalities.

The jail expansion also comes at a time when the overall need for correctional space in New York State is decreasing, which raises questions about the motivation behind building new jails or expanding existing ones.

Authored by Dana Kaplan, an Open Society Institute Soros Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, the report "Impacts of Jail Expansion in New York State: A Hidden Burden" finds that:

€ Between 1999 and 2006, the New York state prison population had dropped from 71,000 to 62,928 people, a decrease of 8 percent in less than a decade. Despite the decrease in the prison population, the combined capacity of jails in upstate and suburban New York increased by 20 percent to a total of 19,984 beds in 2006, with 6,000 more beds due to be added by the end of 2007. € Jail construction has cost counties an estimated $1 billion, raising local property taxes in some instances as much as 40 percent and diverting money away from social services. € The growth in the number of people incarcerated in jails has not been caused by an increase in crime or by an increase in population-rather, it has been caused by the expansion mandates issued by the SCOC and new arrest and detention policies, including arrest policies for low-level offenses and misdemeanors; a rising number of mentally ill people in jail; system inefficiencies; and the use of local jails to hold those detained by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

"The mandate from the State Commission of Corrections for counties to build new jail space is costing New Yorkers an estimated $1 billion, and their only return is the risk of environmental degradation, higher taxes, and less funding for other programs and services," said the report's author Dana Kaplan. "The Commission should redirect its energy to working with counties to ensure that local jails abide by constitutional standards and do not hold people unnecessarily, rather than building more needless correctional space that does not make New York any safer."

The State Commission of Corrections is a state agency appointed by the governor that has the power to mandate the size and timeline of local jail construction and also to deal financial penalties to counties that do not comply with its mandates. Despite mandating multi-million dollar projects, it provides no financial assistance to counties building new jails.

The report documents some of the costs of the SCOC's jail expansion mandates to upstate and suburban New York communities. For example:

€ In Ulster County, property taxes have risen 40 percent due to the high costs of building a new jail, which came in with a final price tag of $95.2 million, more than $20 million over the initially projected cost.
€ In Tompkins County, the SCOC pressured county officials to expand their 73-bed jail to a size far greater than what the County Legislature projected was required. When county officials voted to pursue alternatives to incarceration rather than build a larger jail, the SCOC threatened to punish the county. The county did not build a new jail, but SCOC revoked a variance that had allowed the county to maintain its current jail population, which forced the county to spend money to board a percentage of its prisoners in neighboring counties.

Posted by lois at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Will Harrell Named Ombudsman for Texas Youth

May 11, 2007
Civil Liberties Advocate Named Ombudsman for Texas Youth
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, May 10 — A leading civil liberties advocate was named Thursday as the first ombudsman of the Texas Youth Commission, after a sexual abuse scandal.

The appointee, Will Harrell, has been the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas for the last seven years. He will serve as the commission’s acting independent watchdog until final passage of a bill making its way through the Texas Legislature, said Jay Kimbrough, the commission’s conservator in Austin.

The board and top officials of the agency were ousted after disclosures in February that supervisors had ignored reports that two men who were administrators at the West Texas State School in Pyote had had sexual contact with boys held there, and that rapes and beatings had also gone unpunished at other facilities. Criminal investigations and arrests have since followed.

“I’ll be the advocate for the children and their families, investigate the handling of complaints, and develop broader policy recommendations,” said Mr. Harrell, 40, a lawyer, who will take a leave of absence from the Civil Liberties Union. He has already been involved in reforms at the youth commission, including serving on a board to review the sentences of the approximately 4,700 juveniles in custody.

A bill to overhaul the commission and provide for an oversight panel won unanimous approval in the State Senate last month, and a House version passed unanimously on Monday. Now conferees from both chambers are trying to resolve differences, including whether youths convicted of misdemeanors should be spared confinement in detention centers.

Mr. Harrell’s appointment, at a salary yet to be set, would become permanent with enactment of the measure.

Mr. Kimbrough, a former deputy state attorney general and director of homeland security named by Gov. Rick Perry to oversee reform of the commission, called Mr. Harrell a natural choice for ombudsman.

“Will Harrell reached out to help me the first day I took over the reins of the Youth Commission,” Mr. Kimbrough said. “He has continually demonstrated his compassion for the kids.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/us/11youth.html

Posted by lois at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

City Tests Idea of Building Apartments by Brooklyn Jail

May 11, 2007
City Tests Idea of Building Apartments by Brooklyn Jail
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

City officials have devised what may be the ultimate test of demand for housing in New York: They are asking developers if they want to build apartments pressed up on the side of the Brooklyn House of Detention.

For more than a year, officials at the Department of Correction have been considering whether to add stores and restaurants to the street level of the jail, which they plan to expand and reopen. But now they are floating the idea of a bigger redevelopment that could include residential and commercial buildings sandwiching the enlarged jail.

Diagrams in city documents suggest that one or two buildings, each 10 to 15 stories tall, could abut the jail, which closed in 2003. City officials will decide whether those buildings would contain apartments, hotel rooms or offices after fielding responses from developers over the next 10 weeks.

“There’s no preference for residential, but we certainly wanted to test the market to see what the developers thought,” said Jennifer K. Friedman, a vice president in the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which is soliciting the responses.

But Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, said he believed people were so hungry for living space in Downtown Brooklyn that they would be willing to rent or buy homes right next to the jail.

“We’re hot as a pistol right now,” he said.

Mr. Markowitz cited the rash of condominium construction nearby as evidence that the detention center has not deterred development. If the Correction Department is going to reopen the jail, local residents would prefer that it be as obscure as possible, he said.

“If we built bookend buildings, we could almost mask the House of Detention,” Mr. Markowitz said.

Turning the jail, which opened in 1956, into a mixed-use complex would fill a gap that “still destroys the tapestry of Atlantic Avenue and really separates it from east to west,” Mr. Markowitz said.

The jail sits in the middle of a block bounded by Atlantic Avenue, State and Smith Streets and Boerum Place. The Correction Department plans to nearly double the jail’s capacity of 760 beds by adding an adjoining structure on State Street that would serve as its new entrance.

The city is seeking a developer interested in supervising the expansion and renovation of the jail and in owning the retail space on the street level of the complex, as well as the new residential or commercial buildings.

Robert Maruca, a deputy correction commissioner, said he understood that there might be trepidation about having inmates on the other side of one’s bedroom wall.

“We had to get comfortable with it from a security perspective,” Mr. Maruca said. “We’re confident that we can design in the right type of separation and orient the nonjail buildings away from the jails.”

Indeed, the city’s solicitation specifies that the apartment dwellers, who may have to pay thousands of dollars a month to live within a few feet of occupied cells, would not have a front-row look at life behind bars.

The redesigned detention center “will ensure that inmates and city personnel should not be able to view into the new residential and/or commercial developments nor should the occupants of the development parcels be able to view into the jail,” it states.

For prospective renters or buyers, good value will trump fear in the end, said Highlyann Krasnow, executive vice president at the Developers Group, a real estate brokerage firm.

“Depending on the purchase price, people would consider it because the location is fantastic,” Ms. Krasnow said. “There’s condos selling a block away, half a block away for well over $1 million, even $2 million.”

She added that the looming presence of more than 1,400 inmates would not be as much of a concern to neighborhood residents as the potential impact on traffic and parking. “Welcome to New York,” she said. “We don’t care about jails. We just care about parking.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/nyregion/11jail.html?pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times: "In the Big House ... Just Visiting"

May 11, 2007
In the Big House ... Just Visiting
By MAURA J. CASEY, NY Times
May 11, 2007

A FEW blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a massive, crumbling building rises up like a medieval castle over blocks of modest, middle-class homes mixed with brownstones. Complete with ivy-covered walls, a tower and corner battlements, it casts a forbidding shadow over the city — as it was meant to. Built in 1829, this hulking pile of stone was Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, a cautionary landmark for nearly a century and a half, the place nobody wanted to go.

Now, people are paying to get in.

Almost 150,000 tourists passed through the forbidding gates of Eastern State last year — into a dark hallway, through a gift shop that has a subterranean feel and down dusty corridors lined by crumbling walls. With audio tour guides at their ears, they go through cellblocks; gaze at the mess halls, hospital and prison chapel; climb into a guard tower; and pace in the exercise yard. They peer into the cells of death row.

Teenagers giggle tentatively; children are subdued; adults exhibit a kind of nervous relief, never happier to be law-abiding citizens. But the paying customers keep coming. And Eastern State is just one of three dozen prisons and jails now collectively drawing millions of visitors each year around the country.

From Maui to Louisiana, crowds tread dark passages where heavy doors still slam shut with ringing finality — though most of these eerily evocative tourist attractions no longer actually house convicts. Prisons proudly display cells once inhabited by famous criminals. Some show off gallows or an electric chair.

There is even a proposal to open a museum at Sing Sing in Ossining, N.Y., though, so far, plans have been stymied by the cost and by doubts in some quarters about the wisdom of opening the grounds of a working maximum security prison.

In a handful of prisons, guests are actually paying to stay over — though in much-improved quarters. In Boston, the 1851 Charles Street Prison on Beacon Hill has been remodeled into a hotel, the Liberty, scheduled to open this summer with vestiges of jail cells in the lobby and bars on several of the windows. Abroad, buildings that have served as prisons and are now hotels can be found in Amsterdam, Istanbul and Oxford, England.

Whether called correctional institutions or the clink, prisons hold an enduring fascination. They’ve been the subject of songs, films and TV series. They inspire pity and even empathy; haven’t most of us felt imprisoned at one time or another, or longed for liberation? Still, in the beginning, the public’s interest in sampling the atmosphere of the Big House took just about everyone by surprise.

In 1971 the National Park Service opened the decaying remains of Alcatraz, the notorious maximum-security prison on an island in San Francisco Bay, to visitors under a five-year plan, on the assumption that interest would peter out. It soon became one of the biggest tourist attractions in Northern California and has remained open ever since, with boats from San Francisco carrying passengers over for tours.

The park service has just completed a major renovation, expanding Alcatraz’s exhibits and facilities to keep up with more than a million visitors a year.

Soon states and cities with their own decaying former prisons — usually fortresslike piles of stone with no obvious use — began to wonder if they could turn these burdens into moneymakers. At the same time, preservationists became advocates for saving prisons from the wrecking ball. Thus, the trend was born; prisons are now open to the curious — for the price of a ticket.

ON a cloudy Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia, several people dodged raindrops and walked through the gate at Eastern State. Most were tourists, but two lived nearby, entitled to the free membership that Eastern State offers neighbors. Their self-guided audio tour, following the pattern set at Alcatraz, included narratives from former prisoners and guards.

When it opened, the visitors were told, Eastern State was seen as a model of modernity and enlightenment. It had running water, central heat and flush toilets in individual cells — more than 20 years before the White House had modern plumbing.

Eastern State also followed an 1820s reformist theory about correction, which posited that solitude was the path to rehabilitation. All prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for their entire sentences to reflect on their crimes. To maintain the quiet, guards even put socks over their shoes to muffle their footsteps.

Although some social commentators, including Charles Dickens, thought the lack of human contact would drive most prisoners insane, Eastern State was hugely influential, and 300 prisons on five continents were built based on its model, according to museum officials.

In one of the blocks, the original cells are on display, each with a heavy oak door and a small, round window in the ceiling called “the eye of God,” through which light streams in. Each cell has its own tiny exercise yard. Ceilings curve upward like the arches of a church.

Eventually, attitudes about punishment caught up with the plumbing. After 1900, Eastern State was mostly a typical prison on the 20th-century model. It closed in 1971, and tours began in the mid-1980s.

Much has been forgiven. There, as at Alcatraz, both ex-prisoners and former guards speak on the recordings that visitors hear as they walk through the prison. The two groups even mingle at reunions.

The experiences of two former inmates suggest that even in the middle of the 20th century, life behind the walls of Eastern State was a mixture of the macabre and mundane.

Willie L. Smith, now a sprightly 80-year-old, was incarcerated at Eastern State beginning in 1947, for “20 years, 8 months and 29 days,” as he precisely recalls, for a murder he says he did not commit.

“There was always killing in there,” Mr. Smith said. “Everybody had a knife. If you wanted to do a shank you could,” he said of the inmates’ practice of making weapons.

Yet both he and Robert Moore, who served a little more than 11 years beginning in 1958 for armed robbery, remembered small triumphs. Mr. Smith recalled pitching two no-hitters on a prison team. Mr. Moore said he learned to play chess and didn’t lose a game during a four-year period before he was released. He also remembered, with satisfaction, getting up in the middle of one winter night to help work on the prison central heating system when it malfunctioned. When he was done with the repairs, “it was so hot you could heat a cup of coffee” on the prison radiators, Mr. Moore said.

Mr. Smith explained with a laugh that he helped build several dozen high-security cells, only to find himself later assigned to one for 90 days for breaking the rules.

FROM state to state, each prison tour vies for its share of attention. In Maui, there’s Hale Paahao, the “stuck in irons house, ” with its shackles and walls made of a mix of coral and stone. At the Old Jail Museum in Jim Thorpe, Pa., visitors can view a replica of a gallows on which four people were hanged at once. At the Authentic Old Jail Museum in St. Augustine, Fla., a doorway opens to a grim cell with no windows or mattress.

At the Crime and Punishment Museum in Ashburn, Ga., visitors can eat lunch at the Last Meal Cafe, which has, the museum’s Web site proclaims, “meals to die for.”

Escapes and escape attempts are a common theme. Alcatraz had more than its share: 34 men tried to flee during 14 escape attempts, visitors are told, including two who tried to escape twice. Six were shot, 23 were recaptured, at least 2 drowned.

Three men who broke free in 1962 were never seen again, and their elaborate jail break inspired the movie, “Escape from Alcatraz,” starring Clint Eastwood. The prisoners left lifelike dummies in their beds, complete with human hair, the better to fool the guards. The cell they fled, with replicas of the dummies, is on the Alcatraz tour. Since there’s no record of anyone surviving the chilly waters and deadly rip currents around the Rock, as inmates called Alcatraz, it is believed that the men drowned.

At Eastern State, a display about an almost comical 1945 escape attempt by 11 men, complete with a 90-foot-long tunnel, is backed up with an archaeological dig.

Eastern State also has some other unusual details. A bronze plaque on one wall memorializes inmates who were released to serve in World War I, hauntingly listing only their numbers and not their names. And an art exhibit commemorates the 30-odd cats that lived in the building and eventually had the run of the place when the prison closed.

In just about every prison tour, there seems to be at least one poster child whose bad behavior helps bolster ticket sales, and the more notorious, the better. Al Capone is featured at Eastern State. The Wyoming Territorial Prison Museum in Laramie, Wyo., which gets 20,000 visitors a year, highlights the fact that Butch Cassidy was imprisoned there for stealing horses.

Alcatraz has a particularly star-studded roster. It housed not only Capone, but Machine Gun Kelly and Robert Stroud, the famous Birdman who, according to the tour, was far more surly and manipulative than Burt Lancaster’s character in the 1962 film “The Birdman of Alcatraz.”

People involved with the nation’s prison tours have their own theories about why they are so appealing.

“Everyone has a macabre interest in what could occur if you don’t stay on the right side of the law,” said Nicholette Phelps, director of visitor programs at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which includes Alcatraz. “We always think of what happens on the other side of that gate.”

Julie Smith, the business manager of the Old Prison Museum in Deer Lodge, Mont., which has about 45,000 visitors a year, thinks people are drawn by “the shock and horror” of the way inmates lived.

“It’s like going by a car accident,” she said. “You can’t help but look.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY (22nd Street and Fairmont Avenue, Philadelphia; 215-236-3300; www.easternstate.org) is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily from April through November and until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays in June, July and August. Admission is $9; ages 7 to 12, $4. Children under 7 are not admitted.

For information on Alcatraz, consult the Web site of the National Park Service (www.nps.gov/alca). There is no entrance fee, but tickets for the ferry there ($21.75) must be purchased through Alcatraz Cruises (415-981-7625; www.alcatrazcruises.com). The ferry leaves from Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, where there is a ticket booth, although advance purchase is strongly recommended. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/travel/escapes/11prison.1.html

Posted by lois at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Patrick unveils anticrime plan

"Also yesterday, Salvatore F. DiMasi, House speaker, said lawmakers should consider eliminating mandatory minimum sentences as part of any comprehensive plan to reduce crime.

"Mandatory minimum sentences aren't working, and we're paying for the mistakes we made in the past," said DiMasi. "We need to do more. Young people need to have a chance in life to turn away from the streets, not turn to the streets."

Critics, including Patrick and Senate President Therese Murray, argue that mandatory sentences make it less likely that prisoners will be able to rejoin society successfully once they are freed because they are barred from participating in work release, rehabilitation, or furlough programs. "

Proposal has funds for 70 new Hub police
Boston Globe
By Andrea Estes, Globe Staff | May 11, 2007

Governor Deval Patrick unveiled a $15 million statewide anticrime plan yesterday that includes money to help put 70 new police officers on Boston streets in July.

The initiative, announced at a news conference with legislative leaders, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and members of his new anticrime council, includes $11 million in community safety grants and $4 million to hire and train new police officers.

The funding is "the right approach to help communities deal with the gun and gang violence that may occur this summer and that we all pray won't," Patrick said.

Boston will receive at least $1.4 million to help pay for new police officers, but officials said that amount could increase. The city plans to hire officers from other departments so they won't have to go through a lengthy training program at the city's police academy.

In April, Patrick pledged $900,000 to accelerate the hiring of police officers in Boston, money that will be supplemented by the funding announced yesterday.

The $15 million was included in an $88.9 million fiscal 2007 supplemental budget request Patrick filed with the Legislature -- a request legislative leaders pledged to approve quickly.

The community safety funds, or Shannon grants, will be awarded to communities based on crime rates, the percentage of the population between ages 15 and 19, and the number of young homicide victims. The money will be used to fund sur veillance, patrolling of crime hot spots, afterschool programs, tutoring, drug treatment, and job training.

"Gang-impacted communities -- indeed all communities suffering from the spike in youth violence will benefit from the wisdom in this supplemental budget," said Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, cochairman of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. "The Shannon grant program has already created unique and proven-successful partnerships between police and community groups that have reduced crime in some of our most dangerous cities."

The governor's initial budget proposal for next year did not include money for the Shannon grant program, which the Legislature created last year to combat gang violence in urban areas. The House, however, restored funding for the program late last month.

Yesterday, Patrick said he agreed to seek immediate funding for the grants after lawmakers helped him "appreciate just how much support and energy there has been in the past for the Shannon program. Once I understood the impact and the interest in that approach . . . my view was, 'Why wait until July? Why not do it right now?' "

Also yesterday, Salvatore F. DiMasi, House speaker, said lawmakers should consider eliminating mandatory minimum sentences as part of any comprehensive plan to reduce crime.

"Mandatory minimum sentences aren't working, and we're paying for the mistakes we made in the past," said DiMasi. "We need to do more. Young people need to have a chance in life to turn away from the streets, not turn to the streets."

Critics, including Patrick and Senate President Therese Murray, argue that mandatory sentences make it less likely that prisoners will be able to rejoin society successfully once they are freed because they are barred from participating in work release, rehabilitation, or furlough programs. Also, once prisoners serving mandatory sentences are released, they are sent back to society unsupervised.

Patrick said yesterday that he hopes the anticrime council, which met for the first time yesterday, will look at ways to change the state's mandatory sentencing laws -- which were passed in the 1990s as a response to the perceived leniency on some drug- and gun-related crimes.
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/05/11/patrick_unveils_anticrime_plan?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Juvenile Injustice

May 11, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Juvenile Injustice

The United States made a disastrous miscalculation when it started automatically trying youthful offenders as adults instead of handling them through the juvenile courts. Prosecutors argued that the policy would get violent predators off the streets and deter further crime. But a new federally backed study shows that juveniles who do time as adults later commit more violent crime than those who are handled through the juvenile courts.

The study, published last month in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was produced by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, an independent research group with close ties to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After an exhaustive survey of the literature, the group determined that the practice of transferring children into adult courts was counterproductive, actually creating more crime than it cured.

A related and even more disturbing study by Campaign for Youth Justice in Washington finds that the majority of the more than 200,000 children a year who are treated as adults under the law come before the courts for nonviolent offenses that could be easily and more effectively dealt with at the juvenile court level.

Examples include a 17-year-old first-time offender charged with robbery after stealing another student’s gym clothes, and another 17-year-old who violated his probation by stealing a neighbor’s bicycle. Many of these young nonviolent offenders are held in adult prisons for months or even years.

The laws also are not equally applied. Youths of color, who typically go to court with inadequate legal counsel, account for three out of every four young people admitted to adult prison.

With 40 states allowing or requiring youthful offenders to spend at least some time in adult jails, state legislators all across the country are just waking up to the problems this practice creates. Some states now have pending bills that would stop juveniles from being automatically transferred to adult courts or that would allow them to get back into the juvenile system once the adult court was found to be inappropriate for them.

Given the damage being done to young lives all over the country, the bills can’t pass soon enough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/opinion/11fri2.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

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

Ambitious plan for California's prisons released today

Ambitious plan for California's prisons released today
The federal receiver charged with improving health care for state prisoners released a plan for a decade-long turnaround expected to cost billions.
By Jenifer Warren and Tim Reiterman
Times Staff Writers

11:05 AM PDT, May 10, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO — The federal receiver charged with improving health care for state prisoners today released an ambitious plan for a decade-long turnaround expected to cost billions.

The plan "will eliminate the unconscionable human suffering currently taking place in our prisons, and make California communities safer from disease as inmates revolve in and out of the institutions," receiver Robert Sillen said in filing the 50-page document with the federal court here.

He added that over time, taxpayers will get more for their dollar from a system that experts say had led to an average of one inmate death per week due to medical incompetence or neglect.

"Good care is less costly than bad care," said Sillen, former chief of Santa Clara County's public health and hospital system.

Sillen, 64, was appointed by U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson after the judge concluded that the state was incapable of fixing prison medical care on its own. He has been on the job a year and earns an annual salary and compensation package totaling $650,000.

His plan lays out a standardized healthcare system focused on reducing unnecessary deaths and improving the quality of treatment for the approximately 172,000 Californians in state prison.

Highlights include:

• An "air force" using chartered planes to transport urban doctors to remote prisons several days a week.

• An intensified program to recruit, hire, train and retain essential medical staff, featuring state payment of medical school loans.

• Electronic patient records.

• Improved long-term care for aging and disabled inmates.

• An office of public health to reduce the risk of communicable diseases posed by inmates leaving prison.

• "SWAT teams" of medical staff deployed to prisons experiencing medical crises or unusual inmate deaths.

Sillen did not include a cost estimate for his vision but has made it clear in testimony before the Legislature that he will spend what he deems necessary to raise care to the constitutional standard ordered by the court.

Indeed, his vow to send U.S. marshals to the state treasury and seize whatever funds he needed was among the controversial moments of his debut year.

Lawmakers are divided over his performance, with some praising his in-your-face style and others furious over the prospect of spending billions on inmate healthcare with no legislative control.

Experts say the receivership is the most sweeping undertaking of its kind in history. It is the result of a 2001 class action law suit -- Plata vs. Schwarzenegger -- that found medical care in California's 33 adult prisons violates the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

Sillen's plan is posted at www.cprinc.org, in the Court Materials section under Receiver's Reports.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons11may11,0,7904586.story?coll=la-home-center
jenifer.warren@latimes.com

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

May 10, 2007

RI: "Court Debt and Related Incarceration in Rhode Island"

Just released by the Rhode Island Family Life Center, "Court Debt and Related Incarceration in Rhode Island". This report details the process of assessing and collecting court fees, including the related period of incarceration. It concludes that the most common reason for putting someone in jail in RI is for court debt, and that in many cases that process costs the state more than the individual owed.

http://www.ri-familylifecenter.org/pagetool/reports/CourtDebt.pdf

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

Center for the Study of Political Graphics in LA: POSTERS WANTED! Stop Racism! Stop Police Violence!

POSTERS WANTED! Stop Racism! Stop Police Violence!

Stop Racism! Stop Police Violence! is the slogan on a poster made in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. It could just as easily describe the LAPD assault on peaceful demonstrators and journalists at the immigrants' rights rally on May 1, 2007. Police abuse in Los Angeles has been making headlines for decades.

Police brutality creates national and international crises. And posters document the consistency and severity of the problem. The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) is seeking posters about police abuse for a new online exhibition. From any time and any place. Posters about the May 1 attacks are especially requested.

If your institution, organization or gallery is interested in hosting this or any of CSPG's powerful traveling exhibitions, please contact cspg@politicalgraphics.org

Posters Wanted. No to 53,000 new prison beds!
Protest AB900
AB900 equals 53, 000 new prison beds for California citizens at the cost of 7.4 billion dollars.

This is a call to encourage artists and activists to create new posters protesting the recent deal cut by Legislative leadership and Schwarzenegger to build 53,000 new prison and jail beds.
Social justice groups throughout the state say NO WAY! This is outrageous! It will be totally devastating to communities of color already torn apart by the mass incarceration system in California.

Núñez & the Democrats in Sacramento betrayed the people of California.

In secret meetings with Schwarzenegger they decided to build 53,000 more prison and jail cells.

No public hearings. No public input. No voice for the voters on whether to borrow $7.4 billion to build more prison cells.

Tell Fabian Núñez we don't want to lock up 53,000 more people.

Tell Fabian Núñez we want our tax dollars spent for education, health care & housing not to build and operate 53,000 new prison beds.
Selected digital submissions will be posted on CSPG's website.

New posters submissions may be selected to be a apart of CSPG's Prison Nation: Posters on the Prison Industrial Complex.

The posters in Prison Nation cover many of the critical issues surrounding the system of mass incarceration including: the death penalty, the Three Strikes law, racism, women's right to self defense, access to education and health care, the growing rate of incarceration, slave labor, divestment, privatization, torture, and re-entry into the community. They show the power of art to educate and inspire.

This exhibition is funded in part by the Cultural Affairs Department, City of Los Angeles

Criteria for posters CSPG collects:

1). It must be produced in multiples such as silkscreen, offset, stencil, litho, digital output etc.

2). Please submit both digital and hard copy if possible.

3). The poster must have overt political content. If you would like to to donate posters, please contact

Center for the Study of Political Graphics
8124 West Third Street, Suite 211
Los Angeles, CA 90048-4039

tel: 323.653.4662 · fax: 323.653.6991
email: cspg@politicalgraphics.org

Posted by lois at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

OxyContin Maker Expected to Plead Guilty Today

May 11, 2007
OxyContin Maker Expected to Plead Guilty Today
By BARRY MEIER

ABINGDON, Va., May 10 —The company that makes the narcotic painkiller OxyContin and three current and former executives are expected to plead guilty today in federal court here to criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors and patients about the drug’s risk of addiction and its potential to be abused, federal officials said.

May 11, 2007
OxyContin Maker Expected to Plead Guilty Today
By BARRY MEIER

ABINGDON, Va., May 10 —The company that makes the narcotic painkiller OxyContin and three current and former executives are expected to plead guilty today in federal court here to criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors and patients about the drug’s risk of addiction and its potential to be abused, federal officials said.

To resolve criminal and civil charges related to the drug’s “misbranding”, the parent of Purdue Pharma, the company that markets OxyContin, has agreed to pay more than $600 million in fines, these officials said. That is the third-highest amount ever paid by a drug company in such a case.

Also, in a rare move, three executives of Purdue Pharma, including its president and it top lawyer, are expected to plead guilty today as individuals to misbranding charges, a criminal violation. They have agreed to pay a total of $34.5 million in fines, said these officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because court proceedings have not been completed.

OxyContin is a powerful, long-acting narcotic that provides relief of serious pain for up to 12 hours. Initially, Purdue Pharma contended that OxyContin, because of its time-release formulation, posed a lower threat of abuse and addiction to patients than traditional, shorter-acting painkillers like Percocet or Vicodin.

That claim became the lynchpin of the most aggressive marketing campaign ever undertaken by a pharmaceutical company for such a drug. Just a few years after the drug’s introduction in 1996, annual sales reached $1 billion. Purdue Pharma heavily promoted OxyContin to doctors like general practitioners who had little training in the treatment of serious pain or in recognizing signs of drug abuse in patients.

But both experienced drug abusers and novices, including teenagers, soon discovered that chewing an OxyContin tablet or crushing one and then snorting the powder or injecting it with a needle produced a high as powerful as heroin. By 2000, several parts of the United States, particularly rural areas, began to seeing skyrocketing rates of addiction and crime related to the drug’s use.

Details about the plea agreements are expected to be announced at a press conference at noon today in Roanoke, Va., by John L. Brownlee, the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia. “Misbranding” is a broad statue that makes it a crime to mislabel a drug, fraudulently promote it or market it for an unapproved use.

In a proceeding scheduled this morning in United States District Court in Abingdon, Va., both Purdue Pharma and those executives are expected to acknowledge that the company fraudulently marketed OxyContin for six years as a drug that was less prone to abuse as well as one that also had fewer narcotic side effects.

The time period covered by those expected guilty pleas runs from late 1995, when the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin for sale, to mid-2001, when Purdue Pharma, faced with both public criticism and regulatory scrutiny, dropped its initial marketing claims for the drug.

Federal officials said that internal Purdue Pharma documents show that company officials recognized even before the drug was marketed that they would face stiff resistance from doctors concerned about the potential of a high-powered narcotic like OxyContin to be abused by patients or cause addiction.

As a result, company officials developed a fraudulent marketing campaign designed to promote OxyContin as a time-released drug that was less prone to such problems. OxyContin is made of a long-used narcotic, oxycodone. But unlike other medications like Percocet that also contain the narcotic, OxyContin is pure oxycodone and, because it is a time-released drug, contains its in very high doses. The drug is valuable in treating serious, long-lasting pain.

But to increase the drug’s use, Purdue Pharma and those executives are expected to acknowledge that “with the intent to defraud or mislead” they marketed and promoted OxyContin as a drug that was both less addictive, less subject to abuse and less likely to cause other narcotic side effects than other pain medications.

For instance, when the painkiller was first approved, F.D.A. officials allowed Purdue Pharma to state the time-released of a narcotic like OxyContin “is believed to reduce” its potential to be abused.

But according to federal officials, Purdue sales representatives falsely told doctors that the statement, rather than simply being a theory, meant that OxyContin had a lower potential for addiction or abuse than drugs like Percocet. Among other things, company sales officials were allowed to draw their own fake scientific charts that they then distributed to doctors to support that misleading abuse-related claim, federal officials said.

Between 1995 and 2001, OxyContin produced $2.8 billion in revenue for Purdue Pharma, a closely held company that is based in Stamford, Conn. At one point, it accounted for 90 percent of the company’s sales.

As part of the anticipated plea agreement, Purdue Frederick, a holding company, will plead guilty to a felony charge of misbranding OxyContin. The company has agreed to pay $600 million in criminal and civil penalties, which will be split among federal government and state agencies.

Purdue Pharma will also be required to use some of that money to settle civil lawsuits. The company has also agreed, among other things, to subject itself to independent monitoring.

The three top former and current Purdue Pharma executives pleaded guilty to criminal misdemeanor charges of misbranding, a charge that not require prosecutors to show knowledge of intent. However, the three individuals ran Purdue Pharma during the period in question.

Those executives are Michael Friedman, the company’s president, who agreed to pay $19 million in fines; Howard Udell, its top lawyer, who agreed to pay $8 million; and Dr. Paul Goldenheim, its former medical director, who agreed to pay $7.5 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/business/11drug-web.html?ex=1179460800&en=3e3615b90586f76f&ei=5070

Posted by lois at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2007

CA: Prisons chief apologizes for death chamber debacle

Prisons chief apologizes for death chamber debacle
Edwin Garcia
Marin Independent Journal
Article Launched:05/09/2007 12:17:26 AM PDT
SACRAMENTO - A contrite James Tilton, head of the California prison system, apologized Tuesday for lawmakers being kept in the dark about construction of a new death chamber at San Quentin State Prison.

Tilton, who said his own staff also failed to inform him, pledged to improve the management structure within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and implement better checks and balances on construction projects.

P

"I apologize for this project," Tilton told the Senate Public Safety Committee. "This was one of those issues that should have been communicated to the Legislature."

The informational hearing was ordered by committee chairwoman Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, nearly a month after she and other legislators learned that prison officials had "secretly" ordered construction at a cost just below the threshold that would require notifying lawmakers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the project halted April 20, shortly after he learned of the construction.

But one of Tilton's deputies, Bud Prunty, said that Schwarzenegger aides were briefed on the project early on, leading Romero to conclude "that this goes much higher up." She said the committee will later "discuss at what point it's appropriate to go that far."

The Schwarzenegger administration and prison officials have said the new chamber was being built in response to a December ruling by San Jose-based U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who deemed the existing chamber unconstitutional because it was small, poorly lighted and inadequate for use in lethal injections.

Fogel ordered executions be halted.

But as several officials and a law professor acknowledged at the hearing, the court ruling never ordered a new chamber be built.

"There was a misrepresentation," Romero said, "and that's a polite word I'm using, of the judge's order."

Tilton was aware that a new chamber was in San Quentin's future plans but said he didn't know construction had begun until after it had become public. "There were miscommunications about this project within the department," he said.

Sen. Mike Machado, D-Stockton, expressed doubts about how the prison system's administration, with its damaged credibility, will manage the $7.4 billion prison reform package Schwarzenegger signed into law last week.

"I think it's somewhat inexcusable," Machado said, "for individuals to be taking discretionary action that tends to flaunt the oversight of the Legislature, the transparency to the Legislature."

Tilton vowed to order a complete review of all construction projects and make any necessary changes.

"I need to bring a management structure to my organization that fully understands all the processes, and is sensitive that this department has a huge challenge in front of it," Tilton said.

The new chamber was budgeted at $399,000 - just $1,000 shy of the threshold for lawmakers to be officially notified.

It is now estimated to cost $850,000, which will require legislative approval.

http://www.marinij.com/marin/ci_5851970

Posted by lois at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)

WVA: Prisons to performing arts centers: Region gets a lock on new growth

Prisons to performing arts centers: Region gets a lock on new growth
By CHARLES OWENS
Bluefield Daily Telegraph

— It’s time for the region to lock-up several hundred new jobs. Following years of planning, several prison projects in southern West Virginia and Southwest Virginia are now very close to reality. In Tazewell County, inmates are expected to begin arriving as early as this September at the new Pocahontas State Correctional Center.
A job fair is being held today and Thursday at Nuckolls Hall at the Tazewell County Fairgrounds for the Pocahontas project. Stan Young, the warden for the new prison, and officials with the Virginia Department of Corrections, are hoping to interview and offer full-time positions to as many qualified applicants as possible. They have to fill 350-plus positions for the new 1,024-bed medium-security prison.

The state is looking for more than just correctional officers in Pocahontas. They also need doctors, dentists, dental assistants, dental hygienists, registered nurses, licensed practice nurses and other medical professionals. However, the jobs won’t be limited to just those in the medical field. The prison also will need clerical and office workers and maintenance workers for both inside and outside of prison grounds, including skilled electricians and plumbers.
Across the state line in neighboring McDowell County, Gov. Joe Manchin on Tuesday toured the massive Indian Ridge Industrial Park in Welch. It’s the site of the new $232 million federal prison project for Welch. Site preparation work on the prison is already underway, and the actual construction of the prison is expected to begin later this year.
Manchin, who was joined by state and local officials, also toured the John D. Rockefeller Industrial Park in neighboring Wyoming County Tuesday as part of his visit to southern West Virginia. The tour was designed as a way to showcase economic development initiatives underway in the region, according to Delegate Richard Browning, D-Wyoming.
Browning, also executive director of the Coalfields Expressway Authority, said the federal prison in Welch, and the new industrial park in Wyoming County, represent desperately needed job creation for southern West Virginia.
The federal prison in Welch will include 1,280 beds for inmates, including 1,152 at the medium-security facility and 128 at an adjacent work camp, and will employ more than 300 people. The facility is expected to help pump $35 million annually into the economy of McDowell and Wyoming counties.
In addition to the state prison in Pocahontas and the federal prison in Welch, the new Stevens Correctional Center in Welch has been operational for months. It is providing more than 100 new jobs for McDowell County, and is expected to help with the local tax base as well.
The three new prison projects are in addition to existing correctional facilities in the region, including Camp 31 in the Gratton section of Tazewell, the Keen Mountain Correctional Center in Buchanan County and the Bland County Correctional Center in rural Bland County.
While it might seem like the region is becoming a prison community — that’s not necessarily the case. The prisons are just one piece of the ongoing economic development puzzle that is being assembled by elected officials across southern West Virginia and Southwest Virginia.
A few other key pieces of this puzzle include the multi-use equestrian park project that is now underway for Mercer County. The equestrian project is being pursued jointly by the cities of Bluefield and Princeton, and the Mercer County Commission.
Tazewell County officials are also continuing their pre-development plans for the large-scale Bluestone Regional Business and Technology Park, a visionary endeavor planned along 680 acres of scenic land near Bluefield, Va.
The Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Trail — another project years on the drawing board for McDowell County — is now operational. The next stop for the trail is expected to be Mercer County.
The Princeton area also is seeing welcome new growth. This includes not only the new Lowes and Chilis at the Princeton Crossings, but also talk of several other new restaurant chains and related developments apparently being considered for the Princeton area. A $5 million loan recently awarded by the United States Department of Agriculture to The Charles T. “Chuck” Mathena II Foundation, Inc., of Princeton, also brings the long-awaited Chuck Mathena Center for the Performing Arts closer to completion.
When opened, the 1,000-seat theater and community center will serve both southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. The center will be approximately 42,000 square feet with an auditorium that will provide theater quality sound, according to project organizers. A lobby and gallery area is planned for artistic displays and presentations, and areas for use as classrooms, receptions and conferences.
From prisons and equine centers to technology campuses and performing arts centers, the region is experiencing welcome growth. Yes, we are locking up hundreds of new jobs courtesy of the prisons in Welch and Pocahontas, but other key projects that promise additional growth also can be found across the region.
Charles Owens is the Daily Telegraph’s city editor. Contact him at cowens@bdtonline.com

Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.
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CA: 2 Part SF Chronicle Article: State's youth prisons mired in hopelessness

JUVENILE JUSTICE
State's youth prisons mired in hopelessness
Young offenders face frequent violence and receive little rehabilitation.
Now, some are calling for the state juvenile system to be dismantled.
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, May 7, 2007
Part One (Part Two follows)juvenile crime rates have declined sharply. By contrast, the conditions inthe state-run youth prisons, by nearly every assessment, are grim despite the fact that California operates one of the most expensive juvenile justicesystems in the country.

The state is spending almost $180,000 per youth offender this fiscal year --five times the cost of keeping inmates in the adult prisons -- and thegovernor projects that figure will rise to $216,000 next year. The Divisionof Juvenile Justice's budget this year totals $530 million. State officialssay new programs are being implemented, under pressure from the courts, butin a marked change from the past, some key lawmakers say they have lost hopein the Schwarzenegger administration.

"Today, I am very skeptical that they're going to be able to do what they'vesaid they would," said Sen. Michael Machado, D-Linden (San Joaquin County),a supporter of prison reform. "They are doomed to failure. There is atremendous lack of concern for getting results. Nothing has happened."

Some members of the Legislature are so frustrated that they are urging astep that at one time would have been unthinkable -- dismantling thejuvenile prison system.

The Assembly's Public Safety Committee recently passed a bill that wouldshut down the eight juvenile prisons and send the offenders to their homecounties for treatment or detention. The bill's prospects are uncertain, butseveral experts described it as a vivid symbol of the loss of confidence inthe governor and the dire prospects of the thousands of youths trapped in the state system.

"I think it's hopeless," said David Steinhart, executive director of
Commonweal's Juvenile Justice Program, a San Francisco-based nonprofit thathas worked closely with the Legislature to develop reform plans. "What theyare doing is a formula for disaster. It's not working on any front."

Since agreeing to a consent decree in 2004, settling a class action law suitfiled in Superior Court in Alameda County, Schwarzenegger's administrationhas repeatedly been ordered to introduce fundamental reforms in the system,but the situation appears to be getting worse. Violence is still rising. Ananalysis prepared for the court by a panel of experts last year comparedCalifornia's system with other states and concluded that the state, once anational leader, now lags in nearly every category except cost.

"California is failing its children," the report concluded.

It added, "California is failing its taxpayers."

On a recent visit to the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility inChino, a drab campus of old, worn structures east of Los Angeles, every wardinterviewed -- the juvenile offenders, some as old as 25, are called wards,not inmates -- described frequent, unpredictable violence as an unceasingelement of prison life.

"It's just there all the time," said Felix Faustino, 21, serving a sentencefor assault with a deadly weapon. "You have to really want to stay out ofthat or you're going to get hit. It happens.

"Some of the guys try to get locked up just for protection," he said,
referring to segregation units reserved for troublemakers, in which thewards are usually locked in their cells for 22 or 23 hours a day. "But whenyou're locked up, there's no school, no nothing."

Brandon Gilmore, who is 20 and in the Chino prison for murder, said it isstill common to see wards suddenly charge across a yard to attack anopposing gang member or someone of a different race. The violence, he andothers said, is almost always between blacks and Latinos.

"They can't stop it," Gilmore said.

But what is particularly disheartening about the problems, many experts say,is that they come at a time when there ought to be great hope. The state'sadult prisons are in crisis because of enormous overcrowding, but thepopulation in the juvenile prisons is not just declining, it has been
plummeting for a decade.

From a peak of slightly more than 10,000 wards in 1996, the population ofjuvenile offenders has declined to 2,551 as of last month. In addition,juvenile crime rates are at their lowest levels in 40 years, even with arecent uptick. The youth arrest rate for serious felonies has dropped bymore than half from 1988 to 2006. Experts say they are not certain about thereasons behind those sharp drops, but many speculate that the crack epidemicmay have artificially inflated rates earlier, and that the generally strongeconomy as well as declining rates of teen pregnancy have contributed to the
big declines.

The steep drop in the juvenile prison population should be easing pressureson the state, providing an unparalleled opportunity to implement bettermethods. In at least one level of the system, there has been progress. Overthe past decade, most of the counties have embraced fundamentally newrehabilitation methods -- referred to as evidence-based programs -- thathave proved successful around the country at reducing recidivism rates. Thestate, however, has remained strikingly resistant to change.

"Those state facilities are the absolute last place you want to send a kid,"said Jerry Powers, chief probation officer in Stanis- laus County andoutgoing president of the Chief Probation Officers of California. "The stateis the last resort. We do a much better job treating them in the counties,and we use far more successful approaches."

The counties usually turn to the state prisons out of desperation, expertssay, and the decline in the juvenile prison population reflects that.

"A lot of the decline is just a response to what gulags these state
facilities have become," said Bart Lubow, director of the program for
high-risk youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, based in Baltimore, whichhas become a major force in funding reform programs. "The counties justwon't send their kids there because they're so bad."

Last fall, California provided the state court monitoring the consent decreesix reform plans covering everything from education and medical care tomental health treatment. State officials say it will take three to fouryears to improve things.

"In an ideal world, we'd shut the system down and start over, but we can'tdo that, so we have to move very carefully," said Bernard Warner, the headof the Department of Juvenile Justice.

Warner added, "What you see are well-intentioned people moving forward.There are no shortcuts. These things take time. We want to fundamentallychange the system."

Part of the problem, state officials say, is simply getting competent staff.The six reform plans rely on dozens of new managers and counselors, but thecritical position of a chief of programs remains vacant and 83 percent ofthe new staff positions created to support the changes remain unfilled,according to a recent court filing.

The filing also included a list of deadlines for action that the state hadeither missed or not completed; it ran 11 pages.

According to the report last year by the outside experts, vocational classessit mostly empty at the prisons, the offenders spend exceedingly long stretches of time doing little, and there is "abysmal achievement" in theeducation programs. The report also said there is a "capitulation to gang culture."

It was not always this way. California was a national leader in juvenilerehabilitation in the 1960s and the early 1970s. But it then adopted a morepunitive approach, and rehabilitation programs atrophied.

"I go to California and tell them about things that were developed in theirstate years ago and then were forgotten," said Edward Latessa, a
criminologist at the University of Cincinnati and a highly regarded pioneerin developing new rehabilitation models. "There's a lot of ground to makeup."

The state's Office of the Inspector General issued in March the latest in astring of critical reports on the juvenile prisons. The report focused onconditions at the Stark facility, and it found that hundreds of the wardsreceived little education, many were locked in their cells up to 22 hoursper day and large numbers kept contraband such as rope in their cells.

Ramon Martinez, the superintendent at Stark, said he found the report to beexaggerated. He conceded that there was an unacceptable level of violence,but he insisted there was marked improvement in the past year. He also saidhe was introducing new programs and hiring more professionals to providerehabilitation. The facility has gone from two full-time psychologists to12, he said.

Warner said Stark was also doing a better job of separating low-risk wardsfrom higher-risk ones, which makes for a calmer environment. Warner said heis eager to provide more treatment programs, but that there are barriers.For instance, he said, some of the wards do not want to go to classes out offear for their safety.

"We need to temper some expectations," Warner said.

What particularly irritates some lawmakers is that the state does such apoor job in spite of the sky-high costs. The December court report foundthat violence had risen nearly 10 percent in the first half of 2006 from the year earlier.

Martinez, the superintendent at Stark, which has 780 wards, said the figuresdo not take account of the fact that the wards in his facility tend to besome of the toughest criminals in the state.

"Something happens when they go through these doors," Martinez said. "Theylose their values. We know they have them, and they can find them. But theylose them when they come in."

The atmosphere at Stark can be intimidating. On a recent morning, a fewwards worked in vocational classes, where they were being taught skillsranging from bricklaying to sheet-metal work. In the living units, the wardsfrequently beat violently against the tiny slitlike windows of their cellsand shouted through the heavy steel doors when a visitor walked by.

In a wing for sex offenders, several cells were opened for viewing. They were dank concrete cubes, roughly 7 feet in each direction, with open steeltoilets in the corner. The beds were concrete platforms with thin plasticmats.

Harley Finney, 24, a white ward imprisoned for aggravated mayhem, said thatthe black-versus-Latino mentality is the source of most assaults at Stark.

"You don't need a reason" for one side to attack the other, Finney said.

Waymon Moore, 22, who is black and in Stark for assault, said he enjoyedbeing in a special wing for lower-risk offenders because of the relativecalm.

"You get out of here, into the general population, it's for real, man,"
Moore said. "You can get it anytime."
Coming next

In part two of its look at juvenile justice, The Chronicle examines how
counties have adopted new treatment methods to reduce recidivism rates among
offenders. The approaches are far more pragmatic than in the past and
emphasize retraining rather than punishment.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/07/MNGNEPMD7K1.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
JUVENILE JUSTICE
A new approach to help young offenders
County programs try to keep youths away from violent prisons

James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Juvenile Crime on the Decline.

(05-08) 04:00 PDT Watsonville -- Second of Two Parts

A group of young men laughed over a game of pingpong at a storefront space here recently and several others loudly attacked bags of snacks, but one teenager sat intently in front of a chessboard. Silent, he betrayed emotion only when his opponent, his counselor, got up to make a phone call.

"Hurry back so I can finish you off," he joked.

It could have been any group of teenagers blowing off steam until the 17-year-old chess player tugged up a pant leg, exposing the court-ordered electronic monitoring device wrapped around his ankle, a product of an arrest, his fifth, for alcohol- and drug-related crimes. One of the pingpong players was finishing a term for weapons possession, and the others had been arrested, some repeatedly, on charges ranging from burglary to assault.

Relaxed as the atmosphere may have seemed, the youths in this Santa Cruz County program were symbols of deep shifts that have been transforming the juvenile justice system in many California counties.

"Five years ago, all these kids would have been in detention, in juvenile hall or somewhere else, all of them," said Fernando Giraldo, director of what is called an evening reporting center in Watsonville. "We do everything now to keep them out of the system, and the results have just been completely better."

For the past decade, a system once marked by little but despair has experienced a series of positive changes, and one reason, many experts say, is that the counties have been sending fewer juvenile offenders every year to the state-run juvenile prison system and instead placing them in rehabilitation programs in their home counties. The offenders are generally arrested and adjudicated by county law enforcement authorities, and prosecutors and judges have wide discretion in how and where to handle them.

More and more, those local officials are opting to treat the youths at home at a time when juvenile crime rates, and imprisonment rates, have been plummeting for a decade. Experts say there is no clear explanation for the trends, but many speculate that the generally strong economy, which has meant steady job growth, and declines in teen pregnancy rates have been factors.

The shifts have been profound. There were 65 juveniles imprisoned in 2006 for every 100,000 in the state's youth population, down from a peak of 285 in 1988, while the juvenile arrest rate for serious felonies has fallen by more than half, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit research group in San Francisco.

California's state-run juvenile prisons continue to be plagued by violence and poor rehabilitation efforts, but the counties have seized on new methods and accelerated the introduction of models that appear to be successful at reducing recidivism rates.

Keeping youthful offenders locked up, once common, is now shunned in all but the most extreme cases. Treatment methods are far more pragmatic than in the past and focus on retraining rather than punishment. There is widespread agreement among experts that supportive programs that focus on teaching young offenders new skills are far more effective.

What experts find most striking is that the trends were so unexpected. A decade ago, when crime rates had spiked, some criminologists argued that the only way to protect the public was incarcerating as many juvenile offenders as possible. Now law enforcement officials are finding that, in general, the fewer youths they incarcerate -- while providing treatment -- the more they enhance public safety.

"This is the huge, untold story of the corrections system," said Barry Krisberg, president of Oakland-based National Council on Crime and Delinquency. "What we're seeing is the exact reverse of the old argument that said the only thing that works is incapacitating these juveniles. The crime rates are falling as we got less tough, not tougher."

County probation departments are much more willing to place offenders, even repeat offenders, in day-treatment programs like the one in Watsonville -- not out of kindness, experts say, but because it works.

"We have realized we were locking up kids we didn't need to lock up, especially girls," said Donald Coleman, the supervising juvenile court judge in Ventura County and a former prosecutor. "You don't want to separate them from their families if you can help it. As a judge in an adult case you would never get me to approve electronic monitoring for a serious crime, never. But I think it's a great thing for juveniles because it keeps them with their families. "

Said Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, "This is one of the biggest developments in the history of the system. This goes against everything we thought was needed, essentially. This refutes 30 years of social policy."

A look at a day treatment center in Monrovia, in Los Angeles County near Pasadena, displays another element in the new approach. The center, operated by the Boys Republic group, a nonprofit that runs a string of successful programs for offenders, is open and relaxed.

During a recent group session, a dozen offenders worked with one of the teenagers who had blown up at some classmates earlier in the day. The young woman has a serious methamphetamine problem and a pattern of angry outbursts. But her classmates helped her understand that she had misread comments by some of the other kids, and they discussed strategies for avoiding such miscommunication in the future. The emphasis was on pragmatic solutions to stressful problems.

"It's all about trust with them, and when they feel that, they can move to the next step," said Bob Falk, the director.

But the signs of innovation at the Boys Republic program were best symbolized by the things that were not present. There were no guards, no bars on the windows and no weapons. There is virtually no violence, Falk says.

Perhaps the biggest shift over the past decade is the rapidly declining role of the state in the treatment of juvenile offenders. Today, in part because of dismal conditions in state-run juvenile prisons, only a tiny number of juvenile offenders are sent to the state lockups. Of the 219,000 juveniles arrested in California in 2005, for instance, just 636 were sent to state prisons.

Instead, most offenders now stay in their home counties, and most are placed in day programs because of growing evidence that they produce, in general, the best results.

"The counties are the only ones really changing and they have to be encouraged," said David Steinhart, head of the nonprofit Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program in San Francisco. "The future is with the counties, not the state."

Even so, officials say it is growing increasingly difficult because the offenders entering the system today are, in many instances, far more troubled than youths in the past. A study of the juvenile offenders in Santa Clara County found that 60 percent had mental disorders, about 70 percent had high levels of drug and alcohol abuse and nearly 80 percent reported suffering serious traumas.

For many of these youths, the focus of their lives is not succeeding, it is surviving. At the afternoon reporting center in Watsonville, for instance, dinner began recently with each of the offenders mentioning one thing they were thankful for.

Most of the youths said they appreciated the food. A boy who is about to end his term thought for a moment and then said, "I'm thankful for still being alive."

Even so, the improvements have been real. There have been such dramatic declines in the number of juveniles locked up in juvenile halls and other county facilities that the counties are having trouble adjusting.

For instance, Ventura County completed construction just three years ago of a 420-bed juvenile hall; it has never been more than half full. Orange County has experienced booming population growth over the past decade, but the population of the county's juvenile hall has dropped to 450 from 520.

Santa Cruz County's juvenile hall held as many as 65 offenders a decade ago. Today, it holds 20.

Despite the progress, some experts complain that the counties have done a far better job of talking about the new rehabilitation theories than implementing them.

For instance, Santa Clara County has enthusiastically embraced the new methods, referred to as evidence-based programs because they rely heavily on statistical proof of what works and what does not, much like medical care. The county has been placing fewer juveniles in detention, but a consultant's report said that the county was still detaining a higher percentage of its offenders than other counties and that their stays were longer than the average.

"It can take a couple of years to really design the models properly and then to train all the staff the way they need to be," said Kathy Duque, the county's deputy chief probation officer.

The core of the new approach is this: Experts relying on extensive research have found that juveniles with the potential for becoming lifelong criminals can be identified early with careful screening. They frequently exhibit consistent patterns of truancy, vandalism and drug abuse and often come from abusive environments.

Once identified, these youths can be treated with programs that focus not on lengthy analysis of their often troubled backgrounds but on practical efforts to break behavior patterns and make better choices. This is known as behavioral, or cognitive therapy.

"Talk therapy doesn't work in changing behavior," said Edward Latessa, head of the criminal justice department at the University of Cincinnati and a pioneer in the new methods. "You have to target current issues in the juvenile's life, not things that happened in the past, even if they affected the juvenile's psychology in some way."

The treatment also focuses not on the individual offender alone, but the family, when possible. And a key concern is separating youths who may be more inclined to become repeat offenders, so-called high-risk offenders, from the others.

"You don't want to overtreat a kid who doesn't need it," said Duque. "You can actually make things worse. You want to focus on the kids who really need it."

The changes began in the early 1990s, when juvenile crime had spiked and some experts argued that a new generation of "super predators" could only be stopped by large-scale incarceration. In an influential article titled "America's Ticking Crime Bomb and How to Defuse It," written in 1994, John DiIulio, a criminologist, insisted efforts at rehabilitation were misguided.

"We ... need more cops, more prisons, and less 1960s style nonsense about the "root causes" of crime," wrote DiIulio.

That same year, officials in Orange County struggled with the problem of soaring juvenile arrests and soaring costs.

"We found that turnkey, locking them up, does not work, period," said Colleene Preciado, the chief probation officer. "They were just going to get out and start all over again."

So the county began a research campaign and found that just 8 percent of the juvenile offenders were committing more than 50 percent of the crimes. In response, assessment schemes were devised to identify prospective repeat offenders early and to focus treatment programs on those individuals, and their families, to try to prevent the cycle of crime from getting started.

It was a model that quickly spread to other counties. It is working so well that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed moving some of the younger inmates in the adult correction system to the counties so these offenders can be placed in the more successful rehabilitation programs.

"It's been a huge journey," said Judy Cox, the chief probation officer in Santa Cruz County. "We've worked very hard to change our thinking completely. I am in touch with people and research that I never would have put my hands on earlier in my career."

She added, "I don't think we can ever go back to where we were."

E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/08/MNG4TPMNBM1.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by lois at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2007

TX: To some, TYC bill is no cure-all

To some, TYC bill is no cure-all
Legislature: Lawmakers tout plan; experts seek more on rehabilitation

Sunday, May 6, 2007
By EMILY RAMSHAW / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN - State lawmakers tout their legislation to remake the Texas Youth Commission as a bill that will turn the agency from "national embarrassment to national model."

But some of the country's top juvenile justice experts say the bill is far from progressive, and will do little more than bring Texas' system up from deplorable to average.

And though lawmakers vowed to go to any length to protect young inmates from physical and sexual abuse, many have softened their stance on what experts say is the single most-important element of reform - closing remote, isolated facilities and relocating them in metropolitan areas.

The TYC bill "will get Texas out of being the worst we've ever seen," said Dr. Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, which helped California overhaul its system. "But these moves by themselves don't assure that the problems won't come back."

The bill, which the House is set to consider this week, tackles the most obvious problems that allowed systemic physical and sexual abuse inside the TYC, the experts say - poor supervision, dangerous living conditions and a culture of retribution and mistreatment.

But it does little to implement practices proven to speed rehabilitation and limit recidivism: emphasizing reward, not punishment, in behavioral programs; housing youth in intimate group homes staffed by trained professionals; and relocating rural prisons to urban centers so inmates are near families and services.

Experts point to the far-flung prisons as the most serious problem because inmates aren't close to good medical and psychiatric care and families generally don't live close enough to play a role in a youth's rehabilitation.

The bill "is a hell of a good start," said Mark Steward, who designed the country's gold standard juvenile justice system in Missouri and is overseeing similar reforms in Louisiana and Washington, D.C. "But a lot of these changes just address law and order and safety. ... To get from a punitive correctional system to a true rehabilitative one, you basically have to start all over."

The TYC would be downsized by discharging inmates at age 19, not 21, and keeping youth with misdemeanor offenses - up to 30 percent of the inmate population - out of youth prisons.

And the bill addresses safety by requiring a staff ratio of one guard for every 12 youth, hiring more than 800 additional employees and demanding 300 hours of training for guards. It also would aid abuse investigations by establishing an independent inspector general's office and a youth ombudsman's office and by giving prosecutors special assistance to tackle these cases.

Texas lawmakers and local juvenile justice advocates are equally enamored by the legislation. Sen. Juan Hinojosa, the McAllen Democrat who authored the Senate version of the bill, has said it "will serve as a model for the country in terms of how we treat our youth." Will Harrell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and a key contributor to the legislation, said he has "never seen such a profound and progressive reform bill."

National experts agree the bill is a necessary first step: It's impossible to rehabilitate youth in an environment where they feel threatened and unsafe. But they see problems with several of the bill's provisions.

Citing concerns

Discharging youth at 19, not 21, means more violent young offenders will end up in adult prisons, Dr. Krisberg said. Unless they're reformed enough to be returned to the community, he said, this provision simply moves young offenders into a more dangerous and less rehabilitative setting.

And while the guard-inmate ratio is a good start, Mr. Steward said, it's not meaningful unless staff members are highly qualified and placed strategically across youth prisons. The 300 hours of training is "just a number" if it's all about how to restrain youth, and not about how to relate to them, he said.

In Missouri, the toughest units have one "youth specialist," a guard with an advanced college degree, for every six youth. In Texas, guards aren't required to have more than a high school diploma or GED, and the current ratio slips as low as 1 to 24 at night.

Beyond the immediate fixes, experts say the bill fails to look long-term and focus on rehabilitation.

An auditor's report has called for closing the West Texas State School in Pyote, where abuse allegations were first reported. But the bill itself doesn't call for "regionalization" - housing youth in prison facilities close to their homes. In Texas, youth are scattered among remote, isolated prisons across the state.

The best state programs place youth in far-away prisons for only a short period of time, if at all, Dr. Krisberg said, before moving them to facilities closer to their homes.

"These youth do not parachute from outer space," he said. "They come from real communities, and they're going back to real communities."

Political pressure

But the idea of closing far-flung facilities has run into political pressure. Local officials in towns with TYC facilities have gone on the offensive, warning lawmakers that shutting youth prisons would eliminate jobs and stall economic engines.

"When you look at the [West Texas State School's] track record over a period of years, it's got a pretty good record," said Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego of Alpine, whose district includes the Pyote facility. "What happened was inexcusable. But that's been resolved, certainly by now."

Plus, lawmakers seem to be punting the question of closing facilities to agency executives, calling it a "management decision."

Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, who chairs the House Corrections Committee and authored the House's TYC reform legislation, said that other than the possibility of reverting two youth prisons into adult prisons, moving facilities "is not something we're really talking about or dealing with at this time."

"We'll make those decisions after we determine what size TYC is going to be, and who's going to be at TYC," Mr. Madden said.

But his Senate counterpart, Democrat John Whitmire of Houston, said closing or moving facilities "is still on the table" and could get hashed out in the budgeting process or by the agency's own executive team.

"We can't keep them open because we're worried about jobs," he said.

The location problem has received far more public scrutiny than TYC's behavioral program. But experts say the agency's "resocialization" system, which demands good behavior, educational achievement and an admission of guilt for young offenders to be considered for release, is fraught with problems, too.

As youth move through different "phases" approaching their release, experts say, their only reward is a different color uniform. Administrators completely control an inmate's status, so changes can be arbitrary and retaliatory, inmates and their families say.

"TYC has created a program where the sole incentive is getting out and going home - that or working my way up to a green shirt," said Isela Gutierrez, coordinator of the Texas Coalition Advocating Justice for Juveniles.

"The goal is to interrupt the cycle of these kids, to give them something bigger and better to aspire for. Resocialization has to go out the door."

Lawmakers say that these types of changes will come with time and that they want them to be made by the new officials leading the TYC - many of whom haven't even been named yet. They say legislating the agency to death isn't the solution.

But as they use the TYC bill to keep misdemeanor offenders out of TYC prisons and in their communities, Mr. Steward said, lawmakers should be taking the next step: designing smaller, less institutional settings for the rest of its incarcerated youth. That's safer and more cost-effective, he said.

"All the data shows that the more institutionalized these kids are, the worse off they get," Mr. Steward said. "The best place is the least restrictive environment. If you can place them in a youth home, in a day treatment center, do it."

High-level administrators inside the TYC say they're already working to overhaul the agency's behavioral program and don't need legislation to do it. They've already taken all references to the program off of the agency's Web site.

Some states have sought other, more effective, rehabilitation answers.

Missouri, for example, houses its youth in homey, therapeutic dorm settings, with no more than 40 beds per facility and employees who act as trained counselors, not corrections guards. Behavioral programs emphasize frequent therapy sessions and positive reinforcement - a "culture of caring" where young offenders are exposed to warm relationships and rehabilitated with respect.

But in Texas, those ideas aren't on the table.

"We may modify some of the things on resocialization" with the TYC bill, Mr. Madden said, "but I don't see us delving in [the behavioral] area specifically."

Toby Goodman, a former state representative from Arlington, wrote much of the 1995 legislation that greatly expanded TYC. He said in a recent interview that building smaller juvenile facilities with amenities that approximate campuses or home-like settings could be too expensive.

"I don't think the taxpayers of Texas are going to pay" the costs associated with such care, he said. "You start building those kind of facilities, you're going to have a taxpayer revolt. And I don't think you'll get it through a Republican-dominated Legislature."

Staff writer Doug Swanson in Dallas contributed to this report.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/050607dnte
xtycbill.3bb614a.html#

Posted by lois at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2007

NY: Subway Workers Mourn Marvin Franklin, a Colleague, Mentor, Artist and Friend

May 6, 2007, NY Times
Subway Workers Mourn a Colleague, Mentor, Artist and Friend
By MICHAEL POWELL

In a sea of church ladies with wide white hats and deacons in dark suits sat 120 broad-shouldered men wearing orange-and-yellow reflective vests, transit workers come to bid goodbye to one of their own.

And no one at the funeral of Marvin Franklin, who was killed one week ago, carried the wounds of that day more visibly than Jeff Hill, a lithe young worker who stood alongside Mr. Franklin as the G train bore down.

Mr. Hill came to the funeral in a neck brace, his forearm scratched raw. After a round of song and prayer, he took the pulpit.

He described Mr. Franklin as a mentor who offered pointers on life and art. Then, as if reliving the moment, he described walking across the tracks that night. His words tumbled out one upon the other.

“I saw a light behind Marvin,” Mr. Hill said. “I saw a light above his head. I couldn’t even yell.” Mr. Hill’s chest heaved, he shook his head and continued: “Marvin was squeezed behind me, I saw Marvin squeezed and mushed between the train and the platform.”

Tears began to roll down Mr. Hill’s face. Sobs and supportive shouts of “Amen!” rose in response from the church pews.

“Mrs. Franklin” — Mr. Hill looked at Mr. Franklin’s widow, Tenley, who sat in the front pew — “I love you with all my heart. And I love Marvin, too.”

Everyone in the church rose to their feet and clapped, and transit workers held clenched fists aloft.

Mr. Williams, a 55-year-old husband and father, died last Sunday night in the subway tunnels where he had labored for two decades.

Yesterday his coffin sat inside New Covenant Church of Christ in Queens Village, cloaked in carnations and lilies and within touching distance of his wife, three children, five sisters and four brothers.

In a post-modern city that often seems removed from its smokestack past, these men and women work at an industrial-age craft with all the dangers that implies. Since 1946, at least 238 subway workers have been killed on the job; nine in the last seven years. Mr. Franklin was the second track worker killed in less than a week.

Old hands at the funeral described feeling the vibration of the tracks, listening to the rumble and trying to determine from which direction a many-ton subway train is approaching.

Few maintain the illusion of fearlessness. “It’s like you’re walking in a bad neighborhood — you never, ever relax,” said James Tuck, a 59-year-old track worker.

Mr. Franklin was killed in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn as he and Mr. Hill were carrying a dolly across the G track toward the A and C lines track, which was undergoing work. Mr. Hill said they had followed safety precautions. “It was regular practice what we were doing,” he said. “Don’t let the media tell you otherwise.”

The New York City Transit Authority suspended track maintenance projects for a few days last week. The authority and the unions are preparing new safety measures and training.

Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, escorted Mr. Hill to the church in Queens.

“I wish I could say no more sad and horrible thing will happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “It is extremely, extremely difficult and dangerous work.”

Mr. Franklin was a son of the South Jamaica projects and passed his adult life laboring in subway tunnels. But art sustained him. He earned a degree in illustrative arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology and carried a sketch pad to work, drawing his fellow workers and passengers and handing out the sketches as he left. (Mr. Franklin’s self-portrait adorned the Order of Service for his funeral).

Bob Ritter, a jowly 57-year-old trackman with white hair pulled back in a ponytail, carefully unfolded a sketch that Mr. Franklin had done of him. He patted his belly. “The sketch was too good,” he said. “Reality hurts, you know?”

Mr. Franklin often studied at the Art Students League. He wanted to retire and open an art gallery, and give the proceeds to the homeless.

Midway through the service, Michael Williams, a muscular track worker in a pinstriped suit, rose and walked to the front of the church. “I’m Mikey, because that’s the name Marvin gave me,” Mr. Williams said. “I called him Marvelous, because he was.”

Mikey and Marvelous lived a half-dozen blocks apart in Queens and drove to work together. Mr. Williams described his bearded friend with a booming laugh, who at holiday parties “danced with everyone — all the women, anyway.” (Mr. Franklin was married once before, and his former wife, who was the minister, noted that it was a measure of the man that she could deliver the eulogy yesterday while his widow listened.)

“Whenever I would worry about money, Marvin would say: ‘It’s going to be all right, Mikey.’ ”

Mr. Williams was there that night his friend died. He heard him cry out twice — “Man under!” Mr. Williams found his friend’s boot and, farther down the track, his body.

Mr. Williams fought to hold his composure, and did not lose it.

“Marvin had a gift,” Mr. Williams said. “So I want to thank you, Marvelous, for enriching my life.”

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

MA: County jails seen as dangerously crowded

Well, it looks like the push is on for more jails. In western MA for example, the women's jail in Chicopee isn't opened and Ashe has already asked for 56 more cells. How about bail reform which would free up more than a third of the jail cells. How about ending school zone sentencing "enhancements," or putting some money into drug treatment. If the sheriffs are so concerned with "life or death" they could start by not swallowing up hundreds of millions on more jails. Lois

County jails seen as dangerously crowded
By Peter Reuell/ MetroWest Daily News
Sunday, May 6, 2007

Calling the condition of the state’s county jails a “travesty,” Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration is joining with sheriffs to push for funding and improvements in the overcrowded, run-down facilities.
“This is one area where I’ve been shocked,” Jay Gonzalez, assistant secretary for capital finance and intergovernmental affairs, told state lawmakers last week. “It’s a travesty.”

Crowding at jails in the Metrowest and the Milford regions, for example, have reached dangerous levels, officials say, but fixing the problem could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
With some facilities housing twice as many inmates as they were designed for, “This is an issue that’s a life-or-death issue,” Worcester County Sheriff Guy Glodis said.
“It’s about the long-term rehabilitation of inmates to make the state safer,” he said, noting that conditions at the West Boylston facility are “horrendous.”
“The jail was built for 822 people,” he said. “Now, we’re at 1,440. It’s very quietly become a crisis situation in the commonwealth, where most county facilities are literally bursting at the seams.”
The Middlesex County Jail, located on the top floors of the county courthouse in Cambridge, was built to accommodate 160 prisoners but today houses about 350, Sheriff James DiPaola said.
Space is so tight at the jail, another 250 Middlesex County prisoners awaiting trial are housed in institutions around the state, “because I don’t have room for them,” he said.
The Middlesex County House of Correction in Billerica, built to house 300 inmates, has 1,250.
In Norfolk County, Sheriff Michael Bellotti said, “our jail is probably the most overcrowded in the state.” Located in Dedham, the jail was built to house 302 inmates but today holds about 700.
“Inmates are sleeping on the floor in some housing units,” Bellotti said, adding that it could cost anywhere from $25 million to $30 million to deal with the overcrowding.

http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=198816&format=graphic
this and other news about mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog

Posted by lois at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)