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June 28, 2007
Justice Department Numbers Show "Alarming Growth" in Incarceration. Links to BJS report
New Justice Department numbers show "alarming growth" in incarceration, with biggest increase since 2000;
California responsible for 1 out of 5 new people in prison last year; first increase in the number of youth in adult prisons in over a decade
June 28, 2007 Justice Policy Institute
WASHINGTON, D.C. -After six years of a slowing prison and jail population growth, new statistics released yesterday from the Justice Department show an alarming increase in incarceration across the U.S.
Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006, a new survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the midyear that accounts for prison and jail growth at midyear, found that "in both absolute numbers and percent change, the increase was the largest since midyear 2000." The new survey showed that about 6 out of 10 people in prison and jail were African American or Latino, and that nearly 5 percent of African American men were in prison or jail. One out of every five new people added to prison in the United States were in California. The data also shows that for the first time in over a decade (since 1995), the number of youth in adult prisons has increased. Illinois, Connecticut and Delaware have
recently taken steps to reduce the number of youth tried as adults.
"Once again, communities of color are paying for our troubled criminal justice policies," said Jason Ziedenberg, Executive Director of the Justice Policy Institute. "The population increase in the already overburdened prison system indicates an alarming growth that should not go unchecked. Billions of public safety dollars are absorbed by prison expansion and limits the nation's ability to focus on more effective strategies to promote public safety."
(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim06.htm link to BJS report)
When considering the growth, JPI points out that:
There is little relationship between prison growth and change in violent crime. Coming just weeks after the Justice Department released its preliminary crime statistics for 2006, regional imbalance in the growth of prison populations underscore how little relationship there is between crime and the use of incarceration. The two regions that experienced the least change in prison populations (the Northeast, +1.7 percent, and the South, +1.2 percent) either experienced a decline in violent crime, or marginal change in violent crime.1 By contrast, the West saw the biggest increase in violent crime of any region (+2.8 percent), and the biggest increase in the use of incarceration (5.2 percent). The Midwestern region also saw an increase in violent crime (+2.1), and prison growth (+3.0 percent).
Some states have reduced prison populations and closed prisons, and others have enacted billion dollar expansion plans. Some states and jurisdictions (8 out of 51) saw no growth, or declining prison populations. Maryland, where prison populations have been falling for the last 4 years, recently closed a prison, potentially saving the state tens of millions of dollars. By contrast, 20 percent of new prisoners added last year were in California, where numerous proposals to reduce prison sentences, reform parole, and provide more resources to drug- involved people in the criminal justice system failed to be enacted. California legislators recently voted for a multi-billion dollar prison expansion plan.
### The Justice Policy Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to ending society's reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems. http://www.justicepolicy.org
1The South saw a .06 percent increase in violent crime in 2006. The figures include sentenced prisoners under the jurisdiction of state and federal correctional authorities.
Posted by lois at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
Editorial NY Times: Gitmos Across America
New York Times
June 27, 2007
Editorial
Gitmos Across America
Toughness is the watchword in immigration policy these days. When you combine the new toughness with same-old bureaucratic indolence and ineptitude, you get a situation like that described by Nina Bernstein in The Times yesterday. She wrote about how the boom in immigration detention ‹ the nation's fastest-growing form of incarceration ‹ ensnares people for dubious reasons, denies them access to medicine and lawyers and sometimes holds them until they die.
Sandra M. Kenley, a legal permanent resident who had high blood pressure and a bleeding uterus, died in a rural Virginia jail after not receiving her medication. Returning home from a trip to Barbados she was locked up because of two old misdemeanor drug convictions. Abdoulai Sall, an auto mechanic, had no criminal record, but was still seized during an immigration interview. He had a severe kidney ailment and he, too, complained about not getting his medicine. He got sicker and died in another Virginia jail last December.
Sixty-two immigrants have died since 2004 while being held in a secretive detention system, a patchwork of federal centers, private prisons and local jails. Advocacy groups and lawyers say that the system not only denies detainees the most basic rights but also lacks the oversight and regulations that apply to federal prisons. Instead of fixing this broken system, the Senate bill that is lumbering toward final passage ‹ after surviving a crucial procedural vote yesterday ‹ is overloaded with provisions that will make it even harsher and more unfair.
One of the worst amendments comes from Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. It would impose mandatory detention of all people who overstay their visas. It's a huge overreach that threatens to swamp the detention system, filling already-strapped prisons at great expense and inevitably leading to more abuses and deaths. And because it takes away the power of officials to decide who poses a genuine threat and who doesn't, it would undermine efforts to catch and deport the truly dangerous.
The cells would be full of people who shouldn't be there: asylum seekers, the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and those ensnared in paperwork mistakes. Children, like the kindergartners in inmate scrubs walking the halls of a federal detention center outside Austin, Tex. Day laborers, like those in suburban Brewster, N.Y., whose arrests were hailed by a mayor who spoke proudly of his community's "zero tolerance" for people unlawfully playing soccer in a schoolyard.
The country already detains some 230,000 immigrants a year, at an annual cost of $1.2 billion. Under the current immigration bill, it would build tens of thousands more beds to hold detainees. And it would need many more Guantánamo Bays across America if Mr. Graham's zero-tolerance vision is fully realized.
Non-citizens are subject to our laws and to being deported if they do bad things. But this doesn't mean the country must detain or deport everybody, or relinquish basic decency or even basic sense to achieve some imagined ideal of toughness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/washington/26unions.html?fta=y
Labor Coalitions Divided on Immigration Overhaul
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: June 26, 2007
Now that President Bush has rallied Republicans to try again to reshape the immigration laws, supporters of the effort have a new worry. When the bill returns to the Senate floor, probably next week, opposition from labor unions could doom the bill¹s prospects by putting pressure on many Democrats to vote against it.
The threat that labor poses to the bill has gone largely unrecognized in part because three prominent unions ‹ the service employees, the farm workers, and the hotel, restaurant and apparel workers ‹ have backed the legislation. But that support, advocates say, has been outweighed by opposition from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and virtually all other unions, including auto workers, Teamsters, food and commercial workers, and construction unions.
³The labor opposition on this bill is extremely important,² said Tamar Jacoby, an immigration expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute. ³For this bill to pass, we probably need 80 percent of the Democrats, if not more, to support it, and if unions are what pull them off the bill or make their support soft, that is a serious threat to the bill.²
The split between the three unions and the rest of labor reflects fundamentally different views of what is best for the future of the labor movement.
Supporters of the bill say that the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in opposing the legislation, is focused on protecting the gains that its mostly middle-class members have made in pay and benefits over the decades. To the labor federation, the big worry is that the bill¹s guest worker provision will pull down wages, take away jobs from Americans and exploit immigrants.
The three unions that favor the bill also dislike the guest worker program but are willing to support the bill to pursue a larger goal: a path to legalization for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. The three unions, which represent many janitors, farm laborers and hotel housekeepers, have high percentages of members who are immigrants. They also recognize that it will be far easier to unionize immigrants ‹ perhaps the most fertile ground for labor¹s growth ‹ when illegal immigrants are given legal status.
The three unions argue that the best strategy to help the nation¹s immigrants is to push forward with the bill, however flawed, in the hope that it will be improved by the House. ³We think burying the issue and ignoring it would be a terrible mistake for the country and the economy,² said John W. Wilhelm, president of the hospitality division of Unite Here, which represents hotel, restaurant and apparel workers. ³We don¹t support the bill in its present form, but we think that the process is best served if the bill passes out of the Senate and the legislative process continues.²
But the A.F.L.-C.I.O. asserts that the bill is so flawed that it should be killed.
³We really have major concerns, and the concerns increase each day because the bill is getting worse instead of better,² said John J. Sweeney, the labor federation¹s president, who called the bill overly punitive. ³The bill¹s guest worker provisions pit workers against other workers. It creates a new underclass of workers.²
The federation continues to battle the bill despite amendments proposed to address labor¹s objections. The Senate voted to halve the guest worker program, to 200,000 workers a year, and to phase it out after five years.
³The A.F.L.-C.I.O.¹s hostility surprises me,² said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a liberal group that supports the bill. The service workers¹ union and Unite Here, Mr. Sharry said, ³are forward looking, they¹re trying to figure out how do you improve workers¹ rights in an era of globalization and do more than protect aging members.²
Labor¹s split over the bill reflects tensions between the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the breakaway Change to Win labor federation; the three unions backing the bill belong to the rival federation.
Eliseo Medina, an executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said the bill would help not only immigrants, but also labor unions.
³We have thousands of members who are undocumented who would have legal status,² said Mr. Medina, the son of a bracero worker from Mexico. ³Second, it will allow workers who want to organize to do so without the fear of deportation, and that helps unionization drives. It¹s not just a question of helping us as labor; it helps all workers because if you have a significant number of workers without any rights, that suppresses wages for everybody.²
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/opinion/27weds1.html
Posted by lois at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2007
RI: 2 articles: R.I. Does Away With Mandatory Minimimum Drug Sentencing Rules and New drug treatment slots readied for parolees
R.I. Does Away With Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentencing Rules
By Eric Tucker , Associated Press Writer
Published on 6/26/2007
Providence — The General Assembly has approved legislation that rolls back mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, a move that proponents hope will cut costs, ease overcrowding at the state prison and give judges more discretion in meting out punishment.
The vote, in the waning hours of the legislative session that concluded early Saturday, comes as the prison grapples with a rising inmate population and adds Rhode Island to a growing list of states where lawmakers have mulled changes to their sentencing policies.
“I'm overjoyed and thankful,” Sen. Harold Metts, the bill's primary sponsor and a religious volunteer at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston, said Monday. “I thank God.”
The legislation repeals minimum sentences imposed for drug crimes and also reduces the maximum punishment an offender can receive. Under the bill, for instance, a defendant convicted of possessing more than one kilogram of heroin, or more than five kilograms of marijuana, would no longer face a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison.
“It would give the judges discretion,” Metts said. “Certainly in the late teens, early 20s, people do make mistakes. It shouldn't mean that your life is over.”
It's not clear how much impact the bill would have on the inmate population — which surged earlier this month to a record-high of 3,889 — since most drug offenders in Rhode Island already receive relatively short prison sentences. In 2006, the average sentence for a drug offense was 20 months, with only 6 inmates getting sentences of 10 years or more, according to data provided by the state Department of Corrections.
The department says the data is based on individuals who are sentenced on any drug crimes that are not possession offenses, and it doesn't reflect the drug quantity.
Even so, many inmates who initially serve brief terms behind bars ultimately end up back in prison on probation violations, said Mimi Budnick, an organizer with the advocacy group Direct Action for Rights and Equality, who believes the new approach would help with overcrowding.
“The long probation sentences are a huge part of the problem,” she said.
Critics say mandatory minimum practices are ineffective, lead to excessive prison terms and strip the nuances from sentencing decisions in favor of a one-size-fits-all approach.
“People have this idea that it's about targeting these major traffickers,” said Bill Piper, director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group that opposes mandatory minimum sentences.
“But in reality, it's low-level people, people who have their own drug problems,” he added.
Many states have contemplated changing their sentencing structures, either by rolling back mandatory minimums or altering their sentencing guidelines, said Laura Sager, the national campaign director for Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
Michigan, in particular, has made dramatic reforms by eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and allowing early parole eligibility for certain drug offenders, Sager said. Other states have recently mulled changes, though with varied results.
In Maryland, Gov. Martin O'Malley vetoed a bill last month that would have allowed twice-convicted drug dealers the possibility of parole — instead of a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence. The Delaware House has passed a bill easing that state's mandatory minimum drug law, but the Senate has not taken it up.
In Rhode Island, Republican Gov. Don Carcieri said last week the state must find ways to safely reduce the inmate population. He has not said whether he would sign or veto Metts' bill, although Democrats hold a veto-proof majority in both chambers.
“I haven't even seen it, so I don't want to comment,” the governor said before the vote.
http://www.theday.com/re_print.aspx?re=36e8e483-0b53-4d2f-80a2-b0227e5b5d5f
New drug treatment slots readied for parolees
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
By Elizabeth Gudrais
Providence Journal State House Bureau
PROVIDENCE — When the state budget won final passage last week, despite the governor’s veto, lawmakers declared it a major victory that they were able to earmark $1 million for drug treatment for parolees in the same budget year they had to close a $300-million deficit. But setting aside the money was only half the battle.
The state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals must now determine how to spend the money, and it isn’t as simple as figuring out how many treatment slots $1 million will buy.
Department Director Ellen R. Nelson says she wants to make sure the money is spent in a thoughtful way that maximizes its impact. To that end, Nelson wants to work with the Department of Corrections and the Parole Board to assess the number and types of slots needed, and consult treatment providers about the best way to use the money.
Nelson emphasized that she doesn’t intend to “plan the thing to death,” and hopes the state can buy the additional slots and have them available this fall. “I think we’re going to take a very short and intensive period to analyze the need and the options, and then move forward expeditiously,” she said yesterday. “We’re optimistic that we can do this quickly.”
Neil A. Corkery, executive director of the Drug and Alcohol Treatment Association of Rhode Island, lauded Nelson’s openness to providers’ input, but also urged the state to make the treatment slots available as soon as possible. “There are loads of people who could benefit from this immediately,” he said.
The state prison population reached an all-time high of 3,889 earlier this month, and next year’s budget includes nearly $100 million for prisons. Corrections officials have said 70 percent of inmates at the Adult Correctional Institutions have problems with drug or alcohol abuse, and some inmates who qualify for parole are spending an extra three to four months in prison — at an average per-person cost of $39,000 a year — because there are no open drug-treatment slots and treatment is a condition of their parole. House Finance Committee Chairman Steven M. Costantino, D-Providence, and Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed, D-Newport, spearheaded the push to include the additional treatment money.
Nelson said her “preliminary assumption” is that $1 million is not enough to meet the demand and ensure that drug treatment is immediately available to parolees who need it, but it is enough to make a big dent in the problem.
Residential treatment for an adult costs $54.83 a day, and the average stay in the program is between 6 and 9 months, so the treatment typically costs $10,000 to $15,000.
The Department of Corrections estimates that there are 35 people at the ACI who could be paroled, but are waiting for a bed to open up in a residential treatment program. Parolees typically need residential, as opposed to outpatient, treatment because the structured setting drastically reduces their chances of regressing into active drug use and ending up back in prison, those involved said.
But people generally don’t go straight from residential treatment to living on their own with no treatment whatsoever, and the intermediate steps carry a cost, too. Outpatient treatment costs $10.47 a day, and the average stay in the program is 12 weeks. Narcotic maintenance — treatment with methadone, a synthetic drug used to quell cravings for heroin and other opiates — costs $7.95 per person per day, but people stay in the program for years.
In all, the state spends $14.5 million a year on contract slots in drug treatment programs. Less than $100,000 of that comes from a federal grant; the rest is state money.
Nelson said about 4 percent of the slots are generally open at a given time, but people — especially parolees — end up waiting for residential treatment beds because many of the residential facilities place restrictions on who can stay there. Some facilities are for men only or women only; some won’t accept people with a history of violent crime.
Nelson said those concerns will enter into the process, as her department tries to determine what type of beds it needs and to get providers to create them if they don’t exist. Workers will also need to be hired and trained, and Nelson said the state may need to consider raising the rates it pays providers.
Above all, Nelson called the additional money a positive accomplishment in what was, in many ways, a grim budget year. “People understand this is a critical component that can’t be left unattended,” she said. “It has a negative economic impact as well as terrible social consequences.”
http://www.projo.com/news/content/drug_treatment_beds_06-26-07_JI6594L.330d648.html#
Posted by lois at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2007
Service Oriented Architechture Provides Data Integration, BPM for prisons
"We've got to figure out a way to leverage common and standard business processes and technologies against very different business models.",John Pfeiffer, Vice President and CIO, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)
Web Services News:
SOA provides data integration, BPM for prisons
By Rich Seeley, News Writer
26 Jun 2007 | SearchWebServices.com
When visualizing success stories for service-oriented architecture (SOA), more efficient processing of new inmates arriving at county jails and state and federal prisons probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind.
However, SOA is at the heart of business operations for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which designs, builds and manages prisons and detention centers throughout the U.S., and runs the fifth largest correctional system in the country. John Pfeiffer, vice president and CIO of CCA, points out that in the first two months after implementation of an SOA system that handles data collection on arriving prisoners, errors were reduced by 95 percent and processing time was reduced by 25 percent.
As is often the case in other industries, the SOA system replaced siloed data systems that required multiple manual entry of the same information, Pfeiffer said. "Oftentimes we were keying the data into three or four different systems, the same data."
The old information silos and re-keying of data resulted in both the correctional officers and the inmates spending more time in holding areas for processing than is consider a good correctional system practice. Repeated manual entry also resulted in errors that then made the accuracy of the data a prime suspect.
"Keying accuracy is the last thing that a correctional officer or a prisoner transportation officer is going to be worrying about, so the fewer times you have to do that, the more time is spent managing and caring for the prisoner," Pfeiffer said. "If you key the same information in three times the chances of a mistake are fairly significant."
Not only is it better for the prisoners if less time is spent getting their basic information into the system, but CCA's customers -- counties, states and the federal government -- now have more trust in the data gathered by the company.
The CCA SOA system, based on Oracle Corp. Fusion Middleware and developed by BIAS Corp, a certified partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork, does more than just manage the initial processing of arriving prisoners, Pfeiffer said. It provides integration with CCA's governmental customers as well as financial institutions involved in the operations of the prisons and jails.
"We're a bit different than public sector correctional systems in that we have all different types of incarceration models," Pfeiffer explained. "We have federal prisons, we have state prisons, we have county jails and we have federal detention centers. So we in one system contain all the different business models and process types. As a result we've got to figure out a way to leverage common and standard business processes and technologies against very different business models."
The SOA implementation provides an integration hub that links a variety of formerly siloed systems as well as the government customers and business partners, he explained.
"What we've achieved with Oracle BPEL is a common information exchange hub through which we route data to other internal systems such as our J.D. Edwards accounting system to county information systems, state information systems, Wachovia Bank and Western Union," Pfeiffer said. "For example, with one county we're exchanging inmate names and photographs through the same hub where with a state we're exchanging inmate retail sales in the facility commissary, and through the same hub we're receiving funds from inmate families through Western Union and Wachovia Bank."
The SOA implementation not only links different types of data, but also completely different computer systems.
"All very different business processes, very, very uncommon connection points," the CCA CTO explained. "You've got a SQL-based county. You've got a mainframe situation with Western Union and our state customer. And at Wachovia, you've got open architecture distributed computing type system."
Asked why he chose SOA, Pfeiffer quips "Why SOA? Well what else would I do?"
Pressed to explain, he replies, "The opportunity we faced was to integrate our information and data and our business processes with those of our customers, to minimize non-value added work and maximize access to information. Obviously, an SOA architecture is the most facile way to do that in 2007."
For more information
'First, do no harm,' guides Marriott SOA plans
Check out our SOA Learning Guide
http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1262308,00.html
Posted by lois at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
New Scrutiny as Immigrants Die in Custody
New Scrutiny as Immigrants Die in Custody
By NINA BERNSTEIN, NY Times 6-26-07
Sandra M. Kenley was returning home from her native Barbados in 2005 when she was swept into the United States’ fastest-growing form of incarceration, immigration detention.
Seven weeks later, Ms. Kenley died in a rural Virginia jail, where she had complained of not receiving medicine for high blood pressure. She was one of 62 immigrants to die in administrative custody since 2004, according to a new tally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that counted many more deaths than the 20 previously known.
No government body is charged with accounting for deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities where more than 27,500 people who are not American citizens are held on any given day while the government decides whether to deport them.
Getting details about those who die in custody is a difficult undertaking left to family members, advocacy groups and lawyers.
But as the immigration detention system balloons to meet demands for stricter enforcement of immigration laws, deaths in custody — and the secrecy and confusion around them — are drawing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and from government investigators.
Spurred by bipartisan reports of abuses in detention, the Senate unanimously passed an amendment to the proposed immigration bill that would establish an office of detention oversight within the Department of Homeland Security. Detention capacity would grow by 20,000 beds, or 73 percent, under the bill, which is expected to be debated again today in the Senate.
Complaints focus on a lack of independent oversight and failures to enforce standards for medical care, suicide prevention and access to legal help.
The inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security recently announced a “special review” of two deaths, including that of a Korean woman at a privately run detention center in Albuquerque. Fellow detainees told a lawyer that the woman, Young Sook Kim, had pleaded for medical care for weeks, but received scant attention until her eyes yellowed and she stopped eating.
Ms. Kim died of pancreatic cancer in federal custody on Sept. 11, 2005, a day after she was taken to a hospital.
Some of the sharpest criticism of the troubled system has come from officials at one of the largest detention centers in the country, York County Prison in Pennsylvania.
“The Department of Homeland Security has made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the constitutional requirements of providing adequate health care to inmates that have a serious need for that care,” the York County Prison’s warden, Thomas Hogan, wrote in a court affidavit last year.
Officials with the immigration agency say that some deaths are inevitable, and that sufficient outside scrutiny comes from local medical examiners. Detention expanded by more than 32 percent last year, and the average length of stay was cut to 35 days from 89, said Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman.
“We spend $98 million annually to provide medical care for people in our custody,” Ms. Zuieback said. “Anybody who violates our national immigration law is going to get the same treatment by I.C.E. regardless of their medical condition.”
She declined to release information about the 62 detention deaths since 2004, including names, dates, locations or causes.
Twenty deaths were reported over the same period in a recent briefing paper for the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants from a list compiled by civil liberties lawyers from reports by relatives, advocates and the news media.
Detention standards were adopted by the immigration agency in 2000, but are not legally enforceable, unlike rules for the treatment of criminal inmates. The Department of Homeland Security has resisted efforts by the American Bar Association to turns the standards into regulations, saying that rulemaking would reduce the agency’s flexibility.
“The deaths bring forward in the worst way the systemwide problems,” said Sunita Patel, a lawyer for Legal Aid who prepared the United Nations briefing paper.
Some advocates of curbs on immigration say the solution is quicker deportations.
“The taxpayer cannot be expected to underwrite the elaborate detention facilities that some of these organizations want,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
In the case of Ms. Kenley, a legal permanent resident of the United States for more than 30 years, detention interrupted her medical care for high blood pressure, a fibroid tumor and uterine bleeding. An autopsy attributed her death to an enlarged heart from chronic hypertensive disease. But a report by emergency medical services said that she had fallen from a top bunk, and that a cellmate had pounded on the door for 20 minutes before guards responded.
Ms. Kenley’s sister, June Everett, said her questions had gone unanswered.
“How did my sister die?” she asked, as Ms. Kenley’s daughter, Nicole, wept. “It’s a whole set of confusion, so who knows, really? And I would like to know.”
Ms. Kenley had been traveling with her 1-year-old granddaughter when she arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport, records show, and she was ordered to return without the baby to discuss two old misdemeanor drug convictions that had surfaced in an airport database.
She obeyed. A transcript shows she admitted a conviction for drug possession in 1984 and one in 2002 for trying to buy a small amount of cocaine. She described a life derailed by drug addiction after 11 years of working in a newspaper mailroom.
“I turned my life around,” Ms. Kenley told the immigration inspector, pointing to three drug-free years after probation and treatment, completion of a nursing course, and legal custody of the granddaughter, Nakita. She also showed that she was taking blood pressure medication and was scheduled for surgery.
The inspector arrested her, invoking the law: two drug-related convictions made her subject to exclusion from the United States.
“I am barely living,” Ms. Kenley later wrote her sister from Pamunkey Regional Jail, in Hanover, Va., “trying to hold on until you get a lawyer to help me.”
She died at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Va.
Her only court appearances were by video monitor, waiting for a volunteer lawyer who never came.
Even detainees with legal counsel sometimes do not survive.
Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born taxi cab mechanic in Washington with no criminal record, died in detention last December.
Mr. Sall, whose boss of 17 years had sponsored him for a green card, was at an immigration interview with a lawyer, Paul S. Allen, when he was unexpectedly arrested on an old deportation order — part of a legal tangle left when another lawyer abandoned his case in the 1990s, Mr. Allen said.
The case file shows that Mr. Allen’s office urged medical intervention for Mr. Sall, who had been taking medication for a serious kidney ailment at the time of his arrest. While in detention at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va. he complained that he was not getting his medication and that his symptoms were worsening in a barracks-style unit.
Fellow detainees described Mr. Sall huddling next to the unit dryer for warmth, barely able to walk. “The medical staff told him they don’t have what he needs because immigration don’t pay enough money,” one detainee wrote.
The accusation was denied by Lou Barlow, the jail’s superintendent, who said Mr. Sall had received good care, including a visit to the local emergency room.
“We’ve never done anything unethical, illegal or immoral,” Mr. Barlow said.
Autopsy results are still pending.
Some deaths, like Ms. Kim’s, come to light well after the fact. Ms. Kim, a cook of about 60, was swept up in a raid on a massage parlor and detained for a month at the Regional Correctional Center in Albuquerque, a county prison operated by the Cornell Companies, a publicly traded corporation.
Months after her death, a lawyer in Santa Fe, N.M., Brandt Milstein, learned about the case from other Korean detainees, since deported. Mr. Milstein said that under New Mexico law, the death should have been reviewed by the state’s medical inspector, but officials had not reported it as a death in custody.
About two weeks ago — nearly two years after Ms. Kim died — the inspector general’s office called him, Mr. Milstein said. The investigation is now under way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26detain.html?ref=us
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 04:47 PM | Comments (0)
Dallas PA: Residents-Build New Prison Elseware
06/25/2007
Mundy, residents: Build new prison elsewhere
BY ELIZABETH SKRAPITS
STAFF WRITER
People who want to build new homes in a semi-rural setting aren’t the only ones who find the large plots of land in Jackson Township appealing.
Ample land is a main reason state officials chose State Correctional Institution at Dallas in the township as one of three possible locations for prison expansion.
Township residents, concerned about security and the effect an additional 2,000-inmate prison would have on the water supply, sewer system, roads and environment, have launched a petition drive opposing it. Resident Pat Rusiloski said she has collected hundreds of signatures in just under two weeks.
Rusiloski plans to give copies of the petition to state Rep. Phyllis Mundy, D-Kingston, and the Jackson Township supervisors.
“I’m very sensitive to the concerns of my constituents in Jackson Township and the Back Mountain,” said Mundy. “At this point, I’m trying to keep that location out of the capital budget. I don’t know if I will be successful or not. I let the department (of corrections) know I would rather find another location for the prison.”
SCI-Huntingdon, opened in Huntingdon County in 1889; SCI-Rockview, opened in Centre County in 1915; and SCI-Dallas, opened in 1960, have desirable sites for new prisons because they are on a “decent amount of land, and the facilities are older,” Department of Corrections spokeswoman Susan E. McNaughton said.
“I don’t know that our other prisons have the amount of land those institutions do,” she said.
There are more than 45,500 inmates in the state prison system. SCI-Dallas has a capacity of only 1,750, but its population was 2,084 as of May 31.
To ease overcrowding, the Department of Corrections put a request in the state capital budget for new prisons to be built alongside three existing facilities, with the hopes that if the prison population declines, the older prisons can be closed, McNaughton said. Construction of new prisons will depend on whether the state legislature approves the budget and Gov. Ed Rendell releases the funding.
Resident Chris Miller said a new prison would strain Jackson Township’s resources, from its water supply to its roads.
“We have huge trucks coming up and down these country roads, these small roads, daily,” he said.
But for Miller, the most serious issue is safety.
Terry Lee Brown, who was jailed at SCI-Dallas on charges of retail theft, assaulted an employee and fled in one of the prison’s pickup trucks on Jan. 8, 1998. He was captured by state police the next day near State Routes 11 and 29 in Plymouth Township.
The escape of Michael McCloskey, who was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, and convicted arsonist Anthony Yang sparked a massive manhunt on Aug. 16, 1999. The two Philadelphia felons cut through the bars on their cell window and escaped over the prison’s razor-wire-topped fence using a makeshift ladder.
McCloskey and Yang were captured in Hanover Township on Aug. 19, 1999. Miller remembers “overflow crowds” at a hearing held at Penn State in Lehman Township afterwards.
“All of the Back Mountain was outraged and in fear because of that escape,” Miller said.
Mundy is aware of residents’ worries.
“I really don’t share those concerns about security because the new prisons are very secure, and this one would be state-of-the-art,” Mundy said. Security at SCI-Dallas has been “dramatically improved” since the 1999 escape, she added.
Rusiloski doesn’t agree.
“They say state-of-the-art. They put these up and they forget about them,” she said. “Maintain what you have before you build a new one.”
Lack of maintenance is a chronic problem, she said.
“The grounds are overgrown, they don’t cut the fields. If there’s ever an escape, they’re never going to even see the inmates,” Rusiloski said.
Sirens at the prison are supposed to be tested every Wednesday at noon, she said. Last Wednesday, Rusiloski sat beneath the one on Huntsville and her friend Bonnie Dombroski sat in her backyard, which is near the prison.
They never heard the sirens, Rusiloski said. She later learned they were broken.
Jackson Township Supervisors David Roskos, Allen Fox and John Wilkes Jr. scheduled a meeting on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the fire hall on Chase Road. Local, state and federal elected officials are invited, as are all residents of the Back Mountain, Wilkes said.
“The whole purpose of the meeting is to take public input on the expansion,” Wilkes said. “People in the area have the right to speak, and to have their voice heard ... Obviously, I’ve heard more people against it. If people think it’s a good idea, they should speak for it.”
Mundy said she would be in Harrisburg on Thursday because the House is in session, but she would send a representative.
http://www.citizensvoice.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18513913&BRD=2259&PAG=4ept_id=455154&rfi=6
Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2007
WI: Voter Fraud Conviction of Woman Who Cast Illegal Absentee Ballot is Upheld
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=620108
Voter fraud conviction upheld
Posted: June 14, 2007
In a 3-0 decision, a federal appeals court Thursday upheld the voter fraud conviction of Kimberly Prude, the Milwaukee grandmother of three who cast an illegal absentee ballot in the 2004 election.
The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago rejected claims made by Prude's defense team that key testimony from the chief inspector at a polling location where Prude worked on election day should have been omitted from the jury trial.
The court also rejected a claim that the jury was not instructed adequately on the theory of Prude's defense as well as claims that Prude was denied the chance to introduce testimony about procedures to withdraw a vote.
Prude, a felon under state supervision, was ineligible to vote in 2004. She worked as a volunteer for the John Kerry-John Edwards campaign and cast an absentee ballot after an Oct. 22, 2004 rally that featured Rev. Al Sharpton. Prude claimed she called the election commission and attempted to withdraw her ballot but was told by a person on the telephone that she should not be worried about the vote.
In 2005, a jury convicted Prude of voter fraud and her probation was revoked. Prude had previously pleaded guilty to a state charge of forgery in 2000.
Prude is serving her sentence at the Robert E. Ellsworth Correctional Center in Union Grove. She is expected to be released in the autumn.
- Bill Glauber
Posted by lois at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2007
AZ: 6,000 new cages
"Schriro expressed confidence that her department would be able to staff new or expanded prisons providing 4,000 new public beds included in the Legislature's bipartisan budget for the fiscal year. The budget also authorizes 2,000 additional private beds.``We are earnest in pressing forward on all 6,000 beds ... and are ready to spring into action,'' Schriro assured the lawmakers."
Arizona Prisons Staffed but Still Stuffed with Inmates
June 19th, 2007
by Associated Press
PHOENIX - Arizona has nearly filled vacancies in the ranks of its corrections officers but still lacks space for thousands of inmates, keeping the state in the market for prison beds in other states, Corrections Director Dora Schriro said Tuesday.
Pay raises have helped the department hire new officers and retain experienced ones, dramatically reducing the vacancy rate and providing savings on overtime that officers formerly had to work, Schriro told a legislative oversight committee.
However, Arizona's shortage of beds puts it on the verge of sending more prisoners out of state as growth of the inmate population continues to jump each month, Schriro said.
Arizona halted transfers of inmates to a prison in New Castle, Ind., just before an April 24 riot involving Arizona and Indiana prisoners but is close to deciding whether to send more, Schriro said.
Repairs to the New Castle prison have been completed and, in another sign that the facility is returning to normal, Indiana authorities plan to lift restrictions on inmate movements, Schriro said. ``We are anxious for Indiana to succeed.''
Meanwhile, the state is contracting for additional beds at a Watonga, Okla., prison already housing some Arizona inmates and planning to send inmates to a prison in Hinton, Okla., for the first time, she said.
The oversight committee's chairman, Republican Rep. Russell Pearce, welcomed the additional hirings and the retention of current officers.
``This is good progress when we're filling positions that we have, both for public safety and for officer safety,'' he said.
Schriro expressed confidence that her department would be able to staff new or expanded prisons providing 4,000 new public beds included in the Legislature's bipartisan budget for the fiscal year. The budget also authorizes 2,000 additional private beds.
``We are earnest in pressing forward on all 6,000 beds ... and are ready to spring into action,'' Schriro assured the lawmakers.
http://ktar.com/?nid=6&sid=518216
Posted by lois at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)
NY: Rome council backs drug dealer registry
Observer-Dispatch---Utica, NY
Rome council backs drug dealer registry
June 18, 2007
By LISA KAPPS
ROME -‹ The Rome Common Council took a stand last week in the battle against drugs.
"After decades of the war on drugs, it is painfully clear that we are losing," Rome Common Councilman Philip Vescio Jr. said at Wednesday night's meeting as he introduced a resolution in support of a state Senate bill sponsored by state Sen. George H. Winner Jr., R-C-Elmira.
The "drug dealer registration act" would require convicted drug dealers to be registered in a database, re-registering in the event that they move.
"It's modeled after the sex-offender registry," Vescio said.
The resolution supporting the Senate bill passed the Rome council unanimously.
The proposed database would include names, known aliases, birthdates, physical descriptions, photographs, fingerprints, lists of offenses and sentences, among other data.
While the bill has not been passed into law yet, its current form calls for a toll-free number the public can call to see if an individual is a drug dealer and an Internet posting of the database.
Drugs have two costs, Vescio said. They are costly monetarily as drug criminals fill the prison system but also sociologically as drugs destroy families and communities.
Vescio also cited the recent shooting of Utica Police Officer Thomas Lindsey.
"In light of the recent murders of some of our area's police officers, steps like this have, in my opinion, become necessary," he said.
http://www.uticaod.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070618/NEWS/706180336/10
01/NEWS01
Posted by lois at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)
RI: state subsudized child care for 2,400 lost and 17 year olds will be tried as adults
"Therefore, the spending plan is expected to become law in the coming weeks. As a result, an estimated 2,400 children will lose state-subsidized childcare as of July 1. And beginning that same date, all 17-year-olds charged with criminal offenses in Rhode Island will be tried as adults and sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions if sentenced to jail time."
Senate goes along with House-passed budget plan
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
By Steve Peoples
Journal State House Bureau
PROVIDENCE ‹ There were concerns about freezing state education aid. There were concerns about sending 17-year-olds to state prison. And there were concerns about a privatization proposal that the governor says essentially kills his plan to reform state government.
But the Senate was not expected to change any of the proposals during its budget debate yesterday afternoon. And it did not.
The Senate approved the state¹s fiscal 2008 budget by a 29-to-9 vote after an hour and 20 minutes of debate. It was the same $6.99-billion spending plan approved overwhelmingly early Saturday by the House of Representatives during a marathon session spanning 11 hours.
The budget now heads to the governor¹s desk, where it faces a promised veto. But the governor¹s office acknowledges that it does not have enough support in the General Assembly to block a veto override, which requires a three-fifths vote in the House and Senate.
Therefore, the spending plan is expected to become law in the coming weeks.
As a result, an estimated 2,400 children will lose state-subsidized childcare as of July 1. And beginning that same date, all 17-year-olds charged with criminal offenses in Rhode Island will be tried as adults and sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions if sentenced to jail time.
And while the Assembly may address state education financing in the session¹s waning days, Rhode Island communities will receive the same amount of education aid next year that they did this year, according to the current budget. Both chambers approved a spending plan that cuts the 3-percent increase the governor had proposed in January.
³No one is 100-percent happy with this budget,² said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Stephen D. Alves, D-West Warwick, repeating a mantra that has echoed throughout State House hallways for much of the past month. ³The budget crafted by the General Assembly is responsible, responsive, and most of all, realistic.²
The state budget passed by the Assembly closes a fiscal 2008 deficit that was estimated at $200 million earlier in the year and grew by $90 million last month when state officials learned that a massive insurance settlement was tied up in litigation.
The budget passed yesterday also helps the state end the current fiscal year in the black by using $22 million of anticipated tobacco-settlement bonds. Roughly $153 million in tobacco funds also will be used to balance the 2007-¹08 budget, despite Governor Carcieri¹s vocal opposition.
³This budget is a huge disappointment for every Rhode Islander who wants a bright future for their children and grandchildren,² Carcieri said in a statement. ³But it is a huge win for the labor leaders who appear to be in charge of both the House and the Senate.²
The Assembly gave Carcieri some wiggle room to achieve personnel savings next year, but largely ignored his plans to cut 1,000 state jobs and freeze union wage increases. The legislature went a step further regarding the governor¹s recently announced plan to reform state government by privatizing ³every state service that could possibly be performed more efficiently by the private sector.²
The Senate vote upholds a proposal unveiled Friday night that adds a comprehensive set of privatization oversight provisions that Carcieri said amounts to turning ³over the keys of state government to the unions.²
The privatization measure, which also becomes state law as of July 1, requires a series of detailed reports and cost comparisons ³prior to the closure, consolidation or privatization of any state facility, function or program.² It also requires the governor¹s office to report its intentions to the General Assembly and gives ³aggrieved parties² the right to appeal any privatization effort to Superior Court.
The most heated debate in the Senate yesterday was related to privatization.
Digital Extra
Your turn: React to the General Assembly budget
³I am as concerned as I have ever been about the need to address privatization. I have no argument with anyone who feels that privatization is something that needs to be monitored, controlled and dealt with,² said Sen. J. Michael Lenihan, D-East Greenwich, chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Oversight. ³The question is, however, is this the best approach? In my judgment, it¹s heavy handed and probably would prevent privatization even where it¹s appropriate.²
Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed disagreed.
³This amendment doesn¹t say that if the governor desires, he can¹t lay off 1,000 people. It doesn¹t say he can¹t privatize,² she said. ³What this bill says is before you privatize, you need to provide a fair, objective competitive standard. You can¹t simply lay off people and cause the fear that has been among our employees in the state for the past week. It wasn¹t fair.²
There was also some debate on the move to try 17-year-olds as adults.
During floor debate, Sen. Harold M. Metts proposed an amendment ‹ one of seven introduced altogether ‹ to block the proposal. The Adult Correctional Institutions ³is no place for a teenager,² he said.
Although Metts¹ amendment failed, along with all the rest, the Senate leadership left the door open for reversing the change before it takes effect. Alves said a ³trailer bill² may be introduced this week to bring the age of majority back up to 18, and inscribe other cost-saving measures in the law.
Other items in the budget that drew little mention yesterday would close a series of perceived corporate tax shelters, allow Sunday auto sales from noon to 6 p.m., double the cost of vanity plates, or the so-called ³SUV tax,² which would require owners of vehicles weighing more than two tons to pay higher registration fees.
The Senate debate also ignored creative revenue-enhancing proposals being floated around the State House that may send significant aid to cities and towns in the near future.
Lawmakers from both chambers, lobbyists and the governor¹s spokesman yesterday acknowledged that a proposal is being discussed that would extend the hours of operation at both Twin River and Newport Grand as a way to boost state revenue.
The proposal, according to Rep. Thomas C. Slater, could generate between $25 and $30 million in new state revenue. Slater said he was briefed on the plan by a representative from Twin River in recent weeks.
³It doesn¹t really hurt anybody and with Massachusetts coming closer and closer to a casino, they¹ve got to do something,² he said.
House Finance Committee Chairman Steven M. Costantino said he doesn¹t ³conceptually disagree with the idea² of allowing the slot parlors to stay open 24 hours a day. ³People are talking about 24 hours, but I haven¹t seen anything in writing yet,² he said.
Senate President Joseph Montalbano, D-Lincoln, is also open to the idea.
³Will I support that? Yes, I would, because I believe the extended hours would raise significant revenue that we need,² he said.
Supporters of the proposal, which include labor unions, believe that the hours of operation at both facilities could be extended either by passage of a bill before the General Assembly or by a governor¹s order.
Carcieri¹s office has been in contact with Lincoln town officials regarding the plan, according to Jeff Neal, the governor¹s spokesman.
³I very much doubt that Governor Carcieri would even begin to investigate the possibility of extending the hours for Twin River unless he had an explicit request from the Town of Lincoln to do so,² Neal said, adding that Carcieri had received a letter from Lincoln Town Administrator T. Joseph Almond dated Friday indicating only that there were no public safety concerns.
When contacted yesterday, Almond said the town¹s official position on the subject would have to come from the Town Council.
Town Council President Jeremiah T. O¹Grady opposed expanding Twin River¹s hours to 2 a.m. in January. During that debate, he speculated that the park¹s management¹s plan was a round-the-clock operation. But he was more circumspect yesterday.
³My reaction is that at this point nothing has been done,² O¹Grady said. ³I will be prepared to react to the concept if something happens.²
Meanwhile, lawmakers are weighing another revenue-enhancing proposal, to levy a 3.5-percent tax on cable and satellite TV bills. The same package of legislation ‹ withdrawn from Friday¹s House budget debate ‹ would allow cities and towns to charge user fees for fire-alarm master boxes, and bar water authorities from collecting fire-hydrant rental fees from cities and towns.
Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the National Education Association Rhode Island, said yesterday that interest groups would be busy in the coming days.
³It¹s fair to say that we¹re going to be up here until the last minute trying to figure out if there¹s a way to restore funding to education,² he said. ³We hear a lot of ideas floating around up here.²
With reports from Journal staff writers Elizabeth Gudrais, Katherine Gregg and John Hill
http://www.projo.com/news/content/state_budget_20_06-20-07_6E632CF.37a395b.h
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http://www.projo.com/news/content/prison_reform_06-20-07_J262UBM.34d4c48.htm
l
Providence Journal
Doing time on prison reform
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
By Elizabeth Gudrais
Journal State House Bureau
PROVIDENCE ‹ True to their word, lawmakers are doing something about the size of the state¹s prison population, which continues to set records in terms of the number of inmates and the cost to taxpayers.
The General Assembly is tackling the problem with a spate of bills flying back and forth between the House and the Senate. Lawmakers took votes on three bills yesterday; today, they will consider two more ‹ one of which was just introduced yesterday.
Legislative committees held hearings on many prison-related bills in March and April, but held them for further study. Members of a working group on the issue failed to reach a consensus. With just a few days remaining in this year¹s legislative session, advocates had all but given up hope.
Now lawmakers appear poised to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for drug charges. They may also act on measures designed to cut down on debt-related incarceration and prevent the state from imprisoning people on probation violations if they¹re not convicted of the crime that constituted the violation. And they are fast-tracking a new proposal to reward inmates for good behavior.
Supporters burst into applause when the probation-violation measure cleared the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, in spite of opposition from Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch. ³It¹s a matter of fundamental justice and due process,² said the bill¹s sponsor, Rep. David A. Segal, D-Providence.
Under current law, if someone who¹s already on probation is accused of committing a new crime, the new crime constitutes a violation of their probation terms and they can be imprisoned for the entire length of their earlier sentence, minus whatever time they have already served in prison. But if they are found not guilty of the new crime, or if a grand jury fails to return an indictment, the probation violation does not automatically go away.
Even worse, advocates said, there is no clear legal procedure for getting the probation violation dismissed, and consequently, the person usually remains in prison even after the new charge has been dismissed.
Segal¹s bill would change that. It¹s on its way to the House floor, and would need to clear the Senate, too, before becoming law.
The same group of advocates rejoiced yesterday when the Judiciary Committee gave the nod to a bill by Rep. Joseph S. Almeida, D-Providence, to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for drug charges. The measure is expected to bring down prison costs by freeing judges to divert people into drug treatment, which costs less than incarceration, and give first-time offenders shorter sentences. A twin bill by Sen. Harold M. Metts, also D-Providence, is on its way to the Senate floor.
Metts is also the sponsor of a bill that would create guidelines for judges to release prisoners who don¹t have enough money to pay their court fines and fees.
Unpaid court fines and fees are ³the single largest cause of pre-trial commitments² to the Adult Correctional Institutions, accounting for 2,000 incidents a year and costing the state $500,000 annually, according to a report from the Rhode Island Family Life Center, a Providence nonprofit that assists inmates after their release. In 15 percent of these cases, the state spends more to keep the person in prison than the amount the person owes, the report said.
Under Metts¹ bill, if someone is getting disability payments, public assistance, or food stamps, that person would automatically be considered unable to pay, and could not be imprisoned solely for nonpayment of court fines or fees.
The bill also directs the court system to give arrested persons a hearing on ability to pay ³forthwith,² and orders the courts to assess convicted persons¹ ability to pay ³immediately after sentencing.² Advocates say the state prison is overcrowded in part because people are unable to get such hearings promptly.
Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union¹s Rhode Island chapter, called the bill ³a very important first step, both in addressing the overcrowding problem and the inequities that occur because of fines imposed in even minor criminal cases.²
Metts, a Baptist deacon who performs prison ministry at the ACI, also introduced a bill yesterday to allow inmates to get increased credit for so-called ³good time.² The bill has Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed as a cosponsor.
Under the bill, inmates who ³have faithfully observed² the prison¹s ³rules and requirements² and have not been subject to discipline would be rewarded with shorter sentences. Currently, inmates with long sentences ‹ anything greater than one year ‹ can only get one day subtracted for each year of their sentence. Inmates with shorter sentences ‹ between six months and a year ‹ can get one day subtracted for each month. Inmates with sentences shorter than six months don¹t qualify for ³good time² at all.
Metts proposes opening up the system to all inmates with sentences longer than one month, and giving all categories of inmates 10 days¹ credit for each month¹s good behavior.
The bill was introduced yesterday and scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee today, as the legislature continues its mad rush toward adjournment.
Also slated for a hearing today in the same committee is a bill by Rep. J. Patrick O¹Neill, D-Pawtucket, to allow sentencing judges to waive overnight stays at the ACI for people sentenced to community confinement. The bill passed the House last month.
egudrais@projo.com
Posted by lois at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2007
MA: Many sex offenders end up at shelters.
"Massachusetts has eight regional centers, including one in Mattapan, to help about 20,000 inmates -- including more than 200 sex offenders -- released annually from state prisons and jails. Charles McDonald , a spokesman for the state's Sex Offender Registry Board, acknowledged the reentry centers are not able to help most sex offenders find housing."
Boston Globe
June 18, 2007
Many sex offenders end up at shelters. Some say state should help house ex-inmates By David Abel, Globe Staff
Nearly three years after the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state could post the names, addresses, and photos of the most dangerous sex offenders on a public website, sex offenders released from prison now often end up in homeless shelters, where it is difficult to track them, and a range of potential victims sleep nearby.
In a recent review of 77 Level 3 sex offenders -- the category the state uses to define those with a high risk of committing sex crimes again -- who list addresses in Boston on the state's online registry, the Globe found that 65 percent reported they were living at homeless shelters.
Level 3 sex offenders are required by law to register their addresses with police.
City and state officials, police, and homeless advocates say the system meant to ease the transition from prison is broken.
They say the glut of sex offenders listing shelters as their address raises questions about whether they have anywhere else to go, whether they are more likely to commit additional sex crimes, and whether they list shelters as their address to evade registration.
"This is a critical issue of grave concern," said Jim Greene , director of the city's Emergency Shelter Commission. "Large, crowded homeless shelters are a militantly anti therapeutic milieu for people with mental health or other behavior problems. They're just not a place for a Level 3 sex offender to reintegrate into society."
He and other advocates for the homeless fault the state for more talk than action to keep sex offenders off the streets.
Greene pointed to an unrealized five-year-old plan the state Department of Correction provides to shelters and other agencies that house recently released prisoners. Former convicts deemed at risk of committing more crimes, it says, should have "risk reduction plans" that include applications for specialized housing, special workshops to help them get jobs and medical services; and supervision after their release.
But sex offenders released from prison often find themselves boxed out from housing. Gerard Theriault , for example, was forced out of a homeless shelter.
After living for more than a year in the basement of St. Paul's Church, the 64-year-old pedophile returned to the Dorchester shelter one day in February and was told he had to leave, immediately.
The Archdiocese of Boston had decided it would no longer allow sex offenders like Theriault, who spent five years in prison for molesting a child, to stay at the shelter, which the Pine Street Inn has run for 20 years.
"I didn't know where else I would go," he said. "It's not like anyone wants to take in a pedophile."
Massachusetts has eight regional centers, including one in Mattapan, to help about 20,000 inmates -- including more than 200 sex offenders -- released annually from state prisons and jails. Charles McDonald , a spokesman for the state's Sex Offender Registry Board, acknowledged the reentry centers are not able to help most sex offenders find housing.
"Having a home to live in is extremely important for a sex offender to reintegrate," McDonald said. "This is a problem that should be addressed on the grand scale."
One symptom of the problem, he said, is the state's failure to provide supervision for more than 1 in 6 sex offenders. There are 110 sex offenders in the state under strict state supervision, which includes GPS monitoring, biannual polygraph exams, and curfews, said Don Giancioppo , executive director of the Massachusetts Parole Board.
He said those 110 offenders are banned from living in homeless shelters.
Last year, the Legislature required the roughly 1,500 Level 3 sex offenders registered in the state to list their addresses more often -- every 45 days instead of 90 days -- if they stay in a homeless shelter.
Lawmakers also required them to register any other address where they stay four days or more.
In addition, they banned sex offenders from living in nursing homes, required classification of sex offenders before they leave prison, and mandated lifetime parole supervision for any sex offender convicted of crimes involving children.
In March, Governor Deval Patrick's office also submitted legislation to require mandatory post-release supervision for all inmates, which would last nine months to five years.
The state does not track the number of sex offenders who return to prison for sex crimes or count the homeless Level 3 sex offenders who fail to register. State officials say 49 percent of inmates commit new crimes within one year of leaving prison.
But Boston police Sergeant Detective Kim Gaddy , who verifies sex offenders' addresses, said it is time-consuming for the department to track homeless sex offenders, some of whom lie about living in shelters.
"It does pose difficulties for us, because few people may know them in the shelters and they leave during the day," Gaddy said. "Sometimes we can't find the individuals. You really have to do your homework."
Dr. James O'Connell , president of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, said "an awful lot of people register at the shelter and live somewhere else."
"The odds are that one or more of these sex offenders will recidivate, and if it's at a shelter, we'll all feel terrible," he said. "But if shelters say no to these people, where do they go? It just puts people in a terrible conundrum."
Gerard Theriault found a regular bed in a program for older men at the Pine Street Inn's main, often overcrowded shelter in the South End.
"Our mission and contracts dictate that we take anyone in who presents as homeless," said Shepley Metcalf , a spokeswoman for the Pine Street Inn.
The only exception is for those who pose an imminent danger to others.
She said Pine Street had no problems with Theriault, but that the shelter had to comply with the archdiocese's decision barring sex offenders from St. Paul's.
The archdiocese issued a statement saying it had barred sex offenders from the shelter because "this situation, which we became aware of, was in conflict with the Church's commitment and policies to protect children."
As for Theriault, who takes humanities classes at Harvard Extension School and computer classes at Bunker Hill Community College, he hopes to move out of the shelter soon.
"I'm concentrating my time looking for housing," he said. "It's rather problematic, to say the least. There are places that won't take you no matter what."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/06/18/many_sex_offenders_end_up_at_shelters/
Posted by lois at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
Rx: Incarcerex
From Drug Policy Alliance (1 minute long).
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/incarcerex.cfm
Posted by lois at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)
National Conference of State Legislators: State Funding for Corrections in FY 2006 and 2007
http://www.ncsl.org/programs/fiscal/correx07.htm
National Conference of State Legislators
State Funding for Corrections in FY 2006 and FY 2007
* Corrections Expenditures in FY 2006
* Corrections Appropriations in FY 2007
* Budget Overruns in FY 2007
* Looking Ahead
And.....
Monday, June 18, 2007
States seek alternatives to more prisons
By John Gramlich, Stateline.org Staff Writer
With swelling prison populations cutting into state budgets, lawmakers are exploring ways to ease overcrowding beyond building expensive new correctional facilities.
Though the construction of prisons continues as states struggle to provide enough beds for those behind bars, legislators increasingly are looking at other ways to free up space and save money, including expanded programs to help prevent offenders from being incarcerated again, earlier release dates for low-risk inmates and sentencing revisions.
Criminal justice analysts point to Kansas and Texas as recent innovators. Both states are putting off building new prisons, focusing instead on rehabilitation and recidivism. At the same time, a new $7.7 billion prison spending plan in California – where overcrowding last year forced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) to declare a state of emergency – has met with skepticism. Critics call the plan “prison expansion, not prison reform” and say the initiative relies on impractical fixes such as shipping inmates out of state.
State spending on prisons surged 10 percent nationally last fiscal year (see graphic) and growing inmate populations played a lead role in those costs, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Corrections trails only education and health care in swallowing state dollars, and experts say lawmakers are responding to the budgetary pressures by trying more cost-effective approaches.
“We’re seeing more and more states in different regions and with different political leadership tackling this issue and recognizing that the more they spend on prisons, the less they have to spend on health, education and other priorities,” said Adam Gelb, project director of the Public Safety Performance Project.
The project – which, like Stateline.org, is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts – in February forecast steep increases in incarceration rates and state spending in the next five years unless legislatures enact policy changes.
Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) last month signed into law a prison plan that is winning accolades for its creativity. Among other measures, the $4.4 million package provides financial incentives to community correctional systems for reducing prisoner admissions and allows some low-risk inmates to reduce their sentences through education or counseling while behind bars.
Under the plan, the state offers grants to localities for preventing “conditions violations” such as parole or probation infractions – a leading cause of prison overcrowding in Kansas and nationwide. To qualify for the grants, communities must cut recidivism rates by at least 20 percent using a variety of support tactics.
The early-release provision would cut time served by 60 days for some offenders who successfully complete programs that decrease their chances of returning to prison. Several other states, including Michigan, Nevada and Washington, recently announced plans to release some low-risk offenders early through similar initiatives, including good-time credits and expanded work-release programs.
Expectations are high in Kansas. State Rep. Pat Colloton (R), who led the push for the legislation in the House of Representatives, said she expects the plan to allow the state to postpone new prison construction until 2016 – though officials had said expansion would be necessary starting in two years.
In Texas, which houses 153,000 prisoners, the Legislature recently approved a plan that lawmakers have characterized as one of the most significant changes in corrections in a decade. The package, part of the state budget awaiting Republican Gov. Rick Perry’s approval, would divert thousands of inmates from prison to rehabilitation facilities, where beds would free up twice a year as offenders get help and re-enter society. Notably, the focus on rehabilitation would put off construction of costly new prisons.
The plan includes a new 500-bed treatment facility for those incarcerated for driving while intoxicated (DWI) – offenders who often have substance-abuse problems but receive no rehabilitation and face stiff sentences without the possibility of parole, according to one state Senate aide.
“We have changed the course of the ship substantially in the state of Texas,” said state Rep. Jerry Madden (R), chairman of the House Corrections Committee and an engineer of the prison plan.
In California, the only state with a larger prison system than Texas, Schwarzenegger this month signed a plan that calls for the construction of 53,000 new beds, with rehabilitation services to accompany the expansion.
Analysts say the plan has the potential to overhaul the state’s prison system by providing inmates new opportunities for education, job training and counseling. But they note that funding for the initiative’s rehabilitation services is far from guaranteed because the state has not yet approved its budget, and many in the corrections community are skeptical that lawmakers will follow through on their promises.
“It’s purely prison expansion. It’s just more business as usual,” said Joe Baumann, a state corrections officer who has worked for 20 years at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco. “The thing that everybody misses is the incarceration rate per 100,000 people.”
Meanwhile, other states are revisiting their sentencing policies. Nevada, facing an explosion in its prison population, recently reinstated a commission – dormant since 2000 – that will make recommendations on changing sentencing laws to help ease overcrowding.
At least 22 states revised their sentencing laws between 2004 and 2006 to ease prison overcrowding, according to a study by The Sentencing Project, a Washington., D.C.-based organization that advocates for policy changes.
Comment on this story in the space below by registering with Stateline.org, or e-mail your feedback to our Letters to the editor section at letters@stateline.org.
Governors expect tighter budgets in 2008
California versus New York: Grappling with the prison dilemma
COMMENTS (2)
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Discussion of preventing crime?
By Kristen LaEace on Jun 18, 2007 2:54:14 PM
While I applaud the enlightened work that state are starting to do around drug treatment and prisoner re-entry, I was sorry to see there was no discussion about crime prevention in the first place. The article seemed to focus on more short term solutions, rather than taking the long term of supporting youth, education, and families.
For-profit prisons making matters worse
By Frank Smith on Jun 19, 2007 6:31:02 AM
Although some states have been proactive in constraining the populations of their prisons, such as with the Kansas initiatives, others are falling more deeply in thrall to for-profit prison operators.
In Kansas, the industry tried to repeal a ban on new construction by the troubled industry by lobbying for combining repeal with a law guaranteed to increase the need for beds by 1,000 by 2012.
This tactic would be analogous to poisoning a victim, then offering to sell them the antidote.
On a broader scale, the industry has done this through its participation on the criminal justice committee of the American Legislative Exchange Council, producing "model" draconian legislation guaranteed to produce more market and more market share by casting a wider net for ever more minor offenders and harmless immigrants and keeping them for longer terms.
Exporting prisoners such as Schwartzenegger has done, with his obvious conflicts of interest with the for-profit industry, is dangerous. Witness the frequent riots that have struck these Rent-A-Pens in Kentucky, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico, Mississippi, etc.
http://www.stateline.org/live/printable/story?contentId=217204
graphs at this URL
Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2007
LLR Partners leads a $53 Million Equity Investment in Community Education Centers
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA
June 13, 2007
LLR Partners leads a $53 Million Equity Investment in Community Education Centers
PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--LLR Partners Inc. (³LLR²) and Primus Capital Funds (³Primus²) announced the completion of a $53 million equity investment in Community Education Centers, Inc. (³CEC² or the ³Company²), one of the largest providers of treatment, education and reentry services for adult correctional populations. This investment will allow CEC to complete the acquisition of CiviGenics, Inc. ("CiviGenics"), a correctional services company providing offender treatment and jail management services, and finance the combined company¹s expansion plans.
CEC specializes in providing extensive substance abuse counseling and life skills training to adult offenders who are nearing the end of their incarceration or are currently active in work release programs. CEC offers secure, standardized solutions to government agencies beset with overcrowded public facilities and burgeoning prison populations. The Company differentiates itself in this highly fragmented industry by the superior quality of its proprietary treatment and education programs that help individuals successfully re-enter society with the necessary life skills to remain out of prison. CEC has conducted studies that have shown the re-arrest rates among individuals who have completed CEC¹s programs are 50 percent less than industry averages.
CiviGenics, the largest in-prison treatment provider in the U.S., offers a wide variety of treatment programs, including work release and employment preparation, substance abuse therapies and related rehabilitative programs, all of which complement and enhance CEC¹s service platform. CiviGenics currently operates over 100 treatment programs in more than 19 states. Like CEC, CiviGenics serves various government entities, including state departments of corrections, counties, parole/probation boards, drug courts, community correction boards and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The combined company will become the nation¹s largest provider of offender re-entry services with a staff of more than 3,500, annual revenues in excess of $200 million and will operate 97 facilities in 22 states, which include reentry centers, in-prison treatment programs, and jail management contracts. The company will be headquartered in New Jersey and have an estimated 20,000 individuals in its programs and facilities. CiviGenics will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of CEC.
John Clancy, President and CEO of CEC, said, ³We are excited to partner with LLR and Primus as CEC enters its next phase of growth. Their expertise and experience in working with growth businesses will be invaluable as we integrate the CiviGenics acquisition and grow the combined company.²
³The combination of CEC and CiviGenics creates a company with the most diversified and unique service offerings in the corrections industry,² said Seth Lehr, a partner at LLR. ³John Clancy and his management team have a stellar reputation in the corrections industry, and we believe this is a great opportunity to partner with them as they expand their national footprint and provide results-driven solutions to a growing public problem.²
About Community Education Centers, Inc. (CEC)
Community Education Centers, Inc., located in Roseland, New Jersey, is the leading provider of rehabilitative and reentry services to the criminal justice system in America. CEC owns and operates residential reentry centers and day reporting/outpatient programs and provides a full range of therapeutic residential and non-residential correctional services with an empirically documented record of reducing recidivism. For more information about CEC, please visit www.cecintl.com.
About CiviGenics, Inc. (CiviGenics)
CiviGenics, Inc., headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, is a national management services company. Assembled under its corporate banner are experts in in-prison treatment, community corrections, and jail management services. Founded in 1995, CiviGenics is the second-largest privately held corrections operator, and the largest provider of correctional treatment programs in the United States. For more information about CiviGenics, please visit www.civigenics.com.
About LLR Partners Inc. (LLR)
LLR Partners Inc. is a $620 million private equity firm providing capital to middle market companies with growth potential, proven business models and outstanding management teams. LLR makes investments of $10 million to $50 million in a broad range of industries, with an emphasis on business services, healthcare, financial services and information technology. Based in the Philadelphia area, LLR seeks to create value through a variety of transactions, including buyouts, recapitalizations and expansion capital investments. For more information about LLR, please visit www.llrpartners.com.
About Primus Capital Funds (Primus)
Founded in 1983, Primus is a private equity firm established to invest in growth capital opportunities, recapitalizations and management-led buyouts. Primus typically invests between $10 million and $25 million per transaction targeting companies with proven business models and superior growth prospects. Primus makes both control and minority investments. The firm is experienced in a number of industries including business services, healthcare, for-profit education and communications. For more information about Primus, please visit www.primuscapital.com.
Contacts
LLR Partners Inc.
Press Contact:
Gregory FCA
Jessica Hirsch, 610-642-8253 ext. 132
Mobile: 732-995-5366
Jessica@GregoryFCA.com
Posted by lois at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
Prisons lose sight of justice for mentally ill
Prisons lose sight of justice for mentally ill
By SOL WACHTLER
Albany Times Union
First published: Thursday, June 14, 2007
"Reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability."
President John F. Kennedy spoke those words 44 years ago, when he signed the Community Mental Health Centers Act. Its intent was to close the psychiatric hospitals and provide community mental heath centers for the mentally ill. The unintended effect of this law was to close the asylums and make the prisons the nation's repository for our mentally ill.
According to the federal Justice Department, roughly 16 percent of the inmates in American prisons have serious psychiatric illnesses. They are not in prison because they are mentally ill, but rather because they violated the law. If their crime is the result of their mental illness, efforts should be made through mental health courts to divert them from prison. But for the mentally ill who are sentenced to prison, there must be a recognition of their desperate need for help.
This recognition was absent when it came to the incarceration of thousands of mentally ill veterans returning from Vietnam who, because of drug and related crimes, ended up in prison. We cannot let it happen to those veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq who, because of the high incidence of mental disorders, may become involved with the criminal justice system.
As we treat prisoners who suffer physical disabilities, so too should we concern ourselves with the treatment of prisoners who suffer from mental illness. Winston Churchill once observed that one of the most unfailing tests of a civilization is how a country treats its criminals. How much more telling is the way a country treats its mentally ill prisoners.
Five years ago, Disabilities Advocates Inc. brought a lawsuit against the state Office of Mental Health and Department of Correctional Services. It sought to eliminate the destructive practice of placing mentally ill prisoners in punitive segregation known as The Box, a 6-by-8-foot cell where the prisoner is locked down for 23 hours a day.
The suit also addressed another aspect of New York's shame: The Loaf. If a mentally ill prisoner becomes disruptive or acts out in response to voices only he can hear, he is put in The Box. If, while in The Box, he continues to be obstreperous or demonstrate other manifestations of mental illness, he is punished by being fed The Loaf. It's a dense, binding one- pound loaf of bread consisting of potatoes and flour with a side portion of raw cabbage.
That lawsuit was settled, and although the settlement will lead to some improvements, it doesn't come close to resolving the problems presented by our abuse of the imprisoned mentally ill.
For example, as part of the lawsuit settlement, The Loaf may no longer be fed to the inmate for more than seven consecutive days, but it still may be used as a punishment. And the 23 hours a day of lockdown will be reduced to 21 hours a day. This has been heralded as a meaningful concession, but it is far from that.
For most inmates, the extra hour a day, if he is returned to The Box, is useless. When you are caged like an animal in a cell not much larger than a bathroom, losing all sense of time, beset by noises and smells that defy description, being told that you can spend an extra hour or two in an isolated outdoor cage subject to cat calls from other inmates is not beneficial. Being returned to the hole in isolation makes the drill counterproductive and the prisoner even more dysfunctional.
My observations in this regard are not premised on academic theory. I spent more than a month in solitary confinement in a mental health prison unit. I can tell you from that tortured and mind-bending experience that psychiatrists or medical professionals, not prison guards, should oversee mentally ill inmates, and that no severely mentally ill prisoner should ever be put in The Box.
As The Correctional Association of New York recently reported: "On nearly every site visit, we encountered at least one or two individuals in disciplinary lockdown who were active psychotic, delusional or immobilized by depression ... who mutilated their own flesh, who hadn't left their cell in months and repeatedly attempted suicide." One such diagnosed schizophrenic, covered with scars from attempted suicides, "has spent 13 of his 15 years of incarceration in solitary confinement."
Earlier this month, the state Senate unanimously passed legislation that would eliminate solitary confinement for prisoners who are seriously mentally ill. The Assembly is in the process of passing the same legislation. This legislation will allow New York to join the many states, including New Jersey, Connecticut, California, Texas and Florida in keeping the seriously mentally ill out of solitary confinement. Similar legislation was passed last year but vetoed by Gov. George Pataki.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer has already shown his concern for this problem by committing substantial funding for psychiatric services for prisoners. Those who have studied the proposed legislation, which will keep seriously mentally ill prisoners out of solitary confinement, are in agreement that the funds the governor has already committed for the care of mentally ill prisoners would cover the costs of this necessary reform. It is the earnest prayer of those who abhor the mistreatment of the mentally ill that Spitzer sign the legislation.
We have seen the return of the "cold mercy of custodial isolation" in our criminalizing of mental illness. You don't have to be a trained penologist or psychiatrist to know that a mentally ill person should not be put in solitary confinement.
Not only is such internment uncivilized, it is also counterproductive. Most of the inmates will one day return to the streets in a worse state than they were when arrested.
Sol Wachtler is the former chief judge of New York. http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=597825
Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2007
Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission
Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission
By NEIL A. LEWIS, NY Times
WASHINGTON, June 13 — In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.
Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations that the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict.
The shift at the Justice Department has significantly altered the government’s civil rights mission, said Brian K. Landsberg, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and a former Justice Department lawyer under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“Not until recently has anyone in the department considered religious discrimination such a high priority,” Professor Landsberg said. “No one had ever considered it to be of the same magnitude as race or national origin.”
Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement that the agency had “worked diligently to enforce the federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on religion.”
The changes are evident in a variety of actions:
Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.
Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.
Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.
Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.
Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.
Along with its changed civil rights mission, the department has also tried to overhaul the roster of government lawyers who deal with civil rights. The agency has transferred or demoted some experienced civil rights litigators while bringing in lawyers, including graduates of religious-affiliated law schools and some people vocal about their faith, who favor the new priorities. That has created some unease, with some career lawyers disdainfully referring to the newcomers as “holy hires.”
The department’s emphasis has been embraced by some groups representing Muslims, Jews and especially Christian conservatives, who have long complained that the federal government ignored their grievances about discrimination.
“We live in a society that is becoming more religiously diverse, even by the hour,” said Kevin Seamus Hasson, who founded the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty 12 years ago. “So it’s entirely appropriate and slightly overdue that the Justice Department is paying more attention to the various frictions that increasing religious diversity is causing in the society.”
Combating racism remains an important mission, Mr. Hasson said, but one that has changed over the years. “We can now deal with the problems of racism more effectively on a more local level,” he argued. “We don’t always need the federal government to come riding over the hill.”
Some religious figures, though, are more wary about the changes at the Justice Department. Robert Edgar, president of the National Council of Churches, a liberal-leaning group, agreed that it was important to take on issues like religious discrimination and human trafficking.
But the problems of race and poverty in America “still require the highest caliber of attention,” said Mr. Edgar, who cited the flawed government response to New Orleans and its mostly poor, black population after Hurricane Katrina. He said he was distrustful of the Justice Department’s leadership to make appropriate decisions as to the nation’s civil rights priorities.
A New Mission
Some critics say that many of the Justice Department’s religious-oriented initiatives are outside its mandate from Congress. While statutes prohibit religious discrimination in areas like employment and housing, no laws address some of the issues in which the department has become involved.
“They are engaging in freewheeling social engineering,” said Ayesha Khan, counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and “using the power of the federal government to put in place an ideological, not constitutional agenda.”
The department declined to make available for interviews Assistant Attorney General Wan J. Kim, who heads the civil rights division, or Eric Treene, who holds the newly created position of special counsel for religious discrimination.
Ms. Magnuson, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said it was justified in devoting so much attention to the issue because Congress has demonstrated its interest by including religion in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enacting the 2000 law involving zoning restrictions, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
Ms. Magnuson also said the department had not diminished its interest in enforcing racial and national origin discrimination cases. The changes at the Justice Department began under Attorney General John Ashcroft, but have accelerated under Alberto R. Gonzales, his successor.
Mr. Gonzales has increasingly cited his agency’s record on behalf of religious causes as among his most important accomplishments, often noting the successful intervention in cases on behalf of people who had suffered discrimination for wearing Muslim head coverings. In speeches, he routinely says that religious freedom is the nation’s “first freedom because our founders saw fit to place it first in the Bill of Rights.”
President Bush has also talked of the department’s religion-related activities in appearances before religious conservatives, an important element of his support. Aside from any political benefit of satisfying conservative groups, the Justice Department’s shift has brought a more subtle dividend: a defense to the criticism leveled at past Republican administrations that they were half-hearted about civil rights enforcement.
Changing Mission
The Bush administration has avoided that problem by changing the civil rights mission to something its Justice Department can take on with enthusiasm.
The department has prevailed in many, if not most of the cases in which it has become involved. It has, in effect, duplicated in the religious arena its past success in cases involving race and national origin.
At the same time, the department has sharply reduced its efforts to combat voting rights plans that may dilute black electoral strength.
Ms. Magnuson, the department spokeswoman, said that the civil rights division had brought more voting rights lawsuits under Mr. Bush than had been brought in the Clinton administration.
But an examination of the Justice Department’s Web site listing of the cases brought through early 2007 shows that many of them involved a different part of the law, one that requires voting materials be available in languages other than English in places with high concentrations of Asian and Hispanic voters.
Joseph D. Rich, who recently stepped down as head of the voting rights section after a 37-year career at Justice, said that only the federal government had the resources to bring voting dilution cases, while private groups have been able to bring the language cases. The civil rights division also brought the first case ever on behalf of white voters, alleging in 2005 that a black political leader in Noxubee County, Miss., was intimidating whites at the polls.
The shift in priorities at the criminal section of the civil rights division has been especially stark. The criminal section — which previously had mostly focused on hate crimes or lawsuits against police officers who may have violated someone’s civil rights — began taking on human trafficking cases that had previously been handled elsewhere.
During Mr. Bush’s second term, the section brought dozens of cases against people charged under a new law with bringing women into the country to work in brothels. The new employees with religious backgrounds were enthusiastic about such cases, seeing them akin to combating slavery, a former career lawyer in the division said.
Pursuing trafficking cases, rather than those involving hate crimes or police abuse, was seen as important to moving ahead in the department, current and former career officials said. They added that political appointees in supervisory positions frequently vetoed proposed hate crime investigations or questioned them to death.
“You only needed for that to happen a few times and people got the message they shouldn’t be eager to send up such cases,” said one lawyer who would talk only on condition of anonymity.
Rigel C. Oliveri, a law professor at the University of Missouri who worked in the civil rights division during the Clinton and early Bush years, said it became increasingly frustrating to bring what she said were worthy civil rights cases, because the political appointees would not act on them. “It was like a black hole,” she said.
Whatever cases may have been slowed or ignored, some religious leaders said they were grateful for actions the department had taken.
The Rev. N. J. L’Heureux, the executive director of the Queens Federation of Churches in New York, said the department had helped several Christian, Muslim and Jewish congregations deal with local governments trying to block houses of worship in neighborhoods. In Hollywood, Fla., for example, the department successfully sued the city for denying a permit to an Orthodox synagogue.
Sometimes, Mr. L’Heureux said, an inquiry from Mr. Treene, the special religious affairs counsel, had been enough to encourage local governments to drop their resistance. The civil rights division favorably resolved 16 of 26 zoning investigations simply by expressing interest in them, according to the Justice Department.
Kareem W. Shora, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said that Mr. Treene had also intervened in cases the group brought to him about Arab prison inmates having access to prayer opportunities.
In so-called equal-access cases, the department has mostly won court rulings allowing religious organizations like the Child Evangelism Fellowship to have the same access to public school students as nonreligious groups, a principle generally approved by a divided Supreme Court in 2001.
In the candy cane case, for example, school officials in Westfield, Mass., had suspended students for handing out candy canes with religious messages, saying it was disruptive and lurid. The students said that the “J” shape represented Jesus and the red stripes his blood, the white his purity. In a pending case from San Diego, the government defended the city’s campground lease to the Boy Scouts, which had been challenged because of the group’s religious tenets. The department has also challenged so-called Blaine amendments, which are state constitutional provisions enforcing separation of church and state more rigidly than does the United States Constitution. The federal government sued because the amendments could impede Mr. Bush’s religion-based initiative, which provides money to religious groups for social programs.
Reshaping the Staff
As it has reoriented its priorities, the department has also tried to remake the cast of government lawyers who enforce civil rights. A number of career lawyers who served as section heads or deputies in the civil rights division have been replaced.
In Congressional testimony in March, Mr. Rich said seven managers had been removed or marginalized for what he characterized as political reasons or perceived disloyalty. Department officials acknowledge the changes, but dispute the reasons.
In addition, Mr. Ashcroft arranged for the agency’s senior political appointees to take over the decades-old system used to hire recent law school graduates for entry-level career jobs that are supposed to be nonpartisan.
Under the system, known as the honors program, nonpolitical career lawyers had screened applicants. Those selected were almost exclusively graduates of top-ranked law schools and often had had prestigious judicial clerkships or other relevant experience.
Monica M. Goodling, a former senior aide to Mr. Gonzales, testified to a House committee last month that she had improperly used politics to hire some people as assistant federal prosecutors and for other civil service jobs, a possible violation of federal employment laws.
But the pattern of hiring on an ideological basis was more widespread than what Ms. Goodling described, according to interviews and department statistics.
Figures provided by the department show that from 2003 through 2006, there was a notable increase of hirings from religious-affiliated institutions like Regent University and Ave Maria University. The department hired eight from those two schools in that period, compared to 50 from Harvard and 13 from Yale.
Several career lawyers said that some political appointees favored the religious-oriented employees, intervening to steer $1,000 to $4,000 annual merit bonuses to them.
Ms. Oliveri and several other law professors said placement officers and faculty at their schools found that graduates seeking work at the Justice Department had a better chance by cleansing their résumés of liberal affiliations while emphasizing ties to the Federalist Society, a Washington conservative group, or membership in a religious fellowship.
Ms. Oliveri recalled that when she was hired in 2000 by the Justice Department, she was impressed by the accomplishments of her peers. But once the political appointees controlled the hiring, she said, “The change in the quality of people who were chosen was very pronounced.”
When the front office sent around the résumés of those newly hired for the honors program, she said, “It was obvious what they had: conservative and religious bona fides.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/washington/14discrim.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp
Posted by lois at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
Bush nominates CCA VP to be US District Judge
CCA VP nominated to be US District Judge
By Ken Whitehouse, Nashville Post
06-13-2007
Gus A. Puryear IV has been nominated by President George W. Bush to serve as U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of Tennessee. Puryear would replace the retiring Judge Robert L. Echols.
Puryear currently serves at the executive VP/secretary/general counsel at Corrections Corp of America, having been named an officer in the company in January 2001.
He is a member of the board of directors of Nashville Bank and Trust and has served as legislative director and counsel to former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, as debate advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, and as counsel to the U.S. Senate's special investigation of campaign fundraising in the 1996 presidential election.
The Republican heavyweight has also clerked for Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, U.S. Circuit Judge for the Fifth Circuit in Jackson, Mississippi. He is a graduate of Emory University and received his J.D. from the University of North Carolina.
Puryear's campaign finance disclosure donation forms on file with the Federal Election Commission show that he has been a reliable source for GOP candidates, having maxed out to U.S. Bob Corker in this last election as well as being a regular contributor to the Tennessee and national Republican parties.
Puryear could not be reached for comment at the time of publication of this article.
http://www.nashvillepost.com/news/2007/6/13/cca_vp_nominated_to_be_us_district_judge
Posted by lois at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2007
NY Times: Court to Weigh Disparities in Cocaine Laws
June 12, 2007, NY Times
Court to Weigh Disparities in Cocaine Laws
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, June 11 — The Supreme Court, expanding its review of federal criminal sentencing, agreed Monday to consider the proper judicial response to the sharp disparity in the way the law treats crack cocaine and cocaine powder.
The court will address a growing rebellion among judges who have been issuing sentences lighter than those called for under the federal sentencing guidelines for criminals convicted of crack cocaine offenses. The federal appeals courts are divided on whether judges are permitted to exercise such discretion.
The lower courts have been trying to ease the impact of a 21-year-old federal law that imposes the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of 5 grams of crack, a bit more than a fifth of an ounce, as for 500 grams, or 1.1 pounds, of cocaine powder.
The 10-year mandatory sentence in the law incorporates the same 100-to-1 ratio. It is imposed for possession of 50 grams of crack, about one and three-quarters ounces, and 5 kilograms of powder, 11 pounds.
The federal sentencing guidelines have in turn incorporated the same disparity in the formulas by which a judge is supposed to build on the mandatory minimum and calculate an offender’s actual sentence.
Critics of the disparity, federal judges among them, have observed that the harsh sentences for crack offenses have had a disproportionate impact on black men from poor urban areas, where crack is much more common than the cocaine powder favored by white users. African-Americans make up 80 percent of those sentenced for trafficking in crack.
From among many cases pending at the Supreme Court on the question, the justices selected an appeal filed by the federal public defender’s office in Virginia on behalf of a man from Norfolk, Derrick Kimbrough, who pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing and distributing more than 50 grams of crack cocaine.
Taking account of Mr. Kimbrough’s criminal history and other factors, including a gun possession charge that added a mandatory five-year sentence, the federal guidelines called for a range of 19 to 22 years.
Judge Raymond A. Jackson of Federal District Court, pronouncing such a sentence “ridiculous” and “clearly inappropriate,” refused to impose it. Judge Jackson observed that Mr. Kimbrough had served in combat in the Persian Gulf war, had received an honorable discharge and was gainfully employed, with just misdemeanors and no previous felonies on his record.
Noting that the federal sentencing law requires judges to “impose a sentence sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to achieve the statute’s purposes, Judge Jackson gave Mr. Kimbrough 15 years, the lowest possible given the statutory mandatory minimums.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, rejected Judge Jackson’s reasoning and ordered resentencing.
“A sentence that is outside the guidelines range is per se unreasonable when it is based on a disagreement with the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine offenses,” the three-judge appeals court panel said.
The Fourth Circuit is thus at odds with other appeals courts, including the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, which ruled last fall that “a sentencing court errs when it believes that it has no discretion to consider the crack/powder cocaine differential incorporated in the guidelines.”
In February, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a similar opinion that was sharply critical of the disparity and said, “A sentencing judge cannot simply presume that a guidelines sentence is the correct sentence” for an offense involving crack.
Those appeals courts both noted that in 2005 the Supreme Court itself had made the guidelines advisory rather than binding, based on its conclusion that the guidelines system impinged on a defendant’s right to have a jury make the central determinations on which a sentence is based.
The Supreme Court’s failure to spell out in that decision, United States v. Booker, exactly what it meant by “advisory” has caused confusion throughout the criminal justice system. The court had hoped to resolve much of the confusion this term by hearing two cases presenting different aspects of the issue.
One case, Rita v. United States, No. 06-5754, which the justices are likely to decide in the next few weeks, raises the question of whether a sentence within the guidelines range should be presumed reasonable.
The second case, Claiborne v. United States, No. 06-5618, evaporated last month when the defendant, Mario Claiborne, who was free after serving his sentence, was shot to death in St. Louis. His case raised the question of what kind of explanation a judge has to give to justify a sentence below the guidelines range.
On Monday, the justices accepted a new case with similar facts as a substitute. A judge gave the defendant, Brian M. Gall, a sentence well below that called for by the guidelines, three years’ probation rather than three years in prison.
Mr. Gall, while a college student in Iowa, had been part of a ring that sold the illegal drug Ecstasy. He left the ring after eight months, finished college, moved to Arizona, started a business and lived an evidently crime-free life. The trial judge found that because Mr. Gall had learned his lesson and reformed, prison time would serve no purpose.
But the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, the same St. Louis-based court that issue the decision that had been under review in the Claiborne case, ordered resentencing, finding that such an “extraordinary” departure from the guideline range required an “extraordinary” justification.
The justices will hear Mr. Gall’s appeal, Gall v. United States, No. 06-7949, after the new term begins in October.
No action had been expected at this point on Mr. Kimbrough’s pending appeal of his crack cocaine sentence. But the justices evidently decided that as long as their review of sentencing would, unexpectedly, take them into the next term in any event, they should add a case on the crack issue to address the particular issues that these cases raise.
The decision to hear the case, Kimbrough v. United States, No. 06-6330, comes at a potentially significant moment in the debate over the question.
Last month, the United States Sentencing Commission, which has tried unsuccessfully for years to persuade Congress to reduce the disparity in the mandatory minimum sentences, announced its intention to reduce crack offenses by two levels in the guidelines formula.
That change will cut sentences for crack by about one-third, substantially reducing the disparity without legislative action. Last year, the average sentence for crack cocaine was 10 years, compared with 7 for cocaine powder.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/washington/12scotus.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)
June 11, 2007
Prisons ban books over fear of radicals
June 10, 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Prisons ban books over fear of radicals
By LARRY NEUMEISTER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
NEW YORK -- Inmates at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., were stunned by what they saw at the chapel library on Memorial Day - hundreds of books had disappeared from the shelves.
The removal of the books is occurring nationwide, part of a long-delayed, post-Sept. 11 federal directive intended to prevent radical religious texts, specifically Islamic ones, from falling into the hands of violent inmates.
Three inmates at Otisville filed a lawsuit over the policy, saying their Constitutional rights were violated. They say all religions were affected.
"The set of books that have been taken out have been ones that we used to minister to new converts when they come in here," inmate John Okon, speaking on behalf of the prison's Christian population, told a judge last week.
Okon said it was unfortunate because "I have really seen religion turn around the life of some of these men, especially in the Christian community."
The government maintained that that the new rules don't entirely clear the shelves of prison chapel libraries.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Feldman told U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain that prison libraries limited the number of books for each religion to between 100 and 150 under the new rules. He said officials would expand the number after choosing a new list of permitted books.
Feldman said the removal order stemmed from an April 2004 Department of Justice review of the way prisons choose Muslim religious services providers. It is not exactly clear why it took so long for the order to be put into effect, but prison officials said they needed time to examine a long list of books.
Feldman said the study was made out of a concern that prisons "had been radicalized by inmates who were practicing or espousing various extreme forms of religion, specifically Islam, which exposed security risks to the prisons and beyond the prisons to the public at large."
Feldman said the review by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons concluded that prison chapel libraries were not adequately supervised.
"The presence of extremist chaplains, contractors or volunteers in the BOP's correctional facilities can pose a threat to institutional security and could implicate national security if inmates are encouraged to commit terrorist acts against the United States," the bureau's report said.
The review suggested audio and video monitoring of worship areas and chapel classrooms and screening of religious service providers. It also recommended that prisons reduce inmate-led religious services and consider constant staff monitoring of inmate-led services.
A Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman in Washington did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Feldman said inmates are permitted to order books on their own and bypass the chapel libraries. "So fundamentally this is not a case about what books the inmates have the ability to read," he said.
However, inmates say the rules have had a chilling effect.
Inmate Moshe Milstein told the judge by telephone that the chaplain at Otisville removed about 600 books from the chapel library on Memorial Day, including Harold S. Kushner's best-seller "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," a book that Norman Vincent Peale said was "a book that all humanity needs."
"There is definitely irreparable harm done to us already, and we would like the court to issue the injunction to get the books back as soon as possible," he said.
Inmate Douglas Kelly, who described himself as a representative of the prison's Muslim community, complained of "a denial of our First Amendment rights."
He said books on Islam already were the least represented in the library's collections and were reduced by half in the Memorial Day removal.
"A lot of what we are missing were definitely prayer books or prayer guides and religious laws on the part of the Muslim faith," he said.
The judge said the lawsuit might be premature because the inmates had not yet followed prison administrative complaint procedures. She declined to block the book removals, the remedy sought by the lawsuit.
Ron Kuby, a civil rights lawyer who has represented a former head Islamic chaplain banned from the state prison system after he was accused of making extremist statements, called the prison book removal "a mass Memorial Day book burning."
But he also said there might be limits to relief the prisoners can seek because prisoners' First Amendment rights are severely limited.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Prison_Book_Ban.html
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PA: By the new definition, fewer return to prison
"There is no standard definition of recidivism nationally or statewide. One author refers to differing measures as a "fruit salad concept."
By the new definition, fewer return to prison
Real score: Those awaiting hearings pack the prison
By HELEN COLWELL ADAMS, Staff writer
Lancaster PASunday News
Published: Jun 10, 2007 12:16 AM EST
LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa - The Lancaster County Prison has cut its recidivism rate by more than half.
Yet there were 1,202 inmates housed at the prison on Friday, almost 100 more than the old jail can comfortably accommodate.
The difference is in how recidivism is defined.
By saying that recidivism means ex-offenders who have been found guilty of a new offense or who have failed to abide by terms of their probation or parole, the county Prison Board has effectively lowered the recidivism rate from an estimated 60 percent or more to 25 percent.
Under the definition, recidivism, which refers to the likelihood of an inmate re-offending, now excludes people being held at the prison for technical violations of their parole until hearings are held.
Before the Prison Board adopted the definition last June, said Warden Vincent Guarini, the local recidivism rate was an estimate based on the number of people who left the prison and came back, regardless of whether they had been adjudicated.
"We ran our in-and-out-the-doors against everybody else's," he said.
There is no standard definition of recidivism nationally or statewide. One author refers to differing measures as a "fruit salad concept."
Justice & Mercy, the statewide prison reform group based in Lancaster, has some reservations about the county's decision.
"There is a large percentage of technical parole violators in Lancaster Prison, and leaving them out of the definition will make the prison look like it's doing better," said Jean Bickmire, Justice & Mercy's administrative director.
"However, parole violators do increase the prison population and contribute to overcrowded conditions affecting available room for rehabilitation and classification, and increasing the burden of medical and mental health care."
County officials and the re-entry management organization (see related story, ....) have been working on more concrete solutions to overcrowding and recidivism at the prison.
One approach that may help, now in the planning stages, would cut the average time for a hearing on a technical parole viola