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July 31, 2007

Al Gore's Son...if only everyone could get the same treatment

Al Gore's 24-year-old son pleads guilty to possession of drugs July 31, 2007

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. (AP) - Al Gore's son pleaded guilty Monday to possessing marijuana and other drugs, but a judge said the plea could be withdrawn and the charges dropped if he successfully completes a drug diversion program.

Authorities have said they found drugs in Al Gore III's car after the 24-year-old was pulled over on July 4 for going 100 mph in his Toyota Prius.

He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of drug possession, two misdemeanor counts of drug possession without a prescription, and one misdemeanor count of marijuana possession, the district attorney's office said.

Jaime Coulter, senior deputy district attorney, said Gore's sentencing will be continued until Feb. 7. If he has complied with all the conditions of the diversion program, the sentencing will be continued again for another year, with charges possibly being dropped in 2009.

"At that point, he will be able to withdraw his guilty plea as if he never entered it," Coulter said.

Gore was expected to enter the drug diversion program immediately, said Farrah Emami, a spokeswoman for the district attorney.

Posted by lois at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)

AZ:States Export Their Inmates as Prisons Fill

July 31, 2007
States Export Their Inmates as Prisons Fill
By SOLOMON MOORE

ELOY, Ariz. — For Bob Weier, a Hawaiian convicted of armed robbery, incarceration at the Red Rock Correctional Center on the outskirts of this dusty town is the latest stop in a far-flung and nomadic exile.

Since his imprisonment 12 years ago on Maui, Mr. Weier, 53, has served his sentence in prisons in Minnesota, Oklahoma and Arizona. He last saw his daughter 11 years ago and has five grandchildren he has never met.

“To them, I’m just a voice who talks to them on the phone for a while,” said Mr. Weier, a heavyset man who expects to be released next year.

Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state.

The long-distance arrangements account for a small fraction of the country’s total prison population — about 10,000 inmates, federal officials estimate — but corrections officials in states with the most crowded prisons say the numbers are growing.

One private prison company that houses inmates both in-state and out of state, the Corrections Corporation of America, announced last year that it would spend $213 million on construction and renovation projects for 5,000 prisoners by next year.

“They find that their prison populations are at or beyond capacity and they have to relieve that capacity,” Tony Grande, the company’s president for state relations, said of states turning to private prisons. “They quickly turn to us and we have open prison capacity where we can accommodate growth.”

About one-third of Hawaii’s 6,000 state inmates are held in private in Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. Alabama has 1,300 prisoners in Louisiana. About 360 inmates from California, which has one of the nation’s most crowded prison systems, are in Arizona and Tennessee.

But while the out-of-state transfers are helping states that have been unwilling, or too slow, to build enough prisons of their own, they have also raised concerns among some corrections officials about excessive prisoner churn, consistency among the private vendors and safety in some prisons.

Moving inmates from prison to prison disrupts training and rehabilitation programs and puts stress on tenuous family bonds, corrections officials say, making it more difficult to break the cycle of inmates committing new crimes after their release.

Several recidivism studies have found that convicts who keep in touch with family members through visits and phone privileges are less likely to violate their parole or commit new offenses. There have been no studies that focused specifically on out-of-state placements.

Paige M. Harrison, a researcher for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the out-of-state inmates faced problems familiar to the large number of in-state prisoners incarcerated hundreds of miles from their homes. A study in 1997 found that more than 60 percent of state inmates were held more than 100 miles from their last place of residence.

“If you’re being held on the other side of Texas or California, you better believe that for many inmates, they’re beyond visitation,” Ms. Harrison said.

The frequent moves can also have a disruptive effect on prisons, whether the transfers occur within a state or not, corrections officials said. In California, a federal court official overseeing a revamping of the prison medical system reported more than 170,000 prisoner moves within the state in the first three months of this year. The moves were found to be inhibiting the ability of inmates to receive health care and draining resources.

In Arizona, where more than 2,000 inmates have been exported to prisons in Oklahoma and Indiana, corrections officials are struggling to provide consistent and effective programming for them, said Dora B. Schriro, the director of the Arizona Department of Corrections.

“Having a long-term impact on public safety and recidivism is that much more challenging,” Ms. Schriro said of the arrangements.

The number of inmates shipped out of Arizona would be even larger, but plans for additional transfers to Indiana had to be called off in April after 500 inmates from Arizona rioted at a privately run prison in New Castle, Ind., in part because of complaints about the long distance. Two correctional officers and five inmates were injured in the two-hour incident. Officials there assigned blame to poorly trained guards, many of whom were hired just days before the transfers.

Ms. Schriro said the riot showed how desperate the situation had become. The state’s overcrowding worsened, she said, after two private prisons in Texas now run by the GEO Group, canceled Arizona’s contract and instead signed more lucrative deals with federal corrections agencies.

“We started to add provisional beds in-state through double-bunking, converting several kitchens to bed space and making preparations to bring additional tents online,” Ms. Schriro said.

Eli Coates, a 26-year-old inmate from Arizona serving 10 years for armed robbery, did time at six Arizona prisons and one in Oklahoma before arriving at the New Castle prison early this year. New Castle is managed by the GEO Group.

Mr. Coates said his frequent moves had made it hard to complete educational programs that he hoped would help him get a steady job upon release.

“I was on my way to being able to finish a college program and vocational programs to get a trade,” Mr. Coates said. “But they snatched me up from those opportunities, and here I have to start all over again.”

Mr. Weier, the Hawaiian prisoner here in Arizona, said that each time he moved, he had to reapply for phone privileges, a process that can take six months. Even when he was allowed to call home, he said, he could not always afford the long-distance bills.

“You lose your family identity,” said Mr. Weier. “And that’s not good, because when we go back into society — and more than 95 percent of us will — the only ones who are going to take care of you are your family.”

Without big construction plans or radical sentencing reforms in the offing, Arizona will continue to rely on out-of-state alternatives. The state has some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country and an inmate population exceeding 37,000, or 127 percent of the state’s official prison capacity. Several public prisons are already surrounded by tent cities to accommodate the overflow.

Adam Ramirez, 35, an inmate from Tucson serving six years for a parole violation, sat sweating recently in a 16-man tent at the 100-year-old Florence State Prison, about 15 miles northeast of Eloy in Florence, Ariz.

“It’s always crowded in here,” said Mr. Ramirez, pointing to an empty bed next to his. “They sent that guy out to Oklahoma today and there will be somebody else here today or tomorrow.”

Overcrowding has been a problem in prisons for decades, and the country’s prison and jail population has never been higher, rising 2.8 percent from July 2005 to July 2006 to reach 2,245,189, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin. A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that the prison population will grow by another 192,000 in the next five years.

State corrections officials and prison industry executives say that prison companies are an attractive alternative when cash-strapped state governments need additional prison space faster than they can build it. Private prisons can also provide political cover to elected officials seeking to avoid charges of coddling criminals and spending large sums on prison construction.

Alabama officials turned to the Corrections Corporation of America for space after a judge threatened to hold the overloaded state corrections department in contempt for failing to pick up inmates from county jails, said Mr. Grande, the company official. The company found out-of-state space for 1,500 inmates within 30 days. When hurricanes beset Florida in 2003, Mr. Grande said, the company found alternative prison space within 72 hours.

But state governments often pay a premium for those spaces. The riot in Indiana in April came after Ms. Schriro, the Arizona corrections director, agreed to pay about $14 million a year to house 610 prisoners there. That is about $3 million more than the state would have paid for inmates at in-state public prisons, said a spokeswoman for Arizona corrections, Robin Wilkins.

Ms. Schriro is moving forward with plans to expand prison space for Arizona prisoners locally and in private prisons in Oklahoma. But she expects the state prison population to exceed capacity by the time those expansion projects are complete.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31prisons.html?pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

At Bronx Latino Festival, the Army Sponsors the Music

July 30, 2007
At Bronx Latino Festival, the Army Sponsors the Music
By FERNANDA SANTOS

A young recruiter with bulging biceps tapped his fingers against his stomach, following the thumping melody emanating from the stage nearby. A line of people stretched along the steel barricades surrounding his makeshift office, a black-and-gold tent erected by the Orchard Beach promenade. Beside him, a poster depicting a group of soldiers in military fatigues offered, in Spanish, an invitation of sorts:

It said: “Están entrenando para ser más que soldados.” (“They’re training to be more than soldiers.”) “Están entrenando para la vida.” (“They’re training for life.”)

Each Sunday until Labor Day weekend, a different organization pays $20,000 to $50,000 to cover most of the day’s expenses for the Tropical Music Festival, an annual series of Latin concerts at the beach on Long Island Sound, a mile-long stretch of sand known as the Riviera of the Bronx.

On July 22, the festival’s opening day, American Airlines was the principal sponsor. Yesterday, to the dismay of some local officials, it was the United States Army.

“I know we all have our opinions,” said the festival’s M.C., Casper Martinez, a stand-up comedian from the Bronx who broadcasts on a New York Spanish-language radio station, La Mega 97.9 FM. “But we do want to thank the U.S. Army for being here with us.”

Most of those clustered around the stage, about 200 people who swayed animatedly to the beat of salsa and reggaetón, seemed oblivious to the Army’s presence, or simply did not care about it, regardless of how they felt about the war.

Not too far away, though, near steps connecting the parking lot to the beach, two local elected officials, surrounded by about a dozen supporters, stood in protest.

“We should not be allowing our public recreational space to be used for recruiting our youngsters to get killed in Iraq,” said Assemblyman Jose Rivera of the Bronx.

“Our children are not for sale,” added City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, who represents East Harlem and the Mott Haven section of the Bronx.

Ms. Mark-Viverito said the Army, which was doing most of the fighting in Iraq, had increasingly focused its recruiting efforts on the city’s low-income and minority neighborhoods. Last year, the Army opened a recruitment station on 103rd Street in East Harlem, which is predominantly Hispanic, much like the crowd yesterday at Orchard Beach.

Army representatives at the concert declined to be interviewed.

John Velez, 18, who lives in Washington Heights, another of the city’s heavily Hispanic areas, said he was considering joining the Army once he graduates from high school next May, even as he conceded being “a little bit scared” about possibly going to war.

“I’m looking for some direction, and I think maybe the Army could give it to me,” said Mr. Velez, who is entering his senior year at the Manhattan Occupational Training Center. “And they could make me strong.”

Mr. Velez was standing in line outside the Army tent, waiting to pick up one of the T-shirts and dog tags given away by the recruiters. Lillian Robles, who had already collected her giveaways, said one of the men under the tent asked her to write down her name, address, date of birth and phone number on a form before he handed her the items.

“Sounds like a lot of information to give out for free stuff,” said Ms. Robles, who lives in the West Farms section of the Bronx.

“I got a shirt, and I guess I’m going to get a call, too,” she said, though at 45, she does not seem to be a potential Army recruit.

The recruiters, wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with the black-and-gold Army star over the words “Go Army,” did not approach anyone outside the fenced-in area surrounding the tent. At least one of them attracted the attention of passers-by by doing occasional pull-ups on a bar behind the tent.

The Army has 46 recruitment centers across the five boroughs, but despite its aggressive push, recruitment numbers have fallen by 19 percent in the past three fiscal years, to 1,044 in 2006 from 1,295 in 2004, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit research organization that works with mostly liberal causes.

Nationwide, however, the Army said it recruited about 80,600 people in the 2006 fiscal year, or some 7,000 more than in the previous fiscal year. For 2005, it missed its recruiting goal. From 2001 to 2005, Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent.

Brooklyn led the city last year in new Army recruits, with 391, followed by Queens (261), the Bronx (230), Manhattan (109) and Staten Island (53), the National Priorities Project said.

This is the third consecutive year in which the Army has sponsored one of the days at the festival, which has been put together for 11 years by Ralph Paniagua, a longtime promoter of Latino events in the city. In the event’s news release, the “Army Day” was characterized as “an opportunity to acquaint the public with our armed forces in an ambience of mutual camaraderie.”

“We have a lot of Latinos who have joined the military and become very successful,” said Mr. Paniagua, whose 37-year-old son, Joseph, enlisted in the Army when he turned 21.

“This is not about boosting the Army’s ranks,” he added. “This is about the Army showing appreciation for our culture, and us showing appreciation for their service to our country.”

Posted by lois at 02:16 PM | Comments (0)

TN:Changing focus on state prisons. 1800 new cages under construction

Changing focus on state prisons
As two projects proceed, officials debate design shift

By Tom Humphrey
Sunday, July 29, 2007

NASHVILLE — The cost of building a new state prison in Morgan County has reached $155 million, and the head of the state’s Department of Correction says that unless changes are made, the price for a similar facility in Bledsoe County could pass $200 million.

Altering current plans for the Bledsoe prison, however, will mean scrapping a contract that has already paid more than $2 million in state funds to architects and consultants who were following the original design.

“That bothers me. I’m just afraid there’s something not on the up-and-up about this,” said state Rep. Philip Pinion, D-Union City, one of several legislators who expressed skepticism about the idea at a meeting this month of the Correction Oversight Committee.

Department of Correction Commissioner George Little insisted that a move to let other architects bid to become the Bledsoe “design team,” which he supports, is a legitimate recognition of the need for “a new generation” of prisons in Tennessee rather than following a “cookie-cutter” approach.

But he backed away from directly asking the committee to approve such a change in plans at the recent meeting. Several legislators said they would have voted no if he had.

The proposed change will be back before the committee at an Aug. 21 meeting.

The prison construction projects will add almost 1,800 beds to the state prison system’s capacity. Little cautions that the increase will not be enough for the long run.

New laws passed during the 2007 legislative session will mean longer sentences for many convicts, including child rapists and those using guns in violent crimes. Little said that preliminary estimates are that the new laws will create the need for 1,000 new prison beds in 10 years.

Even before the new laws took effect, Little said, the projected need was for 1,500 new beds by 2017. Now it’s expected that the state will need a total of 2,500 new beds if the preliminary estimates are confirmed by a more detailed analysis this fall, he said.

Also this fall, Gov. Phil Bredesen is expected to appoint a special commission, authorized by the Legislature earlier this year, that will study the corrections system and eventually make recommendations on how to deal with the anticipated influx of new prisoners.

Options include alternatives to hard-time prisons, especially for those committing less serious offenses, Little said.

For now, however, the more immediate corrections challenge is bringing the Morgan County and Bledsoe County facilities into operation.

The Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility, after some delays and a dramatic increase from the initial cost estimate of $80 million, is on track and should be in full operation next year, Little said.

The first prisoners should move into a completed building this fall, he said. They will be minimum-security inmates who will work on landscaping for the rest of the prison grounds, Little said. When the new prison opens, the state will close the aging Brushy Mountain State Prison but still net an increase of 838 new beds.

The increase in construction costs mostly came from corresponding increases in the cost of concrete, steel, other building materials and fuel, he said.

The new Bledsoe prison, officially known as Southeastern Tennessee Regional Correctional Facility, is still in the initial stages of development with a projected completion date of late 2010 or early 2011.

That means it’s not too late to change plans, even though $1,871,975 has already been paid to the architects under the original design contract, Cope Associates of Knoxville and Kaatz Binkley Jones and Morris of Mount Juliet.

The design contract would be worth $4.6 million if carried to completion, said Lanny Cope, president of Cope Associates.

Another $348,352 has already been paid to Mark Golman Associates, an Atlanta-based consulting firm that recommended the change in design being embraced by state officials.

Little said new projections show that sticking to the original plans for Bledsoe would add at least $20 million to the latest estimated cost “based on very conservative figures.”

The latest estimate is $182 million, meaning the total would be pushed to $202 million. The original estimate when the project was announced in March 2004 was $102 million.

“So we hired a consultant for $350,000 to tell us we’re doing it the wrong way — now that we’ve got started — and we need to start over?” asked Rep. Mike Turner, D-Nashville, at this month’s committee meeting. “And the architects are doing a good job, but you want to replace them?”

That is basically correct, Little acknowledged, because the initial “cookie-cutter” designed failed to take some things into account, such as recent advances in security technology that should be incorporated into the plans, and the new facility’s proximity to an existing prison that must be kept secure while work is going on.

“We were going to take what we did in Morgan, drop it down to Bledsoe and do the same thing,” he said.

Unlike Morgan County, the Bledsoe project also involves a water treatment plant, linked to a new pipeline that will bring water from the Tennessee River to the area. There are also environmental problems associated with runoff from a dairy farm operated by the state prison industries program, TriCor.

“It is far more complex than anything this department has taken on,” said Little. “We learned a lot at Morgan County.”

The new approach, if the committee agrees, may also translate into more competitive bidding for the final construction project, he said, and allow faster completion. At Morgan County, only two companies bid on construction, with Ray Bell Construction the winner.

Rep. Bill Harmon, D-Dunlap, chairman of the Correction Oversight Committee, said he is not yet sold on the idea of changing plans for Bledsoe, though he believes perhaps $500,000 of the $1.8 million in work done by architects will apply to the new plan.

Harmon said the increased costs in materials also make much of the escalating expenses at Morgan and Bledsoe understandable.

“That’s happening in every construction job. There are astronomical increases in the cost of concrete, steel and fuel,” he said.

At the committee hearing, Pinion and some other legislators questioned whether the current architects were being treated fairly and whether criteria in the new bidding for architects would effectively exclude Tennessee companies and favor larger, out-of-state firms. Little said that would not be the case.

Cope said he was “reluctant to take any position” on the proposed change and is hopeful that, if the change takes place, “we will still be part of the team.”

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/jul/29/major-prison-projects/
E.W. Scripps Co.
© 2007 Knoxville News Sentinel

Posted by lois at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

MO: Inmate numbers are down in Missouri

When Gov. Matt Blunt took office in January 2005, Missouri's prison population was growing by about two a day, said Commissioner of Administration Mike Keathley. At that rate, the state would have had to build a new prison every two years. Missouri officials point to the community supervision centers as one key factor in the state's decline in inmates. "For the best public safety, you need to reserve the beds for the most dangerous and violent," said Larry Crawford, director of the Missouri Department of Corrections."

St. Louis Post Dispatch
Inmate numbers are down in Missouri
By Virginia Young and Tim O'Neil
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
07/29/2007

FARMINGTON ‹ The supervision center is across a narrow road from the double fence and looping razor wire of a state prison. Out the back door, a garden sprouts with cantaloupe, zucchini and watermelon.

All of the center's residents are on probation or parole, and most have violated the terms that gave them freedom. They could have been ordered behind the razor wire, but the state is giving them a supervised second chance and in the process reducing the state's inmate population. One thing they do is tend the garden.

"I enjoy helping the plants grow," said Michael Goesmann. "It gives me peace."

He could use it. Goesmann, 54, served 15 months for a drug offense and said he'd been an addict for years. He was released from the prison in St. Joseph, Mo., in March and wasn't ready for the outside world.

On Tuesday, he was one of 23 men and five women assigned to the Farmington Community Supervision Center, which opened in January 2006 ‹ the first of two such centers in Missouri. The state plans to open five more in hopes of keeping stumbling offenders away from prison's revolving door.

Such stumbles have fed a decade of explosive inmate growth that required the state to double its number of prison beds. But thanks to alternatives, officials say, Missouri is leading the nation in reducing its inmate population.

In the year that ended June 30, 2006, the number of people behind bars in Missouri declined by nearly 3 percent, the largest percentage in any state.

Only eight states reported a decline, according to the Department of Justice. Illinois reported an increase of 1.7 percent.

When Gov. Matt Blunt took office in January 2005, Missouri's prison population was growing by about two a day, said Commissioner of Administration Mike Keathley. At that rate, the state would have had to build a new prison every two years.

Missouri officials point to the community supervision centers as one key factor in the state's decline in inmates.

"For the best public safety, you need to reserve the beds for the most dangerous and violent," said Larry Crawford, director of the Missouri Department of Corrections.

Crawford said the state also provides a special "re-entry" program for inmates leaving prison. They live in transitional housing units, learn how to write a résumé and get a state-issued nondrivers identification card needed for everything from applying for jobs to renting a movie.

"It's all about making people successful," Crawford said.

Rep. Danie Moore, R-Fulton, stresses the taxpayer benefit of the supervision centers. She heads the House committee that oversees the $624 million operating budget of the Corrections Department.

The system now holds 29,901 inmates. Each prisoner costs the state $39.43 a day or $14,392 a year.

'DRAMATIC' CHANGE

The community centers were an outgrowth of an effort to revamp how criminals are sentenced.

Today, new reports prepared for judges analyze whether a community-oriented program is likely to keep an offender from committing more crimes. Sentencing recommendations emphasize alternatives to prison for nonviolent felonies.

Since probation officers began issuing the new sentencing reports in November 2005, Missouri's prison population has dropped by nearly 700 inmates. By contrast, the number of inmates grew by 850 in the preceding fiscal year.

David Valentine, a senior analyst at the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri-Columbia, called the turnaround "dramatic."

"Missouri is on the beginning edge of what should be a long-term, downward trend," said Valentine, former director of research for the Missouri Senate.

The state's approach has been crafted quietly the past two years by a team led by Supreme Court Judge Mike Wolff. He heads the Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission, which developed the format for the "sentencing assessment reports."

The commission also developed a simple-to-use application on its website ‹ www.mosac.mo.gov ‹ that allows judges to get suggested sentences from their computers. The program recommends probation, prison time or an alternative sentence based on information such as the offender's age, work history and education, as well as his criminal history.

Wolff said the reports give judges crucial information. For example, if the probation officer recommends drug treatment, the report spells out the date when a treatment bed will be available.

Prosecutors say they see the logic in reserving prison space for the most violent criminals. But they say the new sentencing recommendations are based on average sentences for a particular offense and fail to take into account how crimes differ.

Using averages "is just not a good way to decide who should be going to prison," said St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch. "We don't need judges if that's the way they do it."

Under the new system, felons are assigned a "risk class" ranging from "good" to "poor." The sentencing reports no longer include a detailed narrative about the offender's family background, education and crime.

"The new version is more of a cookie-cutter justice, as opposed to a thorough background investigation," said Cape Girardeau Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle.

Prosecutors also say the increase in the state's inmate popu lation was a natural outgrowth of the passage in 1994 of legislation dubbed "truth in sentencing."

Under the law, people convicted of any of seven major crimes ‹ second-degree murder, rape, sodomy, kidnapping, first-degree assault, arson and first-degree robbery ‹ must serve 85 percent of their prison sentence. Before the law, inmates were often paroled after serving half or a third or even less of their sentence.

During the administration of former Gov. Mel Carnahan, the state built five prisons. From 1994 to 2004, Missouri's inmate population doubled, from 14,000 to 30,000.

To help provide more sentencing options, Missouri opened the community supervision centers in Farmington and St. Joseph. Five more are planned or under construction ‹ in Hannibal, Kennett, Poplar Bluff, Kansas City and Fulton.

At the centers, nonviolent offenders can get drug treatment, attend employment workshops or earn a high school diploma by passing a GED test.

"It's a pretty intensive intervention," said Laura Hibbs, district administrator for probation and parole in St. Joseph. "Our goal is to get them turned around fairly quickly," generally in 30 to 60 days.

The centers differ from traditional halfway houses, which are transition points from prison to parole. Supervision centers generally are for those already on parole after time served or offenders who get probation, a sentence that usually doesn't include prison time as long as conditions are met.

Goesmann works at a local garden center and gets to see his adult son, daughter and seven grandchildren, all of whom live in the area. He plans to move into an apartment in nearby Park Hills in about a week.

"This has given me time to move back into society," he said.

District administrator Shelly Crump said most of the center's residents had committed drug-related offenses and, while free, abused drugs again. Those who relapse with more serious offenses usually don't get the deal.

Crump oversees 1,300 probationers and parolees in St. Francois, Ste. Genevieve and Madison counties. Her staff of 47 works from the supervision center, a one-story brick building with a sloping green roof and no fence or window bars.

Inside are living quarters for as many as 40 men and six women. In the men's ward, beds are separated by partitions 4 feet high. The women share a small, open room. Residents stay from one to four months.

They relax and eat in a multipurpose room, with food from the Farmington Correctional Center across the road. There are classrooms for GED, drug counseling and other courses.

Ross Downey, who runs the center, said most residents have jobs outside and can leave for approved visits. They could sneak away, but their ankle bracelets would trip an electronic perimeter outside. With privileges at stake, they don't run, he said.

"This place allows for consequences short of going to prison," Downey said. "We don't make choirboys here, but if we can get them back into productive lives, they and the state are much better off."

Matthew Hathaway of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/missouristatenews/story/B6
58013F26DC305C86257327000BB199?OpenDocument

Posted by lois at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)

New Connecticut Law May Save a Troubled Prison for Juveniles

"Resistance to such a move, he said, has been led "first and foremost" by the unions that represent employees at the youth prison, the largest of which, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has substantial lobbying muscle in Hartford. The unions do not "want it to close," Mr. Lawlor said of the youth prison, adding that "if you create alternate programs, you have to site them somewhere, and there's a great deal of resistance" from local communities. "Those two factors together have made it almost impossible to shut down" the place, he added."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/nyregion/30juvy.html?ref=nyregion>

New York Times
New Connecticut Law May Save a Troubled Prison for Juveniles

Published: July 30, 2007

The state's child advocate labeled the youth prison, called the Connecticut Juvenile Training School and opened in 2001 during Gov. John G. Rowland's administration, "beyond repair." Legislators piled on, and the current governor, M. Jodi Rell, called for it to be closed by next year, saying, "I cannot allow the failure of this institution to continue."

Instead, the $57 million facility, which houses all but the state's most serious juvenile offenders, is gearing up for a likely increase of its population, and an infusion of about $40 million a year. That is because of a state law Mrs. Rell signed last month that will raise the age at which criminal suspects are automatically charged as adults, to 18 from 16, starting in 2010.

Some say that the youth prison's possible revival has been the result not only of the new law, but also of the power of the unions that represent the 300 employees who staff the place. Others cite a lack of resolve among politicians to shut down a boondoggle, while some point to fiscal and political realities, saying it would cost much more to close the prison and start again elsewhere.

Part of the reason, though, rests in the youth prison itself, which has undergone significant improvements during the last two years.

The building where the teenage offenders with the worst behavior problems had been housed in drab rooms, with slits for windows, has been converted into a youth center complete with arcade games and an art therapy room. Cinderblock cells once likened to "tiger cages" by Donald E. Williams Jr., a Democrat from Brooklyn, Conn., who is president pro tempore of the Senate, now have better shelving, desks, bulletin boards and carpet.

"It used to be a hellhole," said Fred Phillips, a longtime youth services officer at the prison. What is there today, he said, "is a great improvement."

Jeanne M. Milstein, the child advocate, said the prison, which opened six years ago, has improved enough that in April she agreed to shift the monitor she had installed there for the previous two years to a psychiatric hospital for children nearby.

She still favors closing the Middletown prison and opening smaller institutions for young offenders scattered around the state, so they can stay connected to their communities.

But, she said,"I don¹t think there"s the political will right now by the legislature to close it."

Connecticut has been one of three states, along with New York and North Carolina, that have set the age threshold at 16 for routinely charging criminal suspects as adults (and, as is common across the country, adult status is often given to those younger than 16 accused of serious felonies).

Under the new law, some of the 250 to 300 16- and 17-year-olds now sent each year to adult prisons run by the State Department of Correction will need to be housed in juvenile facilities. Those accused of the most serious felonies will still be handled in the adult system.

The change means the 16- and 17-year-olds who are to be treated as juveniles will get services including mental health treatment, family counseling and a probation officer as soon as they enter the system. Their records will also remain confidential ‹ and invisible when they apply for jobs, professional licenses and schools.

³What we were doing was not working," said Judge William J. Lavery, Connecticut's chief court administrator. State Senator Toni N. Harp, a New Haven Democrat who pushed the legislation, said the old approach "hardens, rather than softens," teenagers at risk of a life of crime.

Most states set the threshold for adult charges at 18, according to Melissa Sickmund, a senior policy associate for the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh, but 10 states have long used 17 as their cutoff age, and Rhode Island recently became the 11th, lowering from 18 largely because of budget pressures.

Incarceration at juvenile facilities is generally far more expensive than at adult prisons, even for inmates of the same age, because of the differing approaches used ‹ one punitive, the other therapeutic.

In Connecticut, Leo C. Arnone, director of the Bureau of Juvenile Services, part of the Department of Children and Families, said the cost difference could be tenfold: The current annual budget for the Connecticut Juvenile Training School is $27.6 million, or $276,000 for each of about 100 residents, while the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire, a correctional facility, spends about $27,000 per year for each of its 700 inmates.

"We either invest now or pay later," said Ms. Milstein, the child advocate, arguing that the additional services rehabilitate young offenders and curtail recidivism.

But with the new state law, the budgetary considerations grow more complicated.

A report by the General Assembly's nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis predicts that the cost of absorbing some of the additional teenage offenders at the Middletown center would run $38.8 million to $43.2 million per year. Housing them elsewhere ‹ whether at existing private or public facilities or in some new state institutions ‹ would cost an additional $5.5 million to $11.3 million annually beyond that. And that is on top of one-time capital costs estimated at $7.5 million to $10 million for improving the youth prison, or $22.5 million to $25 million to build alternatives.

The youth prison here, whose original capacity was estimated at 240, now has 97 teenagers on site, and officials say 50 empty beds could be available immediately.

Abby Anderson, a senior policy associate with the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, a Bridgeport-based advocacy group, said the conversation among policymakers amounted to: "How do we close a facility that has all these beds if we're going to bring all these 16- and 17-year-olds into the system?"

The Middletown center played a key role in the corruption case against former Governor Rowland, who served 10 months in prison after pleading guilty to having conspired to deprive the public of his honest services and to commit tax fraud.

In the plea, Mr. Rowland acknowledged having approved the funding for the juvenile prison, which was built by the Tomasso family of New Britain, without disclosing that the Tomassos had previously given him gifts worth $15,000.

In the two years since Mrs. Rell and others denounced the youth prison as a boondoggle, some of its shortcomings have been addressed. Building 2, once Exhibit A of the dysfunction and faulty design, has been converted into a comfortably furnished chapter of the Boys and Girls Club, where residents can participate in life-skills training workshops. Painted murals and makeshift walls hide the ugly cells that ring the perimeter of the building and now sit empty; the interior has a pool table and an art therapy room where teenagers one recent afternoon were making go-carts.

Across the courtyard, in the younger children's living area, kites dangled from the rafters. An Oriental-style carpet covered the floor in another wing. "That, we just bought ourselves to home up the unit," said Susan Kunst, the staff member who runs it.

The residents of that unit, mostly older teenagers, occasionally get to cook their own breakfast and leave campus for driving lessons. Unlike inmates at Manson, residents can make free phone calls home and are given some access to the Internet. Recreational offerings include Frisbee golf and a driving range.

At the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire ‹ whose warden, Christine Whidden, said her charges were young enough that she had to remind them "to brush their teeth and pull up their pants ‹ the sports tend to be basketball and more basketball. Trees hardly exist. "They used them as climbing devices," explained Ms. Whidden. Cellblocks lacked air-conditioning until this summer.

Chris Cooper, a spokesman for Mrs. Rell, a Republican, said she remained adamant that the Middletown center was not appropriate for younger teenagers, who are sent there starting at age 13. He said the governor had ordered the Department of Children and Families to develop other options, but the legislature had not funded that effort.

"You can¹t just shut something down without any alternatives," Mr. Cooper said.

As for the new population of 16- and 17-year-olds who could be sent here once the new law takes effect, Mr. Cooper said that Mrs. Rell was "willing to have it looked at."

State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat from East Haven who is co-chairman of the Joint Judiciary Committee, said he agreed with the governor and Ms. Milstein, the child advocate, that it would be better to house juvenile offenders in small facilities throughout the state.

Resistance to such a move, he said, has been led "first and foremost" by the unions that represent employees at the youth prison, the largest of which, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has substantial lobbying muscle in Hartford.

The unions do not "want it to close," Mr. Lawlor said of the youth prison, adding that "if you create alternate programs, you have to site them somewhere, and there's a great deal of resistance' from local communities.

"Those two factors together have made it almost impossible to shut down" the place, he added.

Posted by lois at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2007

CA: State Seeking a Stay of the Federal Judges' Orders

"The state also is seeking a stay of the federal judges' orders that would prevent the three-judge panel from meeting while the appeal is being heard."

http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_6485411>

Governor to appeal panel prison study
Panel ordered to study effects of prison overcrowding.

By Don Thompson, Associated Press
Article Launched: 07/27/2007 11:03:57 PM PDT

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday signaled his intention to appeal a federal court decision that orders a special judicial panel to examine severe overcrowding in California's prison system. The governor's action comes a day after the chief judge of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals created the three-judge panel, following the recommendation of two federal judges.

The panel will be charged with examining how overcrowding is affecting inmate health care, mental health, services for the disabled and other prison operations. Among the possible remedies are a cap of California's inmate population and early release of some prisoners.

The three-judge panel could start meeting before the governor's appeal is being considered.

If it does, "We will show the panel the aggressive efforts being made by the administration to address prison overcrowding, explaining why a prison release order is not necessary," Schwarzenegger spokesman Bill Maile said. "We will continue to do all we can to ensure public safety."

The administration wants to avoid a federal takeover of the state prison system. It says it needs time to implement a $7.8 billion prison and jail building program approved by state lawmakers this spring.

The state also is transferring up to 8,000 inmates to private prisons in other states to ease crowding and adopting changes to its parole policies that are designed to keep more ex-convicts from quickly returning to prison.

In defending the state, Attorney General Jerry Brown said the Schwarzenegger administration has not had sufficient time to solve the overcrowding crisis but is taking significant steps to do so.

"The state is addressing the issue as evidenced by the landmark prison reform package, AB900, which was signed into law a mere two months ago, in May 2007," Brown wrote in the notice of appeal.

The potential of the three judges ordering the early release of inmates while the administration's appeal is pending "would pose a risk to public safety," the attorney general's office said in its filing.

The state also is seeking a stay of the federal judges' orders that would prevent the three-judge panel from meeting while the appeal is being heard.

"Their request for a stay is based on the same arguments that have already been rejected," said Don Specter, director of the San Francisco-based Prison Law Office, who favors the three-judge panel.

Last Monday, U.S. District Court judges Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento and Thelton Henderson of San Francisco ordered the panel to be created. In doing so, they ruled that the state's prison-building program is likely to make conditions worse because the corrections department already cannot handle the number of inmates it oversees.

The judges ruled that the crowding of 172,000 inmates into quarters designed for about half that number is contributing to unconstitutional conditions.

Karlton and Henderson were named to the special panel on Thursday by Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder. The third member is Appellate Judge Stephen Reinhardt of Los Angeles, a Yale Law School graduate who was appointed by former President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

"I don't think it particularly bodes well for the state's case," said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, an expert on prison issues who knows all three justices.

Reinhardt "is someone who values civil liberties, who values the U.S. Constitution," she said. He is likely to be sympathetic to the views of Karlton and Henderson, Romero said.

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

July 27, 2007

Editorial, NY Times: Fixing the Scam on Collect Calls

Editorial, NY Times
Fixing the Scam on Collect Calls
Published: July 27, 2007

New York’s Gov. Eliot Spitzer set an important example earlier this year when he abandoned the longstanding practice of charging prisoners bankrupting fees for collect calls. Telephone rates in New York have since dropped by about half. Those rates are likely to fall further now that Mr. Spitzer has signed a bill requiring the state to consider the cost of inmate phone calls when it negotiates the next contract for prison telephone services.

That’s a far cry from how business is done elsewhere. In most states, contracts are awarded to the company that pays the state the largest “commission” for such calls — essentially a legalized kickback. The states and the companies both rack up the cash because inmates are only allowed to make collect calls while the person who accepts the call is charged a massive premium, sometimes as much as six times the going rate for regular calls.

This amounts to a hidden tax on inmates’ families, who tend to be among the country’s poorest. It also weakens family ties, making it harder for inmates to make successful transitions to outside life.

Even at a reduced price, the collect-call-only approach is not the only option. The federal prison system uses a more affordable debit calling system, in which inmates use money from computer-controlled accounts. New York and other states should adopt the debit system. No families should have to choose between putting food on the table or accepting a collect call from a loved one behind bars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/opinion/27fri4.html

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

Extreme Isolation in Prisons Is Never Justified

Guest Opinion
Extreme isolation in prisons is never justifiable
CAYLOR ROLING
Salem OR Statesman Journal
July 27, 2007

When does punishment in our prisons go too far? When people with mental-health concerns -- even some with only months to go before release -- commit suicide rather than face the extreme isolation of the segregated cells in state prisons.

Reporter Alan Gustafson's series on suicides in state prisons shines a much-needed light on the conditions facing people who are incarcerated. The rate of prison suicides in Oregon is disturbing, and we encourage more coverage about what happens to the people in prisons.

The often-invisible populations of incarcerated people have families, children and friends who must also survive the imprisonment of their loved ones. While for much of society, people in prison are locked up and easily forgotten, for their families, the added potential for suicide is another fear they grapple with daily. When people are imprisoned with no outside oversight, alarming things can happen, as Mr. Gustafson pointed out in his compelling series.

The Statesman Journal's series identified one very significant common theme running through many of the suicides: extreme isolation, often in Intensive Management Units.

IMUs are prisons within prisons where some inmates are sent for long periods of time. IMUs are places where the sun never shines, the lights never go completely out, any real human contact is forbidden and more than 23 hours a day are spent completely alone in a tiny box. Leaving the box means shackles, cuffs and being led by a leash.

IMUs create such dehumanizing and degrading conditions that a U.N. report described incarceration in these units as torture. Yet some Oregon prisoners can spend months or even years in IMUs, even if they have identified mental illnesses that are greatly exacerbated by the extreme isolation and dehumanization of the units.

While the Oregon Department of Corrections suggests it is taking steps to curb suicides in prison, never do they discuss ending the damaging isolation of the segregation units. In fact, Mr. Gustafson's article states that the Department of Corrections is moving the Disciplinary Segregation Unit into the Intensive Management Unit. This will only lead to more isolation, illness and deaths of people confined in that space.

While separating some people from the general prison population might at times be justified, the extreme isolation of the Intensive Management Units is never justifiable. Never does the Department of Corrections explain how such disturbing conditions serve a rehabilitative function because they don't. And because they don't help rehabilitate, Oregonians should be concerned.

We're not alone in suggesting that Oregon put an end to the dangerous conditions in the Intensive Management Units. The bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons calls for limiting the use of segregation and ending the conditions of isolation in segregation.

We encourage the Department of Corrections to develop less dehumanizing and more rehabilitative ways of separating prisoners from the general population when needed.

Most people eventually get out of prison, and what happens to them while they are imprisoned can either positively or negatively shape what happens when they return to the community. Oregonians should end the isolating and disturbing conditions in segregation units. This will save lives, and it's in everyone's best interest.

Caylor Roling of Portland is the prison program director of the Partnership for Safety and Justice, a statewide advocacy organization that promotes safe and sensible solutions to public-safety issues. She can be reached at Caylor@safetyandjustice.org.

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070727/OPINION/707270310/1049

Posted by lois at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)

1986 Article by Harmon Wray: CCA/Private Prisons: "Cells for Sale"

This was posted on: http://www.texasprisonbidness.org/

Southern Changes. Volume 8, Number 3, 1989
Cells for Sale
By Harmon L. Wray, Jr.

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 3-6

The rush to transfer government services and functions from public to profit-making hands has lately found its way to the "field" of incarceration and corrections. The current leader in this new growth industry is the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, chartered in January of 1983 and financed by Hospital Corporation of America founder Jack Massey of Massey Burch Investments, Inc., the South's largest venture capital company. According to CCA president and former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Tom Beasley, the Corrections Corporation of America alma to ~be to jails and prisons...what Hospital Corporation of America has become to medical facilities nationwide."

Declaring that "the market is limitless," Beasley (age 43) hopes to "solve the prison problem and make a lot of money at the same time." CCA currently has seven contracts to own and/or manage detention centers, treatment facilities, jails and workhouses for federal and local jurisdictions in several Southern states--three in Tennessee, one in Florida, two in Texas (for illegal aliens), one in North Carolina. But this is small potatoes compared with what CCA intends to do: take over the entire prison system of particular states, and prepare for a bid on the federal system. "The private jail market is ripe," reports Barron's, the business weekly. "And it is brokers, architects, builders, and banks-not the taxpayers-who will make out like bandits.. In less than a year, CCA has more than doubled the size of its staff, now at 500.

The proposal CCA made to the State of Tennessee in the fall of 1985 was the boldest move yet in prisons-for-profit and showed why the company is considered the most aggressive and well-connected of the capitalist corrections firms. CCA initially proposed to buy out and operate the state's prison system, under federal court order since 1982, as well as build and manage two new prisons (later expanded to five new institutions). Thanks to effective lobbying by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the CCA bid was tabled last year by the Democratically-controlled state legislature. The action came during a special session called for the prison crisis by Republican governor Lamar Alexander, a CCA supporter who once rented a garage apartment to law student Tom Beasley. Alexander has spent seven years overseeing an unconstitutional prison system but has never set foot inside one of his state's prisons.

This year, the General Assembly, under the influence of nine full-time, high-powered CCA lobbyists paid an estimated $100,000, passed a more moderate privatization bill. Before the session Tom Beasley had

Page 4
said, "I intend to get a chunk of this system." Soon he will: the 180-bed Carter County work camp opens September 1, probably under CCA operation. But the legislation (which AFSCME plans to challenge in court) prohibits further privatization of Tennessee prisons for three years.

The ambitions of Beasley and other prison entrepreneurs are not limited to Tennessee. In fact, once CCA lost its bid for all Tennessee prisons, it pursued a smaller "chunk" primarily in order to avoid the embarrassment of having no home-state contracts to advertise in its sales pitch to other jurisdictions. Last December Beasley said that if the Reagan administration decided to sell the federal prison system (as the The Wall Street Journal had just reported it might), CCA would make an offer. CCA was one of three firms bidding for the multi-million dollar Moundsville, W.Va., prison, site of a New Year's Day prisoner rebellion. Reportedly, CCA has been working on proposals for state prison systems in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Misissippi, and Kentucky, as well as several western states. At this writing, CCA contracts to operate jails are pending in Sante Fe, N.M., and Key West, Fla. Meanwhile, CCA's Tennessee competitor, Corrections Associates Inc. (CAI), recently landed Tennessee and Alabama county jail contracts and a prison consulting contract with the Alexander administration. CAI's good fortune came on the heels of the resignation of its new president, Hubert McCullough, as Governor Alexander's finance commissioner.

The McCullough-Alexander connection is only one of many personal, business, and political linkages evident in the prisons-for-profit field. Like CAI's McCullough, CCA lobbyist Tom Ingram, 39, a former journalist and social worker, has been a prime mover with the anti-labor Tennessee Business Roundtable. Ingram also managed Alexander's two winning gubernatorial campaigns and served as his chief-of-staff for four years before forming his own public relations and business consulting firm. Others in the CCA-Alexander circle include CCA stockholders who are current and former Alexander cabinet officers, CCA administrators who are former state GOP chairpersons, a CCA lobbyist who was a Democratic state senator, and two prominent public figures who in 1985 sold their CCA stock to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest: Honey Alexander (the governor's wife held $5,000 of stock) and House Speaker Ned Ray McWherter ($33,000), the Democratic nominee to succeed Alexander. In this fall's general election, McWherter faces former Republican governor Winfield Dunn, a Memphis dentist who became a multi-millionaire as an executive for Hospital Corporation of America. Both Dunn and McWherter have called for the state to experiment with private operation of some prisons.

Another connection is the US Military Academy. Before graduating from Harvard's law and business schools, CCA treasurer and major investor Doctor R. Crants was Beasley's West Point roommate. CCA stockholder Samuel W. Bartholomew, of the Nashville law firm Donelson, Stokes &Bartholomew, was their classmate ('66).

Three of Bartholomew's children are also stockholders. Another West Point alum and major CCA investor is T. Don Hutto, the corporation's executive vice-president. Hutto, an ex-prison guard who became commissioner of corrections in Virginia and Arkansas, has since 1984 been president of the American Correctional Association, which oversees prison accreditation standards. Unlike other corrections-related professional associations-the National Sheriffs Association, the National Conference of State Trial Judges, the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, and the American Bar Association--the ACA under Hutto's tenure has supported prison privatization.

While the prisons-for-profit trend has national dimensions, CCA leadership has focused much of the attention onto the South, where all of CCA's current contracts and most of its financial backers are located (investors include Vanderbilt University, Hospital Corporation of America, and that symbol of public service delivery, the Tennessee Valley Authority, itself often the target of privatization initiatives). Many members of CCA's management staff have worked in corrections departments in Southern states, including Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama.

Critics of corporate punishment have raised a number of issues which call the privatization trend into serious question. Tennessee Attorney General Michael Cody and the ACLU National Prison Project note that the state would retain ultimate legal and fiscal responsibility for assuring private prisons' compliance with state and federal constitutions and court orders. It also appears clear that governments cannot contract their civil liability to private concerns. Noting CCA's lack of a track record in operating a state prison for long-ternm adult offenders, Cody also questions its estimates of operating and capital expenses and doubts the state's

Page 5
ability to buy back its prisons in case of a private firm's bankruptcy, incompetence, or unwillingness to continue. Cody suggests that privatization might encourage the public to believe, mistakenly, that Tennessee can solve its corrections problems simply by building more prisons.

A 1985 Tennessee legislative report points out that privatizing does not mean that construction costs are not a liability of the state; rather, the liability has been deferred." Mark Gray of AFSCME wonders if an artifically low cost presented in an initial contract would lead to government dependency on the private firm, making it "impossible to resume operations in the future without huge capital investments. The private contractor is then in a position to raise its prices" in order to maximize profits. Former Minnesota corrections chief Ken Schoen has pointed to "defense" contractors' use of similar tactics as a way of "capitalizing on the public's fears to assure an ever-expanding system, while the basic insecurities remain."

Closely associated with such economic concerns is the question of just how a private firm will be able to operate prisons as inexpensively as it claims. Public employee unions like AFSCME and the Tennessee State Employees Association point to workers' loss of civil service rules and benefits under private prison managers, along with the possibility of lower wages, a minimal workforce, an anti-union atmosphere, and inadequate training of correctional officers. It may be no accident that corrections capitalists' favorite hunting ground for contracts has been the historically low-wage and under-unionized South. And, whether they are called "prison guards" or "correctional officers," those workers who staff our society's cages are already among the lowest paid of all government employees.

Certainly, prisoners themselves could suffer harmful effects from possible cost-cutting for the sake of profit maximization. CCA's initial proposal to Tennessee proclaims the intention of developing a "full-employment economy within the correctional system." Given the history of Tennessee's and other Southern states' "privatization" and "profitization" of prisons, one might be excused for expecting some contemporary variations on the old convict lease systems and chain gangs. Journalist Ronnie Dugger's discomfort over the proposed privatization of the Texas prison system might also apply to other Southern states: "In the company prison, we will be putting state-sentenced inmates under the command of the employees of the corporation and forcing the state-sentenced inmates to labor for the profit of the corporation. What will keep a privately-owned Texas prison from being in its very nature a state-created system of slave labor for private profit?" Constitutionally, slavery is legal as punishment for crime, and our Southern prison populations are, of course, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black and Hispanic.

Apprehensions on the part of prisoner advocates and those who abhor slavery may not be unfounded when one considers the professional history of T. Don Hutto, the man CCA touts as its foremost corrections expert. The CCA's executive vice-president's career includes a stint as warden of the Ramsey Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in the 1960s, when the system of using inmates to guard and discipline other inmates, later outlawed in federal court, was "at its strongest," according to the Texas Observer. A 1985 article in The Nation reported that during Hutto's tenure as corrections commissioner in Arkansas the US Supreme Court ruled that state's prison system unconstitutional and found that officials "evidently tried to operate their prisons at a profit." "Inmates were required to work on prison farms ten hours a day, six days a week, often without suitable clothing or shoes, using mule-drawn plows and tending crops by hand....Punishment for minor misconduct included lashing with a wooden-handled leather strap...and administering electric shocks to 'various sensitive parts of the inmate's body.' The trial court called the prisons 'a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world.'" When confronted with this criticism, a CCA offical responded that The Nation essay was "a libelous article" and that Hutto had in fact cleaned up the unconstitutional Arkansas system.

The questions raised by Hutto's track record and by a look at the history of profit-making out of the hides of prisoners were echoed by Michael Walzer in The New Republic: "Helpless men and women have never fared well at the hands of profit-seeking entrepreneurs. The incentive system is all wrong. Who will look after the interests of prisoners? Who will be watching the prison owners as they run their 'own' business?"

Prisoners and their advocates in many Southern states lock at the decades of class-action litigation efforts to remedy their unconstitutional prison systems (now ten years in Tennessee) and wonder how much longer it would have taken had the prisons been

Page 6
privately owned during that time. The potential for foot-dragging and buck-passing would surely increase substantially under private ownership and implementation of state functions. The Tennessee Senate Speaker's favorable response to the privatization concept speaks volumes: "If somebody else ran it, somebody else would be in court. We wouldn't."

An analogy with recent corporate mobility trends, another point made by Walzer, is especially striking when seen in a Southern context: "This is probably the chief economic advantage of privatization-that it offers a (temporary) escape from the enforcement of constitutional norms. The resulting savings are like the profit added when a factory moves from a union to a non-union territory. If the union catches up, the old situation is restored. Similarly, if the courts catch up, we will find oursleves again where we are now, with judges struggling to do what state legislatures and Congress ought to do-reform the prison system."

Perhaps the most critical flaw in the privatization move is that it is inherently expansionist. A corporation paid per prisoner and per diem will look to lock up more and more people for longer and longer stretches. Recall the historic Southern practice of determining the county sheriffs' pay according to their jail counts. CCA's Tennessee proposal assumed a steadily expanding prison population (despite the falling crime rate), and its preferred per diem method of being paid has already led to cost overruns for local taxpayers at its Chattanooga penal farm.

The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than any country in the world, with two exceptions: South Africa and the Soviet Union. Some of our Southern states rank even higher than those nations. We ought to be reducing our costly, ineffective, cruel, race- and class-biased overreliance on incarceration in favor of community-based alternative sentences for non-violent offenders, such as victim restitution programs. Other effective alternatives to incarceration include intensive probation, community service work, victim-offender mediation, and required drug and alcohol treatment, GED preparation, vocational training, and job placement. Such options are used frequently with white collar criminals, but perpetrators of street crimes are scarce in these programs.

Organizations such as AFSCME, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Sheriffs Association, the Vera Institute of Justice, and the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners have all voiced the fear of an inevitable expansionism in this new "growth industry." Vera Institute's Michael Smith, noting that "the private sector has an enormous investment in stimulating demand," fears corporate advertising campaigns to heighten the public's fear of crime and trigger a "lock 'em up" reaction resulting in an increasing number of cages, captives, and dollars.

NACJP director Mark Cunniff, calling CCA's Tennessee takeover proposal "incredible," points out that "private contractors can lobby in ways that a public agency cannot." When those doing the lobbying are close friends and political advisers of governors and legislators, many of the traditional lobbying techniques will be unnecessary.

Perhaps Ken Schoen has put it best: "Private operators whose growth depends upon an expanding prison population may push for ever harsher sentences. With the public's unabating fear of crime, and the lawmakers shrinking from any move that appears to be soft on criminals, the developing private prison lobby will be hard to resist. Any drop in the crime rate will be attributed to long prison sentences. An increase will add weight to the call for more prisons. And the taxpayers will finance the profit-makers while double-locking their doors at night."

Michael Smith says that the scenario sketched out above "worries me enough so that I want to look first at making government innovative and responsive." This points toward a possible third option, between the inefficient and incompetent status quo and the CCA-type prisons-for-profit. Walzer suggests, "...we should deputize nongovernmental agencies to perform some prison-like functions....we all might benefit, prisoners, too, from a little flexibility, unorthodoxy, experimentation. But this will have to be the work of nonprofit agencies, with publicly recognized programs and explicit authorization. We should not be contracting out, as if these were not our prisoners; we should be bringing new ideas into the orbit of public service."

The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from all this is simply that the citizens and legislatures of our Southern states should avoid the new "dungeons for dollars" game like the plague. The privatization debate distracts us from the real issue of our society's failure to deal with crime in any way other than a knee-jerk, repressive fashion. This is especially true in the South, which tends to have the highest incarceration rates, the longest sentences, and the most executions.

Most citizens-white and black, rich and poor, male and female-regularly report that crime and punishment constitute one of the most salient and urgent issues in their lives. Almost no one, however, is satisfied with our criminal justice system as it is.

As I have suggested, there are alternative approaches to the issue of crime and punishment, but only a few prisoners, lawyers, academics, and prison reform advocates seem to know or care much about them. As in the field of health, our society's primary approach to crime ought to be a preventive, environmental, "public health" strategy. The implications of this approach reach beyond even such a necessary action as the denial of easy handgun access. We must resist and recast the media glorification of violence, insist upon economic and political equality irrespective of race and sex, confront the climate of national militarism, and reconstruct an American culture and economic system propelled by human greed. Meanwhile, we will continue to have to lock up violent, dangerous offenders, but, for the many others, our motto should be "from the cage to the community," which is largely where the problem is and must be dealt with. We must refuse the exploitation of public hysteria and institutional fatigue by the entrepreneurs of captivity.

Harmon L Wray, Jr., lives in Nashville where he is a staff consultant with Project Return and teaches prison ministry at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Go to Article List for Southern Changes. Volume 8, Number 3, 1989
Previous: The Shame of Contra Aid Article Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 18-19

The Beck Center Southern Regional Council

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

July 26, 2007

Real Cost of Prisons Project Website Reminder

The Real Cost of Prisons Project website (www.realcostofprisons.org) is constantly updated with new research and papers focused on providing ideas and information to strengthen the work of organizers, family members, students, policy makers and others. PDFs of our three comic book are on line in addition to individual comic book pages which can be downloaded free and used for flyers, tabling, newsletters. There also links to hundreds of organizations. Two of our newest sections: "Comix from Inside" and "Writing from Prison" include political and analytical writing and artwork by men and women who are incarcerated.

Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

CO: Need for New Prison is Debated

Need for new prison debated
Critics: Isolated inmates in state twice U.S. average

By John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News
July 26, 2007

Colorado's first new maximum security prison in 14 years will be built this year following years of legal wrangling.

But even before ground is broken on the 948-bed prison near Cañon City, a public policy debate is raging on the wisdom of spending $102.8 million more to lock up the state's worst offenders in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.

Colorado State Penitentiary II will be built across the street from the original Colorado State Penitentiary, which was the last maximum security prison built by Colorado when it opened its doors in August 1993.

Corrections officials have argued that building the facility is a matter of public safety because it will house the most dangerous prisoners. There is a waiting list for inmates who are now housed in less secure facilities, DOC spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti said.

But prison reform advocates such as Christine Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, contend that Colorado - which confines about 6 percent of its male prisoners in "administrative segregation" - is housing nearly twice as many inmates in that category as the national average. Plus, the state's inmate population has soared 400 percent between 1985 and 2005, taxing the DOC's budget of $534 million in 2005-06.

"It isn't that we have so many bad prisoners," Donner said. "It's that the people who are sent to administrative segregation never leave."

Dubbed CSP 2, the new prison was approved by state lawmakers in February 2003. However, construction was stalled by litigation over the way the project was to be financed.

The prison is to be built through certificates of participation, a lease-purchase agreement.

That means the cost of the new construction will be paid by investors through a type of bonding arrangement. The state will enter into a lease, and at the end of the lease, it will own the structure.

The coalition filed a lawsuit in 2003 challenging the constitutionality of the financing. The group lost at the district level and before the Colorado Court of Appeals.

Snapshot of system

Colorado's male inmate population

19,559

Security classification

€ Administrative segregation 1,152, or 5.9 percent*

€ Close security 3,099, or 15.8 percent

€ Medium security 4,795, or 24.5 percent

€ Minimum-restricted 4,962, or 25.4 percent

€ Minimum security 5,394, or 27.6 percent

€ Unclassified 157, or 0.8 percent

ensslinj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5291
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5645520,0
0.html

Posted by lois at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

NY: Inmates can get health benefits when released

Star Gazette, Elmira, NY
Inmates can get health benefits when released
Advocates say new law will help keep people from returning to jail. July 25, 2007

By Cara Matthews

ALBANY -- Gov. Eliot Spitzer has signed legislation that will suspend rather than terminate Medicaid benefits for prisoners while they are incarcerated so they can re-enter society without having to wait two to three months for benefits to restart.

The legislation is being hailed by advocates, who have been pushing it for about 10 years, and the New York State Association of Counties.

"The initiative's been pushed for years, and we've always made the argument that this is a cost saver," said Glenn Liebman, head of the Mental Health Association of New York State. "It's one of those bills that's been around forever -- that were so logical and made sense -- and yet never happened."

Stephen Acquario, executive director of the Association of Counties, said the new law gives former inmates access to health care and mental health treatment, "two of the tools they need to stay out of jail and become productive members of their community."

"It costs considerably less -- in taxpayer dollars and in social capital -- to provide health care treatment and mental health service than it does to fund the revolving door of recidivism into our county jails," he said in a statement.

The legislation is one of nearly 200 the governor has signed or vetoed in recent days. The Medicaid bill is an important one that will especially help former inmates with chronic diseases who "need immediate and uninterrupted attention, and will provide a more seamless transition from prison to community living and increase the chance that offenders will not return to prison in the future," said Jeffrey Gordon, a spokesman for Spitzer.

The daily cost for housing an inmate in a local jail ranges from $291 in New York City to more than $100 for counties outside the city, according to the Association of Counties. Counties and New York City house hundreds of inmates awaiting transfer to state prisons, representing a total of $38 million in annual expenses for counties, the group said.

Currently, New York terminates Medicaid benefits to prevent fraud, the bill's sponsors, state Assemblyman Keith Wright, D-Manhattan, and state Sen. Kemp Hannon, R-Nassau County, said in a memo supporting the legislation. Federal law prohibits using Medicaid funds for health care services in correctional facilities, but it does allow for suspending them. Even people who spend a few days in jail can have their Medicaid benefits terminated, the sponsors said.

The federal government pays half the cost of Medicaid, with state and local governments splitting the rest.

Even with a process aimed at expediting the application process prior to release, there are still significant lag times before benefits are reinstated, the memo said, and re-enrollment adds administrative work to the system.

A large percentage of prison inmates are poor and eligible for Medicaid, and many suffer from health and substance-abuse problems, such as HIV, psychiatric conditions, drug and alcohol addiction and chronic ailments, such as diabetes and asthma, Wright and Hannon said.

Among New York City inmates, 70 percent have a history of substance abuse, 20 percent require detoxification upon admission, 40 percent require mental-health services, and 8 percent of males and 18 percent of females are HIV-positive.

A recent study by Hunter College found that in the year after being released from a New York City jail, women with Medicaid coverage were more likely to participate in a residential drug-treatment program and less likely to be rearrested.

Of the bills Spitzer signed, a number of them are crime-related. They include making cemetery desecration a felony; increasing the penalty for failing to register as a sex offender from a Class A misdemeanor to a felony; creating the crimes of aggravated vehicular assault and aggravated vehicular homicide for intoxicated drivers; and providing prison inmates and individuals calling them with cheaper telephone rates.

Others are school-related -- laws that request students entering school to present dental-health certificates; increase the amount of surplus operating funds school boards can maintain; and require that children riding in small vans used as school buses wear seat belts.
http://www.stargazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070725/NEWS01/707250
330/1001/NEWS

Posted by lois at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2007

Study of Wrongful Convictions Raises Questions Beyond DNA

July 23, 2007
Sidebar, NY Times
Study of Wrongful Convictions Raises Questions Beyond DNA
By ADAM LIPTAK

In April, Jerry Miller, an Illinois man who served 24 years for a rape he did not commit, became the 200th American prisoner cleared by DNA evidence. His case, like the 199 others, represented a catastrophic failure of the criminal justice system.

When an airplane crashes, investigators pore over the wreckage to discover what went wrong and to learn from the experience. The justice system has not done anything similar.

But a new study does. Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false — yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.

“A few types of unreliable trial evidence predictably supported wrongful convictions,” Professor Garrett concluded in his study, “Judging Innocence,” to be published in The Columbia Law Review in January.

The leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant.

Faulty forensic evidence was next, present in 55 percent of the cases. In some of those cases, courts put undue weight on evidence with limited value, as when a defendant’s blood type matched evidence from the crime scene. In others, prosecution experts exaggerated, made honest mistakes or committed outright fraud.

Most of the forensic evidence involved problems with the analysis of blood or semen. Forty-two cases featured expert testimony about hair, an area that is, Professor Garrett wrote, “notoriously unreliable.”

Informants testified against the defendants in 18 percent of the cases. (In three cases, it turned out they had an unusually powerful motive for their false testimony, as DNA evidence proved they were in fact guilty of the crime they had pinned on the defendant.)

There were false confessions in 16 percent of the cases, with two-thirds of those involving defendants who were juveniles, mentally retarded or both.

The 200 cases examined in the study are a distinctive subset of criminal cases. More than 90 percent of those exonerated by DNA were convicted of rape, or of both rape and murder, rape being the classic crime in which DNA can categorically prove innocence. For other crimes, there is often no biological evidence or, if there is, it can give only circumstantial hints about guilt or innocence.

Only 14 of those exonerated had been sentenced to death, 13 in rape-murders. There is a widespread misconception that DNA evidence has freed many inmates from death row, but it is actually a rare murder not involving rape in which biological evidence can provide categorical proof of innocence.

“DNA testing is available in fewer than 10 percent of violent crimes,” said Peter Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, which was instrumental in securing many exonerations. “But the same causes of wrongful convictions exist in cases with DNA evidence as in those cases that don’t.”

Professor Garrett’s study strongly suggests, then, that there are thousands of people serving long sentences for crimes they did not commit but who have no hope that DNA can clear them.

In a second forthcoming study of false convictions, this one focused on capital cases, two law professors — Samuel R. Gross of the University of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State — cautioned that “exonerations are highly unrepresentative of wrongful convictions in general.”

“The main thing we can safely conclude from exonerations is that there are many other false convictions that we have not discovered,” the Michigan study said. “In addition, a couple of strong demographic patterns appear to be reliable: black men accused of raping white women face a greater risk of false conviction than other rape defendants; and young suspects, those under 18, are at greater risk of false confession than other suspects.” Professor Garrett also found that exonerated convicts were more apt to be members of minority groups than was the prison population generally. For instance, 73 percent of the convicts cleared of rape charges were black or Hispanic, compared with 37 percent of all rape convicts.

The courts performed miserably in ferreting out the innocent. Thirty-one of the 200 exonerated prisoners, for instance, had appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but the justices refused to hear 30 of the cases. In the one case they did hear, they ruled against the inmate. Of course, appeals courts do not typically reconsider a jury’s factual findings, focusing instead on asserted procedural errors. Only 20 of the 200 even appealed on the ground that they were innocent; none of those claims were granted.

Perhaps the most troubling finding in Professor Garrett’s study was how reluctant the criminal justice system was to allow DNA testing in the first place. Prosecutors often opposed it, and 16 courts initially denied requests for testing.

Yet DNA evidence can do more than free the innocent. In many cases, it also identified the person who actually committed the crime.

In 40 percent of the cases handled by the Innocence Project, Mr. Neufeld said, DNA not only exonerated the innocent prisoner but also provided evidence that helped identify the person who committed the crime. “In every single one of those cases that perpetrator had committed violent crimes in the intervening years,” he said.

The era of DNA exonerations should be a finite one. These days, DNA testing is common on the front end of prosecutions, meaning that in a few years, the window that the 200 exonerations has opened on the justice system will close. We should look carefully through that window while we can.

Posted by lois at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

Technical Violations Leading to Prison

Technical violations leading to prison
July 23, 2007
By David Angier News Herald Writer 747-5077
dangier@pcnh.com

In some legal circles, probation is called “the delayed entry program.”

It is when a prosecutor with weak evidence in a serious case offers a defendant a plea deal to probation, knowing the defendant will violate probation and be sent to prison. It is when defendants, sitting in jail for months and facing a lengthy prison term, see a chance for freedom despite warnings against the pitfalls of probation.

Many defendants spend a short time on probation before violating and going to prison for many years, without the state ever having to prove a crime was committed.

“It is much easier to obtain a finding that the defendant has violated his probation than it is to select a jury and present evidence to obtain a conviction beyond the exclusion of a reasonable doubt,” said Circuit Judge Glenn Hess. “When the State Attorney’s Office comes to me and has offered this defendant a plea to probation, the first thing they’re telling me is that person is not a danger to the community in their estimation; that this is a person that, with some work, can straighten out their life. I will accept probation on these basis.”

But the guidelines for probation have changed since 2003, when the Department of Corrections began a zero-tolerance policy on technical violations. Any violation of probation, from missing a scheduled appointment with a probation officer to falling behind in restitution payments, can lead to an arrest and prison term.

Years ago, probation officers would work with a probationer to provide the direction they needed to complete their sentence, he said. Hess now signs many more warrants for probation officers seeking the arrest of a probationer on technical violations. “As a result, my probation docket has gone through the roof,” Hess said.

There are several recent examples of probation deals in serious felony cases resulting in quick prison sentences:

David Randy Polk pleaded no contest to sexual battery on a child in Gulf County in 2000, despite insisting he was innocent, in return for a probation sentence. He violated his probation because he missed an appointment with his probation officer and was sentenced to prison. While in prison, he submitted a public records request to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and obtained DNA results that exonerated him. He was released from prison last year but is awaiting additional DNA testing to see if he will be released from the charge.

Michael Freebarin and Ralph Woolam, both transients and alcoholics, were given plea deals to probation in 2004 on charges of being accessories after the fact to murder. The pleas came after accused killer George Holzerwood was acquitted at trial. Freebarin and Woolam quickly violated their probations and were sentenced to prison.

Johnny Easterling was given probation in 2005 on three counts of sexual battery on a child in Washington County. He violated his probation by failing to register as a sexual offender and was sentenced to life in prison.

In 2005, the 14th Judicial Circuit, which includes Panama City, had 4,562 people under some form of probation or supervised release — fifth lowest out of 20 circuits in the state. The Department of Corrections did not have more recent statistics.

Department statistics show a gradual increase in judges statewide revoking probation, usually resulting in a prison term, for technical violations, and a gradual decrease in prison sentences based on new law violations. There were about 4,000 more people sentenced for technical violations in 2005-06 than in 2000-01. Over the same period, the number of new offenses that led to probation revocations dropped by 1,125.

Due process

Deputy Public Defender Walter Smith said the “delayed entry program” could be a violation of a defendant’s due process.

“If the prosecutor has a case and the victim doesn’t want to go forward or there’s some other problem, they’ll plead him to probation knowing the guy’s going to violate,” Smith said. “It’s easier to prove a violation of probation instead of the underlying offense.”

Smith said this is not a recent development.

“It’s just one of the dirty little secrets of the criminal justice system,” Smith said.

Smith said he has begged clients not to accept a plea and take a weak case to trial, but the prospect of spending months in jail awaiting trial and possibly spending years in prison if a jury convicts them is a powerful incentive to accept probation. “Nobody wants to run the risk,” Smith said.

The State Attorney’s Office declined to participate in this story unless provided a list of questions in advance. The News Herald uses this method of interviewing as a last resort when extenuating circumstances necessitate it.

Once on probation, Smith said, the demands can be impossible — especially for those who have to register as sexual offenders. Cities within Bay County have expanded buffer zones around schools, churches and parks that essentially have prohibited a person registered as a sexual offender from living within city limits. That makes having a permanent resident, stable income and reliable transportation difficult — all elements that easily could lead to a probation violation.

Smith said the majority of sexual offenders are young men who have had consensual sexual relations with an underage girlfriend. He said the Legislature changed the law this year to require juveniles who have been convicted of having sex with other juveniles to register for life as sexual offenders.

“These laws were enacted to go after dirty old men that go after children,” Smith said. “The net keeps getting wider and wider. A girl with a phony ID is in a bar drinking and a guy picks her up. She’s 17 and he’s 24. He could go to prison for a long time.”

Jonathan Dingus has been on both sides of the issue. As a prosecutor, he offered defendants probation to clear a weak case, with the expectation that the defendant would violate and go to prison.

“Some people we knew were going to screw up,” Dingus said. “Some people we wanted to give them one last chance to prove themselves.”

As a defense attorney, he has seen those same offers come along. Dingus said he tries to explain to his clients the dangers of accepting such a plea.

Dingus said he doesn’t see an abuse of the system.

“I don’t think it happens that often,” he said. “I don’t see people abusing that. It’s not the lawyers; it’s just the system.”

http://www.newsherald.com/headlines/article.display.php?a=2396

Posted by lois at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2007

In Memory of Harmon Wray

The Tennessean
Wednesday, 07/25/07
Prisoner advocate Harmon Wray, 60, dies
By John Egerton
For The Tennessean

Harmon L. Wray was about to graduate from Southwestern College in Memphis in April 1968 when, a short distance across town, an assassin's bullet took the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the lightning rod of the Civil Rights Movement.

Countless people around the world have been moved to lives of service
by the martyrdom of Dr. King. Harmon Wray was one of them.

When Mr. Wray died of a massive brain hemorrhage in Nashville's St. Thomas Hospital Tuesday, he was in his 40th year of selfless commitment to a particular class of American outcasts: the more than 3 million men and women in the nation's prison population.

"He left campus to march with the sanitation workers in Memphis," recalled Mr. Wray's mother, Celeste Wray, "and he was in the audience when Dr. King made his last speech, the night before he was killed. No mother could want a better son than Harmon. He gave his life for others. I was intensely proud of him."

Mr. Wray was born in Memphis on Nov. 10, 1946, the only child of Celeste Hardy and her husband, Harmon Lee Wray. He graduated with honors from Southwestern (now Rhodes College) in 1968 and then earned a master's degree in religion from Duke University in 1970.

During that time, he entered the process of ordination into the ministry of the United Methodist Church.

Though he pursued a doctorate in ethics at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the 1970s, Mr. Wray stopped short of completing his dissertation - a study of religious radicals in the 20th-century South - and chose to be an activist rather than a scholar.

"I got what I came for," he told friends after he quit. "I got the experience, the knowledge, the personal associations. The only thing I left behind was the degree itself, and it meant nothing to me - and even less to the people I wanted to serve."

It was during those years that Mr. Wray began working with two Nashville-based organizations, the Southern Prison Ministry and Tennesseans Against the Death Penalty, both of which had religious motivations but no church affiliation. He was employed from time to time at the state and national levels of the United Methodist Church to work with task forces on various social issues.

"Somewhere along in there," recalled Don Beisswenger, now retired from the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty, "Harmon decided not to seek ordination. It was an act of personal integrity for him, based on his understanding of the radical gospel of Jesus."

In the 1990s, while teaching part-time as an adjunct professor at the divinity school, Mr. Wray developed a course entitled "Theology and Politics of Criminal Justice." Over time, he inspired others to explore the subject with him - members of the divinity school faculty, professors from elsewhere in Nashville, people from beyond the campuses.

Mr. Wray's inspiration was to teach classes at Riverbend Prison in Nashville, the main correctional facility in Tennessee, with equal numbers of divinity school students and inmates taking part. He first got clearances to do that in 2003. In every academic term since then, he and some of his colleagues have taught there.

"Harmon gave much of lasting value to this institution and its population, and he will be sadly missed," said Riverbend warden Ricky Bell.

Tennessee Corrections Commissioner George Little said Mr. Wray "touched many lives at Riverbend, staff and prisoners alike. I greatly respected and valued his unique commitment, his passion and compassion. He was a bridge between the inside and the outside, and what he started will not die with him."

Three of Mr. Wray's colleagues - social worker Judy Parks, Lipscomb University historian Richard Goode, and Janet Wolf, a United Methodist minister who also teaches at American Baptist College in Nashville - met late Tuesday at Riverbend with more than a dozen inmates to give them the news of Mr. Wray's death.

These were some of the prisoners' reactions: "He donated a piece of himself to us, and he will be with us always . . . More than a teacher, advocate, friend, he was family, and this is like a death in the family . . . He told us, 'You are my church.'"

A memorial service for Mr. Wray, who donated his organs for transplant, will be Saturday at 10 a.m. in the sanctuary of Belmont United Methodist Church in Nashville, with former Tennessee Bishop Kenneth Carder and several Nashville UMC ministers presiding.

There will be visitation for family and friends tomorrow evening from 6 to 8 p.m. at Edgehill UMC at 15th and Edgehill Avenues.

The family requests that contributions be sent to Edgehill UMC, Box 128258, Nashville 37212, designated to a fund for the continuation of Mr. Wray's work.

Mr. Wray was married for a few years in the early 1970s, but the love of his life was Judy Parks, a career social worker (now retired). Janet Wolf knew them as a couple for more than 30 years.
"Harmon had three great loves in his life," Wolf said. "Jesus, Judy, and justice."
---------------------------------------------------------
The Harmon Wray Fund has been set up at Edgehill United Methodist Church which will be used to continue Harmon’s prison ministry life work. Please write checks to Edgehill United Methodist Church noting that the gift is for The Harmon Wray Fund and send it to:

Edgehill United Methodist Church
The Harmon Wray Fund
PO Box 128258
Nashville, TN 37212

------------------------------------------------------------
Harmon Wray died Tuesday, July 24, 2007 from complications of a massive stroke. His ministry with Edgehill United Methodist Church, the Tennessee Conference, Vanderbilt University and beyond provided profound inspiration for those who knew and loved Harmon and his life partner, Judy Parks. Harmon’s ability to see himself as “no better than” was a gift. He regarded people on death row to be as human and as filled with God’s spirit as any of the rest of us. For many years he was a volunteer in the Visitor On Death Row program which fostered friendships between free world people and those condemned to death by the state. He was willing to put everything on the line for his beliefs and did so many times over. His ear was available to people regardless of their station in life.

Visitation will be Friday evening, July 27 at Edgehill UMC (15th and Edgehill Ave.) from 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. The Memorial Service will be Saturday morning, July 28 at 10 a.m. at Belmont UMC. Condolences may be sent to: Judy Parks, 1109 Graybar Lane, Nashville, TN 37204

Tuesday, July 24, 2007
In Memory of Harmon Wray

Harmon Wray, a tireless crusader to end the death penalty, suffered a massive stroke yesterday and was removed from life support this afternoon. Harmon was an organizing member of TCASK and has been relentless in his work to end the death penalty in our state. Harmon was a champion for prison reform and upholding the dignity of those who are incarcerated.

As a teacher and author, he educated countless numbers of people concerning the myriad problems with our current criminal justice system. As adjunct faculty of Vanderbilt Divinity School, Harmon created and coordinated a class at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, comprised of both Vanderbilt students and inmates. Harmon was also a founder of the Restorative Justice Coalition of Tennessee, seeking to transform the current criminal justice system from a system primarily focused on punishment to one which facilitates healing and restoration. Most recently, he authored, Beyond Prisons: A New Interfaith Paradigm for our Failed Prison System.

Harmon was formerly with the Tennessee Conference Correctional Ministries staff of the Methodist Church and the General Board of Mission. Harmon continued to be an active member of Edgehill United Methodist Church.

Harmon Wray followed the way of Jesus to the end, still giving of himself, even in death as an organ donor. He took Jesus' call to visit the prisoner to heart and spent his life as a fierce advocate for those who are incarcerated. I count him as a mentor and a friend, and today my heart is very heavy as I cannot imagine the world without him. Still, I know that Harmon's spirit will remain with us and will continue to inspire all of us as we struggle together to end the death penalty in Tennessee.

Stacy Rector
Executive Director
Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing
PO Box 120552
Nashville, TN 37212
615-256-3906

Posted by lois at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

ALEC orchestrating attack on second chance type bills

This is something to watch out for! ALEC is a/or the major creator and proponent of state-based legislation in the country.

"Hough, of the American Legislative Exchange Council, said he believes the Ohio bill is likely to meet some opposition in the Legislature, and he doubts that if it does pass other states will rush to draft similar legislation."

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3405428

I've Got a Secret Criminal Past

Ohio Bill Would Let Some Felons Hide Their Records From Employers to Boost Job Prospects

By LAURA E. DAVIS

July 24, 2007‹

A controversial bill working its way through the Ohio Legislature would help state residents with multiple felony convictions hide their criminal records from prospective employers.

Opponents said the initiative is unfair to employers, who fear they would not have all necessary information when making hiring decisions. But supporters of the proposed "second chances'' bill said it would stem recidivism rates and help those who have shown they can live law-abiding lives find work beyond minimum wage jobs. Prospective applicants must go five years without being arrested before they are eligible to have their records sealed.

People who are convicted of the worst felonies -- class one or two -- will not be eligible for the proposed program, and the bill includes a list of crimes that would automatically disqualify candidates, including murder, kidnapping, abduction and sex crimes.

Police, public school districts, health care agencies and some government institutions would always have access to the documents, regardless of whether ex-offenders' attempts to have them sealed succeed or not. Journalists, employers and the rest of the public wouldn't be able to view them.

The process would require a judge to review an applicant's record following a recommendation from a prosecutor before making a final decision.

Employment Doors Closed

The bill is designed to help people like Susan, an Ohio woman who spoke to ABC News on the condition that her last name not be used.

Susan was a human resources executive for a major corporation before she pleaded guilty in 2000 to 43 felony counts related to prescription drug abuse after she acknowledged writing herself hundreds of prescriptions for Adderall and other medications. Facing a lengthy prison sentence, she agreed to a plea bargain that spared her from incarceration.

Susan got court-ordered treatment for her addiction, and after spending the three years of her probation going to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and receiving chemical dependency counseling, she said she looked forward to re-entering the work force.

But that task proved harder than she thought, and by 2005, Susan said she had hit her ultimate low -- what she called an unplanned suicide attempt caused by the frustration of not being able to return to her normal life.

"I couldn't even get a job at McDonald's," she said. "Society would not accept me, and I didn't want to go back to a life of crime. I was so utterly in despair."

Today, Susan hasn't given up her job search, but so far has had little luck in finding employment.

"I just got turned down from Wal-Mart when they did the background check," she said. "As soon as they found I'm a convicted felon, they immediately eliminated me. Company policy is company policy."

Instead of working a paid job, Susan said she now volunteers at Alcoholics Anonymous and has recently joined the effort to pass state senate bill 197.

The bill's sponsor is Ohio State Sen. Shirley Smith, who introduced a similar unsuccessful measure as a state representative that would have required ex-offenders to wait seven years before applying to have their records shielded from public view.

Smith's own son is a convicted felon, although this bill would not apply to him because of the serious nature of his crimes. Her son, William Allison, is currently serving a prison term for drug trafficking.

Smith said she hopes her bill, which the state senate will consider in the fall, will help ex-offenders reach their full potential in the workplace after they have served their time and demonstrated they have reformed their lives.

"Those people cannot take care of their families, become part of our community, and it causes our recidivism rate to rise," Smith said. "Usually, most of these crimes & they really happen in a person's youth, thereby saying these things are done when it's a bad judgment call."

'Radical Departure'

Some groups representing private employers said Ohio's current laws on ex-offenders are adequate, and the bill doesn't go far enough to protect employers.

"A person's criminal history is available today for a very good reason -- it allows employers to make very good hiring decisions," Tony Fiore, director of labor and human resource policy for the Ohio chamber of commerce, told ABC News.

Current Ohio law allows one-time offenders to apply to have their records sealed. Although most states have legislation regulating who is eligible to have criminal records sealed, Smith's bill is unlike other such laws, said Michael Hough, task force director of criminal justice and homeland security at the American Legislative Exchange Council.

"I think [Smith's] bill goes a lot further than most states do" in broadening eligibility to have records sealed, Hough said. "This would tend to be more on the liberal side."

Most states either require ex-offenders to wait longer before having records sealed, or they allow only one-time offenders or one offense to be sealed, according to a document provided to ABC News by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Smith's bill broadens both of these rules, so a person who has any number of lower-level felony convictions or misdemeanors -- excluding any crime on the exceptions list -- can potentially have his or her records sealed.

The proposed bill is a "radical departure" from Ohio's current system, said John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association. "You've got to draw the line somewhere, and we've always drawn it at one [offense], and we think it should not go beyond that," he said. "[Ex-offenders] should be able to get jobs, but the employer who's going to employ them should know what they're getting themselves into."
Small employers, where every hire has an impact on the business, would be disproportionally affected, according to Roger Geiger, Ohio executive director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. "The fastest-growing area of litigation for businesses is employment issues," Geiger told ABC News. "Small employers are not afraid of taking risk with their employees, but it's already very litigious, it's already very contentions as is, and we're saying don't add to that problem."

Geiger said an employer's ability to view an applicant's criminal background is important to honesty in the employer-employee relationship. "It at least allows an employer, if they see somebody has a conviction, they can ask the right kind of questions," he said.

'The Past Is the Past'

Susan acknowledged her criminal past but wants to move on with her life after serving probation and becoming sober following more than 20 years of addiction.

"I'm not saying I'm not a criminal; I am a criminal, and I know that. I made some bad choices," she said. "There are certain things I understand, but why can't I work in an office? I'm not looking to be the president of a company. I just want to make a decent salary so I can save for retirement."

Susan said it wasn't until after she pleaded guilty to 43 class four and five felonies that she learned from her lawyer the facts about having a criminal record: It would follow her everywhere under Ohio's current law because of her guilty plea to multiple charges committed over a period of two years.

Terry Collins, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said he supports the concept of the bill and favors second chances for people being released from Ohio's prisons.

"Doors shouldn't be slammed on you merely because you had a felony conviction," he said. "All people have a right to try to change their lives. And we in society at some point have to say, the past is the past."

The bill will most likely be revised as it moves through the state senate in the fall, Smith said, but she believes she can get it passed.

Laws on sealing and expunging criminal records vary from state to state, many of them covering employment by public agencies. Only Hawaii bars an employer from asking about an applicant's criminal record until the applicant is offered a job. And many states have laws that allow records to be sealed, but in a much tighter set of circumstances than Smith's bill envisions.

Hough, of the American Legislative Exchange Council, said he believes the Ohio bill is likely to meet some opposition in the Legislature, and he doubts that if it does pass other states will rush to draft similar legislation.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

Posted by lois at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)

Former Prisoners Reforming Prisons

Former Prisoners Reforming Prisons

Politicians and correctional officials are recognizing that, in conversations about prison reform, they must reserve a seat at the table for those who have lived it.

Beth Schwartzapfel | June 28, 2007
American Prospect

Elizabeth Gaynes has worked with people involved in the criminal justice system for more than 30 years: as a young law student in the early 1970s, she was galvanized by the uprising at Attica, and helped to defend some of the incarcerated people who were involved. Later, she took the reins as executive director of the nonprofit Osborne Association, which provides services to incarcerated people and their communities.

But until her daughter turned 16 and started speaking up about prison issues, Gaynes kept a rather relevant piece of personal information close to her chest: her kids' own father was incarcerated, and had been for a decade. "We really didn't volunteer that information very much in the world," she says. "Even people like me who worked in this business felt pretty restrained."

All of that's changed now. Part of it, Gaynes says, was her daughter's outspokenness. Part of it, however, was a larger cultural shift that is now reaching a tipping point. People affected by incarceration are raising their voices and telling their stories in ever-larger numbers. And, for the first time, politicians, policymakers, correctional officials, and foundations are listening.

"There are more formerly incarcerated people speaking up, organizing to fight for civil and human rights," says Dorsey Nunn of the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization Legal Services for Prisoners With Children.

There is now more funding than ever before available for organizations doing work around issues of incarceration -- some $40 million in federal and foundation dollars, up from almost nothing in 1999. More organizations working in the field are employing people affected by incarceration, and graduating those employees to leadership positions. And politicians and correctional officials are recognizing that, in conversations about correctional policy, they must reserve a seat at the table for those who have lived it.

"Especially in the last year and a half there's been a tremendous change in the attitudes of correction personnel," says Scott Washington, an attorney with the Dayton, Ohio-based nonprofit, Workplace Reconnections. Washington served some three years in prison and jails after spending his youth as a crack addict and member of the Crips gang. He later went on to college and then law school. "There's always going to be an ‘us against them' mentality," he says. "But the attitude of politicians is changing."

The U.S. prison system is in the midst of a unique historical moment. Federal "Truth in Sentencing" laws and mandatory minimums have recently turned 20, and the stringent state laws which followed suit -- California's 1994 ‘three strikes' law, for instance -- are coming of age, such that the first generation of people who have served 10- and 20-year sentences under these laws are re-joining their communities in record numbers. They're arriving home at a time of increasing political consciousness about incarceration -- the term "prison-industrial complex" was coined only a decade ago, by activist and historian Mike Davis in a 1995 article in The Nation -- as well as a growing awareness on both sides of the political spectrum that the current system is not sustainable. More than 2 million people are incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. If you include people on probation and parole, that number jumps to over 7 million, or 1 in every 32 adults, according to the Bureau for Justice Statistics. At least 95 percent of them will come back home: 1700 people a day are released from state and federal prison.

The staggering numbers of people being released are, at least in part, at the root of this new trend towards a larger role for formerly incarcerated people in the criminal justice policy discussion. In 1999, Jeremy Travis was director of the National Institute of Justice when then-Attorney General Janet Reno asked him what was happening to all the people coming out of prison. The answer was Travis's 2005 book, But They All Come Back, and a shift in the conversation from its previous focus, rehabilitation to the new buzz-word: re-entry.

"Rehabilitation was seen as a pure left kind of issue," says Amy Solomon, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, who worked with Travis when he was a senior fellow there. "It was a discussion about helping offenders, coddling offenders." Re-framing the debate to be about re-entry, she explains, meant "rethinking how people are released into the community, [putting it in the context of] public safety, about doing things smarter so we prepare people for work and family when they get out. It really galvanized people on the right and the left."

Further, the sheer number of those incarcerated, and the reach of the war on drugs, has meant that "we've now gotten to the point where there are very few people left who have not been personally touched," says Gaynes of the Osborne Association. "It's hard for it to keep being ‘them' all the time." Suddenly, politicians on both sides of the aisle could listen to those with a bent towards reform without being seen as soft on crime.

In the past, says Glenn Martin, co-director of the H.I.R.E. Network, which seeks to increase job opportunities for those with criminal records, "we were caught in such a tough-on-crime era that people would stay away from taking advice from those directly affected because they were worried that their constituents would say, ‘what are you doing taking advice from these criminals?'" Now, says Martin, who served six years in New York state prison for armed robbery before being hired as a receptionist at the H.I.R.E. Network and working his way up to his current position, "I have to pinch myself. I'm sitting here with the head of criminal justice services, or I'm sitting here with the top Republican in a state somewhere."

Susan Tucker, program director at the Open Society Institute's After Prison Initiative, one of the key funders in the field, says that six or seven years ago, meetings and panels about re-entry rarely included the perspectives of formerly incarcerated people. Now, she says, including formerly incarcerated people on the agenda is "pro-forma."

State and federal funds are pouring into re-entry programs, which means there is more money than ever allocated for positions specifically for formerly incarcerated people. President Bush, in his 2004 State of the Union Address, proposed a $300 million prisoner re-entry initiative, citing Bureau of Justice Statistics data that some 600,000 inmates are released each year. "We know from long experience that if they can't find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit crime and return to prison," Bush said.

The resulting $25 million Prisoner Re-entry Initiative was funded in fiscal year 2005 and now has 30 grantee organizations nationwide that work to transition formerly incarcerated people back into the workforce. State-financed programs have followed, and with them, more employment and advocacy opportunities for former inmates.

Critics are quick to point out that re-entry work is, in the words of one person in the field, "tinkering around the edges." Which is to say, it doesn't address the real problem: the massive numbers of incarcerated people in the United States, and the socio-political structures which cause poor people and people of color to be locked up in numbers vastly disproportionate to their numbers in the country as a whole.

"Out of the punishment industry comes a group of people who says, let's try something different," says a skeptical Nunn of Legal Services. "I don't know how different it is--they're just acknowledging that we're releasing a lot of people." In other words, politicians may be able to make changes to the way people are released without seeming soft on crime, but it would be a different story for a senator to propose changing the way we approach incarceration altogether.

These types of proposals, more often than not, come from formerly incarcerated persons themselves. A 1998 conference was convened by formerly incarcerated people, including Nunn and Angela Davis, to examine ways of dismantling the prison-industrial complex. Nunn says the organizers were expecting some 500 attendees -- instead thousands flocked to New York City, and the weekend led to the birth of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization which seeks to "build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe," according to its website.

Organizations like Critical Resistance are still considered relatively fringe, but they have been successful in raising awareness and helping to politicize the issue. "We took an obscure term out of a Mike Davis [article]-- prison-industrial complex -- we turned that into common language," says Nunn.

Nunn, who notes that after years of being the only one in his organization to be directly affected by incarceration, now up to 50 percent of his coworkers have done time, says that an increased political consciousness among people affected by incarceration has made the community speak out with a louder voice than before.

"I used to run from being this particular thing. Now I'm not running anymore. That's absolutely new. Used to be a time we would internalize it," he says. He used to tell himself, "Maybe I'm not good enough for the apartment. Now, I say, I have a right to get an apartment. Maybe I don't deserve a job. No, I deserve a clean application."

Foundation money has supported the push of the political envelope further to the left, allowing organizations to focus not just on re-entry, but on more systemic issues raised by incarceration, such as poverty and racism. "Most everybody agrees from right to left, people are coming out, they deserve a second chance, they need services, they need help," says the Open Society Institute's Tucker. "A more nuanced understanding is that incarceration itself is both a cause and an effect of political, economic, and social disenfranchisement."

Since it was launched in 2000, the Institute's After Prison Initiative has distributed $16 million in grants to some 100 organizations doing work "to decrease U.S. over-reliance on mass incarceration and harsh punishment," according to its website. And this year the Funding E